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"Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance is an edited collection focused on the design and re-design of welfare-to-work systems around the world"--

A key question concerning the marketisation of employment services is the interaction between performance management systems and frontline client-selection practices. While the internal sorting of clients for employability by agencies has received much attention, less is known about how performance management shapes official categorisation practices at the point of programme referral. Drawing on case studies of four Australian agencies, this study examines the ways in which frontline staff contest how jobseekers are officially classified by the benefit administration agency. With this assessment pivotal in determining payment levels and activity requirements, we find that reassessing jobseekers so they are moved to a more disadvantaged category, suspended, or removed from the system entirely have become major elements of casework. These category manoeuvres help to protect providers from adverse performance rankings. Yet, an additional consequence is that jobseekers are rendered fully or partially inactive, within the context of a system designed to activate.

Welfare recipients are increasingly subject to various forms of work-related conditionality that, critics argue, presuppose a "pathological" theory of unemployment that stigmatizes welfare recipients as de-motivated to work. Drawing on surveys of Australian frontline employment services staff, we examine the extent to which caseworkers attribute being on benefits to recipients' lack of motivation, and whether this problem figuration of unemployment is associated with a "harder edged" approach to activation. We find that it is, although it is diminishing. This reflects how frontline discretion has become more routinized from the application of more intensive forms of performance monitoring and compliance auditing.

AbstractIn September 2009, the British Government launched a new employment assistance model called Flexible New Deal. It was soon replaced by Work Programme in 2011. Both prioritized what is often called a 'black box' approach to public employment assistance, whereby the government purchaser focuses predominantly on outcomes and does not seek to direct agency operations. Using a study of the orientations and strategies of frontline employment services staff in 2008 and 2012, we seek to enhance understanding of the impact of so‐called 'black box' commissioning on key aspects of service delivery. Black box advocates propose that it is a hands‐off approach that allows agencies to be innovative and to improve efficiency. These effects are thought to be due to improved local service quality and greater flexibility to tailor services to individual clients. Critics argue that this increased discretion facilitates under‐servicing of some jobseekers and agency profiteering. These practices are commonly referred to as 'parking' and 'creaming'. In this UK study, we provide evidence of both positive and negative activities associated with black box commissioning. We find some small improvements in flexibility at the frontline, but little to no evidence of increased efficiency as measured by the reported rates of jobseekers moving into work. We also observe an increase in practices associated with creaming and parking. We conclude that improving efficiency and maximizing innovation are not guaranteed by black box commissioning, and that the aim of facilitating increased frontline flexibility, while also minimizing risk, persists as a major policy design tension.

AbstractThis article investigates strategic changes in the governance of not‐for‐profit (NFP) boards in response to Australia's fully contracted employment services system. Of interest are changes in board demography, behaviour, procedures and dynamics, with special attention to the impact of those changes on boards' identity as a representation of community interests. As Australia is in the vanguard of social service contracting, the Australian experience affords insight into the impact of contracting upon the identity of the NFP sector. We find that NFP directors operating in this quasi‐market have come to define board 'professionalism' as the main strategic move to accommodate the increasingly commercial and competitive nature of contracting. Boards have adopted a more business‐like view of how their agency should operate, changed their board's skill set and utilized strategic recruitment processes, including selecting new board members based on perceived skill deficiencies of the current board and paying board members for their service. NFP boards have also introduced more comprehensive induction, training and evaluation systems. These findings provide Australian policymakers with evidence of the cultural impact of service delivery reforms on NFP agencies. They also afford leaders of NFPs an opportunity to reflect on important changes in the governance of their organizations, including the potential for 'mission drift' and loss of local forms of legitimacy.

AbstractThe study explores the accountability implications of the increasingly privatized and marketized models of welfare governance. Privatization of public services radically destabilizes our concepts of accountability. While on the one hand, accountability deficits are created as traditional public accountability systems become less relevant; on the other hand, new market and results‐based forms of accountability emerge. In order to examine how accountability is safeguarded under privatized activation, the study provides an in‐depth look at private contractors' accountability in the case of activation in Israel. It finds that results‐based accountability mechanisms were perceived as insufficient to legitimize contractors' discretion; and sometimes they even intensified accountability concerns. In practice, significant traditional public accountability requirements were extended to the private contractors, creating a hybrid public‐private model of accountability. The article discusses the contradictory dynamics leading to the development of this hybrid accountability model and the tensions and instabilities it produces. It closes by stressing the need for more research into activation accountability regimes and their complexity.