School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemQuasi-Markets and Service Delivery Flexibility Following a Decade of Employment Assistance Reform in Australia(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2011-10-01)In 1998, we were witnessing major changes in frontline social service delivery across the OECD and this was theorised as the emergence of a post-Fordist welfare state. Changes in public management thinking, known as New Public Management (NPM), informed this shift, as did public choice theory. A 1998 study of Australia’s then partially privatised employment assistance sector provided an ideal place to test the impact of such changes upon actual service delivery. The study concluded that frontline staff behaviour did not meet all the expectations of a post-Fordist welfare state and NPM, although some signs of specialisation, flexibility and networking were certainly evident (Considine, 1999). Ten years on, in 2008, frontline staff working in Australia’s now fully privatised employment sector participated in a repeat study. These survey data showed convergent behaviour on the part of the different types of employment agencies and evidence that flexibility had decreased. In fact, in the ten years between the two studies there was a marked increase in the level of routinisation and standardisation on the frontline. This suggests that the sector did not achieve the enhanced levels of flexibility so often identified as a desirable outcome of reform. Rather, agencies adopted more conservative practices over time in response to more detailed external regulation and more exacting internal business methods.
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ItemNETWORKS AND INTERACTIVITY Ten years of street-level governance in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2012-01-01)The systemic reform of employment services in OECD countries was driven by New Public Management (NPM) and then post-NPM reforms, when first-phase changes such as privatization were amended with ‘joined up’ processes to help manage fragmentation. This article examines the networking strategies of ‘street-level’ employment services staff for the impacts of this. Contrary to expectations, networking has generally declined over the last decade. There are signs of path dependence in networking patterns within each country, but also a convergence of patterns for the UK and Australia, but not The Netherlands. Networking appears to be mediated by policy and regulatory imperatives.
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ItemFront-line work in employment services after ten years of New Public Management reform: Governance and activation in Australia, the Netherlands and the UK(Sage Publications, 2010)This study examines the impact of administrative reforms upon the work of front-line staff in the employment services of three reform-oriented countries – Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These changes have involved greater use of private agents, more detailed performance contracts, clearer expectations about outcomes for job-seekers, and increased competition between agencies seeking government work. The study compares the work characteristics and strategies of front-line staff in agencies in the three systems in 2008 and a decade earlier, using surveys. The results show that there are substantial differences in the level of tailoring and investment in these countries. There are three relatively stable modes of governance in these cases and the most stable of these types across countries and across time is what we term the corporate-market mode – more generally labelled New Public Management (NPM). Despite the expectations of theorists and of reformers, the role of network governance proves neither as stable nor as generalised as expected.
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ItemPolicy Design as Craft: Teasing out policy design expertise using a semi-experimental approach(Wiley, 2014-09)Public policy research typically neglects the role of the individual policy actor with most accounts of the policy process instead privileging the role of governmental systems, institutions, processes, organizations; organised interests or networks of multiple actors. The policy design literature suffers from similar limitations, with very few authors paying attention to the crucial work of the individual policy designer or considering how the latter's skills, expertise and creativity are employed in the design task. This represents a significant weakness in our understanding of how policy is formulated. This paper outlines and previews what we believe is a potentially fruitful semi-experimental methodological tool for exploring how individual policy actors draw on knowledge, expertise, intuition and creativity in framing and responding to complex policy issues. Real-time scenario-based problem-solving exercises are used to explore how policy problems and solutions are framed and articulated by novice (first-term politicians and early career bureaucrats) and experienced (former cabinet ministers and senior civil servants) policy actors and to examine the strategies and approaches they employ in response to specific problem cues. Initial findings are discussed, and we conclude by advancing potential refinements of the instrument and directions for future research.
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ItemFrom Entitlement to Experiment: The new governance of welfare to work - Australian Report back to Industry Partners(University of Melbourne, 2016-10-01)
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ItemExplaining the Normative Underpinnings of Local Governance(University of New South Wales Press, 2005)
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ItemGovernance, networks and civil society: How local governments connect to local organisations and groups(University of New South Wales Press, 2008)
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ItemWho are the innovators inside government? The importance of networks(The University of Melbourne, 2008)
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