Frontline Delivery of Welfare-to-Work Policies in Europe

Activating the Unemployed

Rik van Berkel, Dorte Caswell, Peter Kupka, Flemming Larsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317439684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Welfare-to-work or activation policies refer to programmes aimed at promoting the employability, labour-market and social participation of benefit recipients of working age. Frontline workers delivering these policies are conceived of as policy implementers, as policy makers, and as actors mediating politics in an arena where conflicting interests are at stake. Frontline work plays a crucial role in determining what welfare-to-work practically means and how it affects the lives of the people it targets. Yet few books have deliberatively focused on comparing what happens when frontline workers, some of whom are professional social workers, meet clients.

Pioneering the provision of scholarly reflections on both theoretical and policy relevance of studying frontline practices of delivering activation, internationally renowned researchers present the first comparative analysis of how activation policies are actually delivered by frontline staff in selected EU countries and in the United States. In trying to understand and interpret frontline practices in activation, each contribution provides insights into what 'activation in practice' looks like, what services are provided and how they are enacted. This involves examining processes of client selection, monitoring, sanctioning and motivating, as well as the role of external service providers.

This book is an important acquisition for scholars and researchers of social policy, public administration, public management, social work and policy implementation.

1
The Frontline Delivery of Welfare-to-Work in Context

Dorte Caswell, Peter Kupka, Flemming Larsen and Rik van Berkel

The Study of Frontline Policy Implementation

This book starts with the notion that the frontline delivery of public policies cannot simply be interpreted as a technical process of implementing laws, rules and regulations issued by governments. Both the policy implementation literature and the literature on street-level bureaucracies or street-level organizations have convincingly argued that policy implementation is part of the policymaking process (Brodkin & Marston, 2013; Hill & Hupe, 2002; Hupe & Buffat, 2015) and, put in a somewhat provocative way, that street-level bureaucrats themselves are policy makers (Lipsky, 2010). Despite considerable debate about attempts to curtail discretion and to influence the ways in which discretion is used, for example, by new public management instruments such as performance management (Brodkin, 2006; Evans & Harris, 2004; Jessen & Tufte, 2014), few researchers will deny that frontline workers continue to exercise discretion and to contribute to making policies. From a more positive point of view, frontline workers need discretion in policy implementation, especially when they are expected to deliver personalized services to their clients in policy contexts where people-changing interventions are required (Hasenfeld, 2010).

These insights have been important for scholars interested in public policies. First, studying formal policies can only provide us with a partial understanding of what policies ‘are’ and look like in practice, and what they ‘do’ with the people at which they are targeted. From a somewhat different point of view, it can be argued that explaining the results and outcomes of policies cannot merely refer to formal policies but also needs to look at how formal policies are actually being delivered by the agencies and workers responsible for their implementation. This implies opening up the ‘black box’ of policy implementation or what Brodkin (see Chapter 3) calls the ‘missing middle’ in policy analysis.

Second, acknowledging the role of street-level or frontline workers in the ‘production’ of policies also includes acknowledging their role in the policy process. As Brodkin (2013) has argued, the workers involved in the delivery of policies are not merely policy implementers and administrators. They are also mediators of policies in the sense that they transform formal policies into policy practices, and in doing so, they ‘make’ these policies; they are mediators of politics in the sense that this transformation process, especially when policies are ambiguous or inconsistent, makes frontline decisions and interpretations political (also see Chapter 3). Depending on the role that scholars of frontline work focus on, the relevance of studying frontline work can be formulated in different ways. From a more traditional frontline-workers-as-policy-implementers perspective, the issue arises whether or not policies are actually implemented at the frontline. This perspective is dominant in studies of implementation failure or implementation gaps and has received quite some attention in the US, also in the policy area that this book focuses on: welfare-to-work or activation policies (for example, Meyers, Glaser & Donald, 1998). From the perspective that frontline workers are mediators of policies, frontline studies analyse how the process of policy making continues while policies are delivered at the frontlines. In this context the questions arise how frontline workers contribute to shaping how the policies they implement look like in practice and how these policies-as-implemented impact the target groups of these policies (see Chapter 2). Finally, studies focusing attention on frontline workers as mediators of politics look at frontline work as a setting where political decisions are made and political struggle and conflict take place. For example, these studies look at individual or collective resistance of workers against elements of their work or the policies they deliver (for example, Prior & Barnes, 2011). However, the political nature of frontline work in most cases is not something that develops from frontline workers’ own volition. Instead, acting as mediator of politics is an unavoidable element of the job frontline workers do, irrespective of whether or not they intend to act politically. Policies often are ambiguous or contain conflicting problem definitions and goals so that policy delivery and frontline agency become part of the arena where problems are defined and solutions developed. This is not an issue of frontline workers’ (dis)loyalty but part of the job of delivering policies.

Third, recognizing the important role of frontline workers does not mean that their agency is unconstrained within the parameters set by the policies they implement. Although a considerable body of research exists that looks at how frontline workers’ personal characteristics influence frontline work (Blomberg, Kroll, Kallio & Erola, 2013; Morgen, 2001; Scott, 1997), there is consensus that what frontline workers do and don’t depends on more than individual characteristics. Of course, this was also one of the main arguments made by Lipsky (2010) who focused specifically on workers’ conditions of work and their impact on policy implementation and delivery. In other words, frontline work is structured: workers operate in complex contexts (Vinzant & Crothers, 1998) that constrain as well as enable their actions by shaping their room for discretionary decision making as well as by framing and limiting their options and decisions in using discretion. According to Vinzant and Crothers (1998) these contexts include, apart from policies and laws, the agencies and organizations for which frontline workers work, supervisors and co-workers, professional associations to which workers belong, other agencies that play a role in policy delivery, clients, etcetera. Although they may emphasize different sets of contextual ‘factors’ or ‘influences’, many authors come to a similar conclusion regarding the complexity of the environment in which frontline workers do their work (Austin, Johnson, Chow, De Marco & Ketch, 2009; Hasenfeld, 2010; May & Winter, 2009). As a matter of fact, the complexity of this environment has increased, among others as a consequence of new forms of governance for the delivery of public policies and services (Borghi & Van Berkel, 2007; Considine, 2001; Denhardt & Denhardt, 2000). Coping with these contextual influences is a crucial part of frontline workers’ agency (Møller & Stone, 2013).

Frontline Work in Welfare-to-Work

This volume aims to gain insight into the frontline, street-level delivery of welfare-to-work or activation policies in European countries; we will use ‘welfare-to-work’ and ‘activation’ interchangeably throughout this book. There is considerable debate on how these policies should be defined, which partly reflects the debates about varieties of activation (see Barbier & Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2004; Heidenreich & Rice, 2016). For example, Bonoli (2013) distinguished between active social policies and policies aimed at (re-)commodification. According to Bonoli, active social policies “prioritize human capital investment and the removal of obstacles to labour market participation” (Bonoli, 2013, p. 19) whereas policies aimed at (re-)commodification include workfare policies. Other authors made a rather similar distinction—namely, between human capital development and work-first or labour-market attachment approaches in activation policies (Lindsay, McQuaid & Dutton, 2007; Lødemel & Trickey, 2001). Although these approaches remain of interest theoretically, developments in activation and welfare-to-work policies make it increasingly difficult to position national policies in either of these ideal types, given that these policies nowadays often contain mixes of characteristics of both types, especially as a consequence of policy reforms that strengthened conditionality of benefit entitlements and increased work as well as activation obligations of benefit recipients. For pragmatic reasons, therefore, we will define welfare-to-work or activation policies here as those programmes and services that are aimed at strengthening the employability, labour-market or social participation of unemployed benefit recipients of working age, usually by combining enforcing/obligatory/disciplining and enabling/supportive measures in varying extents.

Reforms of activation policies have not only had an impact on the mix of enabling and enforcing elements in these policies but also broadened the target groups of these policies. For example, groups of people that used to be exempted from work and activation obligations may nowadays be treated as ‘regular’ unemployed people, such as older people, single parents or people with health and disability issues (Lindsay & Houston, 2013). Furthermore, stricter criteria used in evaluating entitlements to sickness and disability benefits or (early) retirement schemes may have resulted in situations in which people that used to be entitled to these benefits are now dependent on unemployment benefits or social assistance. This book will focus on welfare-to-work aimed at unemployed people dependent on unemployment benefit or social assistance schemes. Unemployed people as a target group of activation policies are a very heterogeneous group, not only in terms of age, gender, education or duration of unemployment but also in terms of issues such as health, childcare responsibilities, etcetera.

Studying welfare-to-work policies from a frontline work perspective is interesting for several reasons. First, as these policies are aimed at people with a vulnerable position in the labour market and in society more generally, the issue of whether frontline practices in welfare-to-work manage to improve their position on the labour market and in society or rather increase their vulnerability is an interesting issue in its own sake and is being debated extensively in the academic literature. For although in general activation policies meet wide support in society and among policy makers, the specific instruments and measures introduced as part of these policies are far more contested—and this specifically refers to the enforcing, sanctioning and disciplining elements in these policies. Thus studying frontline work in this policy area contributes to our insights in the practical delivery and implications of activation policies. Second, activation policies are a type of policies par excellence where the role of frontline workers as mediators of politics becomes tangible. For these policies include objectives and use instruments that are often considered hard to reconcile. For example, they are aimed at preventing benefit fraud and at strengthening individual responsibilities, while they should at the same time promote social inclusion, fight poverty and remove labour-market barriers. In terms of instruments and interventions, activation policies combine supportive and enabling services with punitive elements such as sanctions or benefit withdrawal. The dilemmas and tensions arising from these various objectives, instruments and interventions need to be resolved and—as this book will show—are somehow being resolved at the frontlines. Third, activation policies often combine—using Hasenfeld’s (2010) terminology—people-processing with people-changing technologies, as a consequence of the close links between benefit and activation systems in most countries. Thus the provision of activation often includes rule and regulation guided work with forms of service provision that resemble professional rather than bureaucratic work. Furthermore, in contrast to, for example, the health domain, the ‘activation domain’ is not dominated by a high-status profession and a strongly institutionalized professional group that might be able to provide a legitimate counter-narrative to political rhetoric and hypes and might challenge the often highly politicized debates and policymaking in activation policies. Therefore, the study of frontline work in activation policies not only supplements the academic insights in these policies that we gain from formal policy studies and studies of the effectiveness of activation policies but also provides insights of wider relevance for studies of policy implementation and service delivery ‘at the frontlines’.

A Contextualized Approach of Activation Frontline Work

As was mentioned before, frontline workers do not act independently from contextual factors or influences that shape their work, the discretion that they have and their use of discretion. In other words, these contexts shape—mediated through frontline workers’ agency—the actual delivery of activation policies: activation practices. In trying to understand and interpret frontline practices in welfare-to-work, this book will focus particular attention to four contexts considered relevant.

First of all, the activation policy context. It seems rather obvious—if not superfluous—to mention the policy context explicitly as structuring frontline work in activation: for whatever happens at the frontlines of the agencies responsible for implementing activation policies, workers are expected to implement the objectives of these policies in some way and to use the instruments and measures regulated in these policies. However, from an internationally comparative perspective it remains interesting to study this aspect of the frontline work context, as it is a vital part of explaining differences in national activation practices. Two aspects of the policy context are of specific importance. On the one hand, of course, policy content which, generally speaking, includes the objectives and instruments of activation policies, the target groups of these policies and the mix of enabling and disciplining elements that characterize activation. On the other hand, we need to pay attention to characteristics of the regulation of activation as such. When we talk about formal policies, we often implicitly refer to national formal policies. However, national formal policies often tell only part of the story of what formal activation policies look like: these policies are decentralized and deregulated to different degrees and in different ways in different countries (Lopez-Santana, 2015; Rice, 2015), and this has two implications that are potentially important for the frontline delivery of activation policies. On the one hand, it may imply that formal policies not only exist at the national level but also at regional or local levels, and this means that policy contexts may not only differ between countries but also between regions or municipalities, potentially resulting in diverse activation practices within individual countries. On the other hand, it may imply that activation policies (irrespective of the levels where these policies are made) are regulated in more or less detail: and this may include policy objectives and instruments as well as more operational issues involved in the delivery of policies. Depending on this ‘regulation density’, frontline workers and their organizations responsible for policy delivery may have more or less discretion in decision making.

The second context to which this book will pay specific attention concerns the governance context. This refers to the ways in which the delivery and provision of welfare-to-work are organized, the agencies and actors that are involved in policy delivery and the ways in which the relations between these agencies and actors are structured. Activation policies are a policy area where significant governance reforms have been taking place and are still taking place (Consi-dine, 2001; Larsen & Van Berkel, 2009; Van Berkel, De Graaf & Sirovátka, 2011). These reforms have an impact on the roles of frontline workers in agencies responsible for delivering activation, on the actors with whom they need to collaborate and on how they relate to these actors. One important aspect of the governance of activation policies concerns the organization and coordination of the administration of income provision and the delivery of activation: does this involve different agencies (which may cooperate through one-stop shops) or a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 The Frontline Delivery of Welfare-to-Work in Context
• 2 State of the Art in Frontline Studies of Welfare-to-Work: A Literature Review
• 3 Street-Level Organizations and US Workfare: Insights for Policy and Theory
• 4 Activation in the UK: The Frontline and the ‘Black Box’ of Employment Service Provision
• 5 Back-to-Work Services in France and the Flexibility Edict
• 6 Activation ‘Made in Germany’: Welfare-to-Work Services under the ‘Social Code II’
• 7 The Street-Level Delivery of Activation Policies in Austria and Italy: Comparing Practice Representations and Possibilities for (Professional) Action
• 8 Activation Work within the Social Welfare System: The Case of Poland
• 9 The Street-Level Activation of the Unemployed Remote and Very Remote from the Labour Market: The Dutch Case
• 10 Frontline Work in the Delivery of Danish Activation Policies
• 11 Conclusions and Topics for Future Research
• Contributors
• Index