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

Abstract

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.

Emerging modes of digitalisation in the delivery of welfare‐to‐work: Implications for street‐level discretion

“…Lipsky was especially concerned with how SLBs adapted their decision-making to cope with resource scarcity (time pressures and budget cuts) in the face of rising organisational demands on their performance. Other studies have focused on how governance reforms such as quasi-marketisation have reshaped street-level agency; and often in ways that orient workers towards prioritising job-search conditionality over alternative employability approaches as their preferred means of 'activating' claimants (McGann, 2023;Larsen & Wright, 2014). Underpinning this interest in the organisational, governance, and professional dynamics shaping frontline delivery is the critical assumption that it is often the behaviours of SLBs which 'are highly consequential' for how ordinary citizens experience the (welfare) state and 'their own standing within it' (Zacka, 2017, p. 240).…”

Corrosion beneath the surface? The emotional navigation of managerialist regulation in German welfare organizations

“…Similarly, Jacobsson et al. (2020), McGann (2023) and Paulsen (2018) observe a direct impact of new forms of public regulation upon the emotional states of caseworkers entrusted with activating jobseekers. Repercussions of this regulation have also been explored in other studies into economic pressures on welfare organizations and their social missions (e.g.…”

“…This resonates with Kamp and Dybbroe (2016) who illustrate how mental healthcare professionals struggle with increasingly standardized work procedures, with this involving intensified emotional labour. Similarly, Jacobsson et al (2020), McGann (2023 and Paulsen (2018) observe a direct impact of new forms of public regulation upon the emotional states of caseworkers entrusted with activating jobseekers. Repercussions of this regulation have also been explored in other studies into economic pressures on welfare organizations and their social missions (e.g.…”

“…Over the last years, this has been found to translate into various forms of rationalization at organization level, for instance "project"-based portfolio management or pre-determined time slots for service delivery (Alf€ anger et al, 2017;Schniering, 2021). While this resonates with developments elsewhere in Europe (Hellgren and Hobson, 2021;McGann, 2023;Nothdurfter, 2017;Orupabo, 2022), studies into the interplay of managerialist regulation and organizational responses rarely engage with emotional dynamics within affected work settings. As argued above, such dynamics can matter greatly concerning both the day-to-day functioning of welfare organizations and their internal transformation, also in view of the capacity of these organizations to deliver in line with their mandate.…”

The Marketisation of Welfare-To-Work in Ireland

“…In 2016, this was revised to focus exclusively on job placements and up until 2021 each LES provider had a target of placing at least 30 per cent of its activation clients into 30 or more hours of employment per week (although job sustainment was not measured). This was a blanket target that proved controversial for its failure to take any account of local labour market variation or differences in providers' caseload mix (McGann, 2022a). A review of LES performance conducted on behalf of the DSP found that only half of LES achieved the target in 2016 (INDECON, 2018).…”