scholarly journals Remodeling Street-Level Workers With Quasi-Markets: Comparing Ireland’s Mixed Economy of Welfare-to-Work

2021 ◽  
pp. 009539972110509
Author(s):  
Michael McGann
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Performance Monitoring ◽  
Parallel Program ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
Mixed Economy ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Market Governance ◽  
Policy Experiment

Quasi-markets in employment services often follow social policy turns toward activation. Critics see this as no accident, arguing that marketization is intended to raise the odds that workfare policies will be implemented. Drawing on surveys of Irish frontline activation workers, this study harnesses a natural policy experiment whereby Ireland introduced a Payment-by-Results quasi-market alongside a parallel program contracted without outcomes-based contracting. Although the demandingness of activation remains modest in Ireland, the study finds that regulatory approaches are more common under market governance conditions, which in turn has been associated with significant workforce changes and stronger systems of performance monitoring.

scholarly journals Meeting the numbers: Performance politics and welfare-to-work at the street-level

2021 ◽  
pp. 079160352110684
Author(s):  
Michael McGann
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Performance Management ◽  
Management Control ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Eligibility Criteria ◽  
Frontline Staff ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
Double Activation ◽  
And Performance

Over the past decade, social policy in Ireland has taken an increasingly ‘workfarist turn’. This has proceeded through benefit cuts, tighter eligibility criteria for payments, and claimant activation via penalty rates for breaching new conduct conditions. However, key to understanding the post-crisis reconfiguration of welfare is not just the increasingly workfarist content of social policy but also how the delivery of public employment services has been reorganised through processes of marketisation and tightening performance management of delivery organisations and the staff who work within them. Positioning these governance reforms as processes of ‘double activation’, and drawing on survey and interview research with frontline staff working for agencies contracted by government to deliver activation, this study explores how frontline staff experience performance management as a disciplinary regime: the degree to which frontline workers are subject to management control and performance management in their jobs, what forms this takes, and how it shapes their field of action and choice. In so doing, the study draws attention to the ways in which the governance of caseworkers and the governance of claimants are inter-related, and the degree to which performance management regimes influence frontline practices to motivate the enforcement of workfarist policy practices.

Targeting single mothers? Dynamics of contracting Australian employment services and activation policies at the street level

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHELLE BRADY
Keyword(s):  
Single Mothers ◽  
Performance Pay ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Or Education ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Legitimate Target ◽  
The Social ◽  
Activation Policy ◽  
Government Legislation

AbstractActivation reforms targeted at single parents simultaneously construct them as a legitimate target for activation policy and subject them to new obligations to engage in paid work or education/training. The social policy literature has established that the work of ‘making-up’ target groups occurs at the street level as well as in government legislation. The street level has become even more significant in recent years as there has been a shift towards establishing quasi-markets for the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes and organising these around the principles of performance pay and process flexibility. However, what is largely missing from the existing literature is an analysis of how contract conditions, together with individuals' activation obligations, shape how they are targeted at the street level. Drawing on a study conducted over eight years with agencies in Australia's quasi-market for employment services, this paper argues that the changes to the contracts for governing this market changed how Australian single mothers were targeted by employment services. Over time there was a shift away from making-up single-parent clients as a distinct, vulnerable target group and a shift towards viewing them in terms of risk categories described within the agencies’ contracts.

Street-level Interpellation: How Government Addresses Mothers Claiming Income Support

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEGAN BLAXLAND
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Income Support ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Street Level

AbstractMeetings between advisers and claimants are central to many welfare-to-work programmes. These ‘street-level’ exchanges between clients and staff are critical to the implementation of policy. When talking to welfare claimants, it becomes clear that contact with welfare bureaucrats is constitutive of their experience of policy and it is not until parent and adviser meet and negotiate that the policy is truly enacted. The policy comes into being through an exchange between advisers and parents, who interact, albeit unequally, to shape the proceedings. This paper examines the experience of parents claiming income support who faced compulsory employment measures. Drawing on research with claimants of teenage children, I examine the adviser meeting as an interpellative interaction. The state addresses mothers as workers and welfare claimants in an interpellation which is mediated by the adviser in dialogue with the mother. This analysis demonstrates how the notion of interpellation can inform research on street-level interactions.

scholarly journals Applying Regression Discontinuity Design to Social Policy: An Evaluation of the Welfare-to-Work Program in South Korea

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Lee Seog-min ◽  
Kwon Huck-ju
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Regression Discontinuity ◽  
Minimum Cost ◽  
Security System ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Regression Discontinuity Design ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
Livelihood Security ◽  
Work Program

Social policy studies focusing on poverty reduction attempt to measure poverty reductions rates and poverty gaps, but they do not provide criteria to determine whether a given social policy is a success or failure. In this study, we suggest using regression discontinuity design to establish evaluation criteria and validate estimation results in social programs. Using the dataset from the Korean Welfare Panel, first we conduct, first, a difference-in-differences comparison between welfare recipients under the National Basic Livelihood Security system and nonrecipients whose income falls under the minimum cost of living. Secondly, we establish the counterfactual effects of the program among nonrecipients whose income is below the minimum cost of living and among nonrecipients whose income is above the minimum cost of living. Last, we analyze treatment effects by comparing welfare recipients with income below the minimum cost of living and nonrecipients with income above the minimum cost of living using the regression distribution design method. We argue that the National Basic Livelihood Security system as a welfare-to-work program has positive effects on labor market participation, which has not been established by previous studies.

Evidence from the ‘Frontline’? An Ethnographic Problematisation of Welfare-to-Work Administrator Opinions

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
John David Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis

Researchers both supportive and critical of welfare schemes regularly explore the influence, legitimacy and effects of welfare administrator opinions. However, the ‘origins’ of those opinions are generally less well considered. This article explores and problematises the use of welfare-to-work administrator testimony in social science and social policy research. Rejecting both Foucauldian models of ‘elite conceptual download’, and approaches that take administrator views at face value, it argues that the material circumstances of day-to-day working may constitute the most significant influence on administrator views. This both supports a more materialist, less idealist and/or positivistic approach, and also suggests the pressing need for more contextualised, ethnographic analysis of data in welfare-to-work debates.

Implementing social policy in Brazil: an inter-contextual exploration of the exercise of discretion by street-level bureaucrats

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Vicente da Rocha Soares Ferreira ◽  
Janann Joslin Medeiros ◽  
Charlotte Lyn Bright ◽  
Charles David Crumpton
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Street Level Bureaucrats ◽  
Exercise Of Discretion

scholarly journals Anti-Poverty Policy for Families in the Next Century: From Welfare to Work—and Worries

2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T Ellwood
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Single Mothers ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Single Parents ◽  
Work Incentives ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Working Families

This paper reveals that recent changes in social policy have included both sharp cutbacks in welfare for non-working families and dramatic increases in supports for low income working families. It explores the reasons for these changes, and documents how they have radically changed work incentives for some persons, notable single mothers. The result has been a large increase in work by low wage single parents. The paper concludes by examining several potential dangers of this new direction and explores the challenges that remain for the next century.

scholarly journals Reclaiming Responsibility: The Case of Welfare-to-Work Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (03) ◽  
pp. 529-546
Author(s):  
ANDREAS ERIKSEN
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Normative Foundation ◽  
Policy Strategies ◽  
The Sacrifice

AbstractWelfare-to-work programmes have a contested normative foundation. Critics argue that ‘citizen responsibility’ is being promoted to the sacrifice of more important social values, such as solidarity and fairness. This paper seeks to recapture what is valuable in citizen responsibility and to challenge the idea that the concept is intrinsically bound up with detrimental policy strategies. The paper develops a view of the responsible citizen as an appropriate addressee of moral expectations. This view highlights how addressing someone as responsible involves a presumption of reasonableness. Thereafter, the view is applied to conditions of street-level interaction, the design of policy instruments, and political discourse.

Australian welfare workers and street-level discretion when working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tran Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Culturally And Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
Street Level ◽  
New Public ◽  
Welfare Workers

This article explores street-level discretion of Australian welfare workers when working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. The research is situated within the context of New Public Management (NPM) and neoliberalism in the welfare sector. Findings suggest that workers’ discretion oscillates between extra support for clients, or further scrutiny and sanction. Such contradictory patterns of discretion highlight workers’ capacity to resist neoliberalism while concurrently upholding it. The article argues that cultural understanding, recognition of the limitations in welfare-to-work policies and neoliberalism, and how those factors, together with ethnicity, may influence street-level discretion are necessary for welfare workers to support CALD clients effectively.

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