The Responsibilization of Market Actors in Legalized Local Prostitution in the Netherlands

Eelco van Wijk (Free University Amsterdam) shows with a case study of Dutch local government, the evolvement and short term effects of a regulatory regime on prostitution that through a strategy of responsibilization, increasingly operates through owners of brothels and prostitution windows (entrepreneurs). It will deploy a field-type analysis in which local government as an institutional actor is trying to alter the governing strategies and cultural language of the relevant actors within the local prostitution sector. Its policies exude normalization via market mechanisms (cultural language) but in implementation it achieves paradoxical results. The paper will show that via its licensing system, local government is more or less successful in transferring the responsibility of fighting abuses to entrepreneurs, but at the same time hinders the market logic it is advocating, by being severely restrictive in issuing new licenses, thus not living up to its creed of normalizing via market principles.