Making up the market: Job-seeker courses and the ordinary ethics of social investment in Norway.

This article examines Norway's social investment paradigm through the lens of state-sponsored, privately administered job-seeker courses designed to facilitate unemployed individuals' reintegration into the labor market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, it analyzes how these courses promote a particular understanding of the job market using three key tropes—hiddenness, becoming visible, and national cultural specificity—that shape participants' perceptions and strategies for job-seeking. The courses function not only as practical training but also as sites of moral education, encouraging an ethics of individual responsibility aligned with social democratic values and the demands of a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy. While participants actively negotiate and sometimes contest these lessons, the courses ultimately aim to produce a workforce oriented toward continuous employability and economic flow.