Central concern of this article is tracing back how the making-responsible of citizens takes shape within Dutch speeches from the throne, government statements and reports of the Dutch Social and Cultural Research Institute (SCP) ever since the 1960s. The Dutch participation society, a term much discussed ever since mentioned in the 2013 speech of the throne, is often associated with a withdrawing government and a coming to end of the welfare state. At the same time, according to several authors, the notion of a withdrawing government that operates within a network of multiple equal actors has brought along the need for a widening of the government’s repertoire of action. This has been characterized as making-responsible citizens on conditions of the state. It has raised doubts about true government-withdrawal and authors have related it to the dominance of neo-liberal thinking ever since the 1990s. Applying an analysis framework derived from discourse analysis, it is made tangible in this article how within political discourse beginnings of the making-responsible of citizens can be traced to the 1960s, more than thirty years earlier than expected. It is argued that this longer history makes a plea for encouraging the political dimension of citizenship all the more important.

While international research gives increasing attention to geographical factors in education, this perspective is lacking in Dutch research and policy. That a geographical perspective is badly needed, is demonstrated on the basis of the proposed policy to promote new schools in the Netherlands. Current housing policies for Dutch schools are described, pointing at disputes between municipalities and school boards who hold shared responsibilities. Next, foreign housing policies for new schools are studied, that is for friskolor in Sweden, free schools in England and charter schools in Texas (USA). Experiences abroad not only testify that very different choices can be made, but indicate that housing policies may in the long run have a substantial impact on segregation and educational inequality. It is also shown that new schools are mainly located in urban areas. It is argued that in addition to costs for new schools, friction costs for existing schools need to be considered. In all, a geographical perspective on education is needed, so as to prevent increasing segregation and social inequality as well as wasting public financial resources.

In the 1990’s, the Dutch social democrats were trailblazers of what became known internationally as the politics of the Third Way, a new middle course between social democracy and neoliberalism. From the start, the Dutch Third Way distinguished itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterparts by its implicit character. The Dutch social democrat party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA) never fully embraced the Third Way and has sought to downplay the idea of a break with traditional social democratic thinking, combining Third Way practice with more classical social democratic rhetoric. The resulting political ambiguity, this paper argues, is at the centre of the present identity crisis of the social democrat party. Even though Third Way ideology has at times been declared dead, the range of attitudes, strategies and policy proposals that were introduced under its banner, still play a vital and prominent role in Dutch politics. While in the UK and the US, communitarianism was from the very beginning a defining feature of the Third Way, in the Netherlands this only came to the fore in 2012 under the leadership of Samsom and Asscher, and in the plea for a participation society under the Rutte II government. Leading us to conclude that the reports of the Third Way’s death are greatly exaggerated.

In 2015 Amsterdam introduced a new primary school admissions system. This system is rooted in various desegregation pilots, including two based on the ‘controlled choice’ approach. In conjunction with one of these pilots located in West Amsterdam, we researched the criteria parents used while thinking about (de-)segregation in primary schools and parents’ attitudes regarding the controlled choice approach. Due to political developments between 2008 and 2011, we considered our data useless for policy discussions. The introduction of a new admissions system, however, gives our data a newfound relevance. This article therefore describes how parents in socio-economically diverse neighbourhoods think about segregation and school choice. The 249 parents we interviewed or surveyed supported schools with a ‘good mix’, but they had diverging opinions about the meaning of such terms. The parents were optimistic with regard to controlled choice, even if this could in some ways limit their own options. We conclude that the political resistance to desegregation at the primary school level cannot be justified by empirically unfounded claims about the perceptions and preferences of parents. We hope that our findings may lead to empirically grounded policy evaluation and policy making.

In today’s debate on the impact of new technology on employment, many fear that robots will substitute human labour. Due to increased exposure to market pressure and the decline in union power, the adoption of new technology at the workplace is perceived as an inevitable course in order to remain competitive. This rejects the basic principles behind organizational choice theory: the idea that technology is shaped by social agency. Analysis of qualitative data from 23 in-depth interviews in two sectors of the Dutch economy shows that the use of robotics at the workplace is far more limited than anticipated.

The Internet of Things generates a wealth of data (big data) about personal behaviour, which can be used for marketing purposes. It brings about both benefits and costs in terms of societal welfare. Various forms of government intervention are needed to safeguard the public interests associated with these welfare effects. These public interest relate, on the one hand, to public availability of data and information, to repairing informational asymmetries, and on the other hand to providing personal security and privacy protection. This article discusses, from the perspective of the principal/agent approach to regulation, how the design of applications and systems in the Internet of Things can best be shaped. The example of the smart thermostat Toon® of the Dutch energy provider Eneco shows how an intensive collaboration between designers and software engineers may contribute to both proper data protection and to provide an incentive to save energy.