School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemCan Robots Understand Welfare? Exploring Machine Bureaucracies in Welfare-to-Work(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2022-07)Abstract The exercise of administrative discretion by street-level workers plays a key role in shaping citizens’ access to welfare and employment services. Governance reforms of social services delivery, such as performance-based contracting, have often been driven by attempts to discipline this discretion. In several countries, these forms of market governance are now being eclipsed by new modes of digital governance that seek to reshape the delivery of services using algorithms and machine learning. Australia, a pioneer of marketisation, is one example, proposing to deploy digitalisation to fully automate most of its employment services rather than as a supplement to face-to-face case management. We examine the potential and limits of this project to replace human-to-human with ‘machine bureaucracies’. To what extent are welfare and employment services amenable to digitalisation? What trade-offs are involved? In addressing these questions, we consider the purported benefits of machine bureaucracies in achieving higher levels of efficiency, accountability, and consistency in policy delivery. While recognising the potential benefits of machine bureaucracies for both governments and jobseekers, we argue that trade-offs will be faced between enhancing the efficiency and consistency of services and ensuring that services remain accessible and responsive to highly personalised circumstances.
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ItemThe Policymaker's Dilemma: The Risks and Benefits of a 'Black Box' Approach to Commissioning Active Labour Market Programmes(WILEY, 2018-01)Abstract In 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.
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ItemAre policy tools and governance modes coupled? Analysing welfare-to-work reform at the frontline(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2021-07-03)ABSTRACT This paper considers the link between policy tools and governance modes – the characteristic ways frontline staff are meta-governed. It asks: Are substantive policy tools coupled to procedural tools (governance modes) that can guide local service delivery agencies and the work of individuals delivering welfare services? The substantive policy tools in this case are those typically utilised to reform welfare-to-work services: contracting-out of services and competitive tendering, and the regulation of quasi-markets. These are hypothesised to flow through to procedural policy tools in the form of corporate and market incentives and regulatory (bureaucratic) methods that shape how work is done (governance modes), privileging certain practice orientations at the frontline. Policy makers seek to shape these meta-level governance modes because they should result in systemic change, based on a reconfiguration of policy actors and their interrelationships, for both service delivery agencies and the individuals working in them. We identified four ideal-type governance modes (bureaucratic, corporate, market and network) and tracked which of these were dominant in-practice at the frontline in Australia and the UK at two levels: office and personal, at four points in time (1998, 2008, 2012 and 2016). We found that the dominant mode of organisation at the office level was corporate, followed by bureaucratic in both nations. But the bureaucratic mode had grown in strength over time, particularly in Australia, and as a personal priority for staff, as re-regulation occurred. The results indicate a coupling between substantive policy tools and governance modes at the frontline of welfare-to-work.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableContracting personalization by results: Comparing marketization reforms in the UK and Australia(Wiley, 2020-04-07)Market instruments are increasingly used to drive innovation and efficiency in public services. Meanwhile, many governments recognize the need for services to be more personalized and ‘user-centred’. This was a key aim of major welfare-to-work reforms in both the UK and Australia over the past decade, which sought to achieve personalization through increasing service delivery by for-profit providers, contracted via Payment-by-Results. Drawing on three surveys of frontline staff, we show the impact of recent UK and Australian marketization reforms on frontline practices to consider whether the reform mix of increased commercial provision tied to Payment-by-Results has enhanced service personalization. We find that the UK's ‘black box’ model was associated with some increase in frontline discretion, but little evidence that this enhanced personalization, either compared to previous programmes or to Australia's more regulated system.
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ItemLocked-in or Locked-out: Can a Public Services Market Really Change?(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020)Australia’s welfare-to-work system has been subject to ongoing political contestation and policy reform since the 1990s. In this paper we take a big picture look at the Australian system over time, re-visiting our earlier analysis of the impact of marketisation on flexibility at the frontline over the first ten years of the Australian market in employment services. That analysis demonstrated that marketisation had failed to deliver the service flexibility intended through contracting-out, and had instead produced market herding around a common set of standardised frontline practices. In the interim, there have been two further major redesigns of the Australian system at considerable expense to taxpayers. Re-introducing greater flexibility and service tailoring into the market has been a key aim of these reforms. Calling on evidence from an original, longitudinal survey of frontline employment service staff run in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this paper considers how the Australian market has evolved over its second decade. We find remarkable consistency over time and, indeed, evidence of deepening organisational convergence. We conclude that, once in motion, isomorphic pressures towards standardisation quickly get locked into quasi-market regimes; at least when these pressures occur in low-trust contracting environments.
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ItemWelfare Conditionality and Blaming the Unemployed(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2020-03-01)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.
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ItemThe Category Game and its impact on Street-Level Bureaucrats and Jobseekers: An Australian Case Study(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019)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.
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ItemFrom Entitlement to Experiment: The New Governance of Welfare to Work. UK Report back to Industry Partners(University of Melbourne, 2017)The UK employment services sector is a dynamic landscape that has been the subject of several major waves of reform over the past decade. This has included the consolidation of centrally-contracted programmes focused on particular localities and discrete cohorts of job seekers into much larger programmes aimed at broader groups of unemployed people. For the past five years, the Work Programme has been the main contracted welfare-to-work programme in the UK, although the Department for Work and Pensions has also established a smaller Work Choice programme for those with more substantial barriers to employment related to disability and ill-health. In addition, Jobcentre Plus continues to provide a public employment service to many people during the earlier stages of benefit claims. It will take on an even greater role in doing so when the Work Programme and Work Choice programmes come to an end in mid-2017 and are replaced by a new Work and Health Programme.
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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)