Although often neglected, the availability of employment opportunities is central to the effectiveness of active labour market policies. Employers play a crucial role in this policy field as they are both clients and co-producers of public employment services (PES). This study focuses on that relationship and reports qualitative research conducted in Tuscany (central Italy) from a street-level perspective. The findings show how public job-brokers manage this asymmetrical relationship and develop specific strategies to obtain employers’ cooperation and accomplish the PES mandate. The strategies identified here involve language adaptation, curricula “creaming”, and control of the bureaucratic procedure. These are shaped through a variable mix of four components that will be defined as relational, perceptive, technical, and tactical. This study contributes to the debate on activation policies, analysing in detail how PES frontline workers interact with employers, dealing with market logic in the public encounter.

This chapter discusses the potential of social innovations as effective policies and actions to reduce poverty. Social innovations are driven by an unconventional mix of actors and apply multidimensional approaches to respond to social needs that are not adequately met by macro-level welfare policies. The chapter first gives a brief overview of the history of social innovation as an academic concept and an important concept in current European policies to combat poverty. It then turns to the implications of adopting a social innovation perspective for our understanding of poverty. We stress the multidimensional and relational character of poverty, highlight the importance of place-based developments and their multilevel governances, and point out the crucial role of participation and empowerment. Finally, we present preliminary lessons for anti-poverty strategies based on our extensive case-study analysis, stressing the important link to broader strategies to foster social cohesion, the value of bottom-linked approaches, and the importance of collective empowerment.

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Social innovation rises and grows within specific social and institutional conditions and relations, being at once an outcome and a driver of change of the contexts in which it is embedded. This paper sheds light on these processes, by studying the relationship between social innovation and local welfare configurations in the development of the same innovative practice, the Housing First model to contrast homelessness, in two different European cities: Bologna (Italy) and Stockholm (Sweden). The comparison allows us to highlight how the two local innovative practices, inspired by the same global model, have developed differently in these contexts and how they have adapted to the conditions posed by local welfare and housing configurations.

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