Of late, media coverage of anxiety and insecurity proliferating among the German population has been considerable. However, the social sciences have only recently explored these tendencies more profoundly, e.g. with respect to fears about social decline among the middle classes or immigration...

The paper presents new findings on a specific 'gendered' problem resulting from 'activation policies' and a certain group of unemployed which has been widely neglected so far in public and academic discourse although it is both quantitatively significant and reveals systematic failures of...