Contracting personalization by results: Comparing marketization reforms in the UK and Australia

Irish Journal of Sociology

2021

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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.

Section: Study Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Irish Journal of Sociology

2021

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“…The data reported are drawn from an online survey of frontline staff conducted between July 1 and August 14, 2020. The instrument was adapted from that used by Considine et al (2015Considine et al ( , 2020 to track the impacts of quasimarketization on frontline welfare-to-work delivery in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands in 1998 and, most recently, in 2016. The Irish version comprises approximately 60 questions concerning the characteristics of frontline workers-defined, in this study, as staff who "work directly with jobseekers to find employment"-their belief structures about unemployment, disposition toward using behavioral policy instruments, and various other aspects of how they do their jobs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As further detailed below, the performance incentives and competitive pressures within PES quasi-markets may further hinder the provision of more holistic employability supports by focusing caseworkers’ attention on achieving short-term placement targets and limiting the resources at their disposal for responsive adaptations to clients’ needs (see Considine et al, 2020; Fuertes & Lindsay, 2016). The concern here is that marketization may function as a governance strategy for disciplining providers and caseworkers into enacting policy practices with “more perceptibly hard edges” (Brodkin, 2013, p. 6).…”

Section: Market Governance and Workfare Policy Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Taking advantage of this “pluri-governance” approach, the study draws on survey research with frontline JobPath and LES staff to consider whether market governance arrangements are associated with a more demanding model that emphasizes “work-first” and the enforcement of conditional obligations rather than the provision of enabling supports. This question has been explored in several previous studies, including the effects of market governance reforms on the frontline delivery of PES in Britain (Considine et al, 2020; Fuertes & Lindsay, 2016), Denmark (Bredgaard & Larsen, 2007; Greer et al, 2017), the Netherlands and Australia (Considine et al, 2015). However, those studies have predominantly involved analyzing changes in frontline delivery over time, following quasi-market reforms (e.g., Considine et al, 2015), or case studies of providers delivering performance-based contracts (Fuertes & Lindsay, 2016), rather than comparative research on frontline workers delivering PES under varying governance conditions but to the same client cohorts and under the same social policy settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Administration & Society

2021

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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.

“…This need to compete on price, combined with the commercial imperative for agencies to generate profits from payments, provides an incentive for agencies to adopt 'lean staffing … and inexpensive programme content' (Fuertes & Lindsay, 2016, p. 536). By transferring the financial risk of programme delivery onto providers, and increasing the level of risk associated with long-term support measures, outcomes-based funding models reinforce these incentives for providers to standardise their case management practices to reduce costs while enabling them to be implemented at larger scale by lowerpaid staff (Considine et al, 2020). Within this organisational context, the value of professional qualifications can be quickly diminished by client-classification instruments and other structured assessment tools designed to standardise decision-making and to replace 'part of the skill set that a case manager might otherwise need' (Considine et al, 2011, p. 821).…”

Section: Impacts Of Marketisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Double activation’: Workfare meets marketisation

2021

Administration

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Since the financial crisis, Ireland’s welfare state has been reorientated around a regulatory, ‘work-first’ activation model. Claimants now face penalty rates for non-compliance with activation requirements that have been significantly extended since 2009. Alongside these formal policy reforms, the organisations delivering Public Employment Services, and the modes by which they are commissioned, have also been reconfigured through a series of New Public Management style governance reforms, including, most notably, the creation of a quasi-market for employment services (JobPath) in 2015. This article addresses the intersection between activation and quasi-marketisation, positioning the latter as a form of ‘double activation’ that reshapes not only how but also what policies are enacted at the street level. It unpacks their shared logics and mutual commitment to governing agents at a distance through a behavioural public policy orientation, and reflects on the extent to which marketisation is capable of producing lower-cost but more responsive employment services.