Performances for upward mobility How Dutch workfare programmes function as temporal spaces of imagination

The gradual retreat of many governments from actively supporting secure labour relations and social security through welfare arrangements, and the related normalisation of precarious conditions, goes hand-in-hand with a promise of the attainability of ‘the good life’ through work. Workfare programmes are at the centre of this, as they are aimed at ‘improving’ welfare clients and their position in society through performing precarious work. Based on an ethnographic study of group workshops in three Dutch workfare programmes, this article shows how welfare clients are taught the promise of upward mobility through waged labour and are required to give ‘the right’ performances that might (in principle if, often, not in practice) potentially enable them to be successful on the post-Fordist labour market. I argue that these workshops function as temporal spaces of imagination in which adherence to the promise of upward mobility through paid work can best be understood as a form of post-Fordist affect, one that enacts, albeit temporarily, a resolution that is frequently lacking in real life.