The Street-Level Organisation in-between Employer Needs and Client Needs: Creaming Users by Motivation in the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Service (NAV)

Abstract

Employer engagement is increasingly emphasised in the context of efforts to bring more disadvantaged people into work. A new approach in the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Service (NAV) combines demand-side and supply-side measures in a ‘combined workplace-oriented approach’. Through qualitative interviews with frontline staff – including job coaches following the Supported Employment (SE) method – the paper examines the intermediary role of the street-level organisation (SLO) through the targeted use of SE methods directed at young users and employers. The findings suggest that young users are ‘creamed by motivation’ into the SE programme, which can be explained by the importance the SLO places: on maintaining inter-organisational relationships with employers, on job coaches’ performance goals and the need to uphold an organisational structure in the SLO that seemingly works efficient to shift caseloads of young unemployed into work. Hence, creaming is not specific to outsourcing but can also occur when insourcing employer engagement services into a public SLO. Although relational work directed at both employers and young clients is seen as the benefit of a combined workplace-oriented approach, it appears a rather flimsy foundation for successful ALMPs unless supported by more structural demand-side measures.

Accountability in personalised Supported Employment-based activation services

“…These accountability requirements coordinated teams across sites, producing various account-giving responses from employment specialists in the form of reporting and mitigating (Dubnick, 2005). This resonates with arguments in a range of studies of frontline implementation in personalised services (Gjersøe and Strand, 2021;Howard, 2012;Ingold, 2018;Tummers et al, 2015) and the literature on accountability in frontline work (Brodkin, 2008;Van Berkel and Knies, 2016;Van der Tier et al, 2021), which point out various coping strategies that frontline workers may adopt when faced with competing demands in service provision. At the same time, our analysis illustrates that when subjected to accountability demands, frontline workers mostly respond as 'active agents' (Bakkeli, 2022: 2), interpreting policy mandates by drawing on contextual and professional knowledge.…”

“…According to Dubnick, mitigated account giving begins with conditions that assume that the principal is judging the agent for an act that is regarded as wrong or unexpected (Dubnick, 2005: 388). Applied to street-level account-giving practices, mitigating arises in situations where '"limited resources and unremitting pressure to meet measured dimensions of performance" lead to 'reliance on coping strategies' (Fuertes andLindsay, 2016, quoting Brodkin, 2011;Gjersøe and Strand, 2021;Høiland, 2018), such as creaming and parking. In the case of Supported Employment approaches in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), Schönfelder et al (2020) show that frontline workers may resort to giving false accounts as a means of meeting accountability pressures.…”

“…In operationalising the five-step model of Supported Employment, NAV has developed a quality guide based on the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) fidelity scale (Bakkeli et al, 2020;Gjersøe and Strand, 2021). This stipulates specific performance indicators at the national and local levels to which employment specialists must adhere.…”

“…An extensive body of scholarship focuses on how these forms of hierarchical control, expressed in various forms of formal accountability procedures, continue to create tensions at the frontline of service provision (Brodkin, 2008;Johnson and Bagatell, 2020;McGann et al, 2019;Rice, 2017;Van Berkel and Knies, 2016;Griffith and Smith, 2014). A related body of literature has drawn attention to the challenges faced by frontline workers in personalised activation services while trying to balance user needs and limited resources with performance measurement, resulting in their adopting various forms of coping strategies (Fuertes and Lindsay, 2016;Gjersøe and Strand, 2021;Ingold and Stuart, 2015;Rice, 2017;Yeatman et al, 2009). Nevertheless, this literature has been carried out mainly in the context of contracted-out services that involve pay-for-performance models (Ingold, 2018;Ingold and Stuart, 2015;Jordan, 2018).…”

“…First, we wish to add to existing knowledge on how accountability mechanisms impact personalised service provision by exploring public-led innovative activation work that often requires challenging and immersive work by frontline workers. Second, we wish to extend the debate on accountability and frontline activation work by highlighting variations in strategies that frontline workers adopt when faced with accountability requirements beyond coping strategies such as parking, (a practice where workers decide to focus on a proportion of their clients), creaming (selecting clients with performance targets that are easy to realise), rule bending, and rule breaking (Tummers et al, 2015;Van Berkel Knies, 2016;Freier and Senghaas, 2021;Gjersøe and Strand, 2021;Raspanti and Saruis, 2021). Our approach is to combine Dubnick's (2005) concept of account-giving behaviour through reporting, mitigating, and reframing and Brodkin's (2008) approach to street level accountability that considers how lower-level bureaucrats respond to street level conditions.…”