The Role of Non‐profit Organizations in the Mixed Economy of Welfare‐to‐Work in the UK and Australia

This article charts the development of welfare‐to‐work policies and compares and contrasts the traditions of delivery in the UK and Australia. We find that in the UK, employment services and social security benefit administration have been dominated by the central state, traditionally affording a key role to civil servants as direct delivery agents. However, in federal Australia, mixed economies of welfare‐to‐work operate in the different states, there is a far greater role for social services and non‐profit organizations are firmly established as key providers of frontline employment services. Since the late 1990s, UK welfare reforms have been gradually following the Australian lead in contracting non‐state actors as delivery agents. As this trend seems set to continue and intensify, we examine the Australian experience in order to reflect on the role of non‐profits in policy reform.     

Lone Parents and Welfare‐to‐Work in England: A Spatial Analysis of Outcomes and Drivers

Mirroring changes across nations of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, recent UK governments have redrawn lone parents' entitlement to social assistance benefits ever tighter around participation in the labour market. A radical shift since 2008 has been the gradual transfer of most non‐employed lone parents into the ‘activating’ Jobseekers' Allowance (JSA) regime. The enhanced conditionality requirements of this JSA regime have been justified by both paternalistic and contractualist arguments but, however justified, are built on the premise that behavioural factors drive lone parent employment outcomes, a view made increasingly forcefully under the current Coalition government. This article uses up‐to‐date administrative data at local authority level across England to provide a geographical perspective into the sub‐national changes in lone parent employment outcomes since the transfer to JSA from 2008, as well as the relevant importance of the alternative structural and behavioural accounts to these outcomes. The findings suggest that the JSA transfer has increased lone parent employment, that structural rather than behavioural drivers are more relevant causal factors and that there is good reason to be concerned about the effect of the reforms on the well‐being of lone parents and their children.     

‘Street‐level Bureaucracy’ Revisited: The Changing Face of Frontline Discretion in Adult Social Care in England

This reassessment of the continuing significance of Lipsky's (1980 ) work on ‘street‐level bureaucracy’ for frontline decision making is based on a retrospective review of the author's research on assessment practice in adult social care in England. The studies span the past two decades during which time successive governments have restructured and modernized social services departments. When these were established in 1970, they represented the high watermark of bureau‐professionalism – a mode of administration which dominated social welfare at the time Lipsky was writing. The subsequent dismantling of bureau‐professionalism calls into question the validity of his findings, and the author draws on her own research to assess conflicting views about the impact of social care reforms on the discretion which social workers exercise as street‐level bureaucrats. She concludes that the distinct types of discretion to emerge from her findings, represented in a taxonomy, are shaped by the differing micro environments of frontline practice which, in turn, affect the relative force of managerialism, professionalism and user empowerment in countering the defensive exercise of discretion described by Lipsky. Whilst her analysis affirms the continuing significance of Lipsky's analysis, it also points to the need for some revision to accommodate major shifts in welfare administration since the publication of his work. She highlights the potential relevance of these insights for investigating the next planned transformation of adult social care, personalization, as well as for the implementation literature more widely.     

Children's services in the iron cage of performance management: street‐level bureaucracy and the spectre of Švejkism

Wastell D, White S, Broadhurst K, Peckover S, Pithouse A. Children's services in the iron cage of performance management: street‐level bureaucracy and the spectre of ?vejkism Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 310–320 © 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. Recent UK government reforms have introduced a range of measures to regulate practice in child welfare, with professional work increasingly structured into formal processes embedded in information technology. This prompts obvious anxieties about the erosion of professional discretion. Using Lipsky's concept of the street‐level bureaucrat, we report on an ethnographical study examining how social workers organise their practice in an atmosphere of performance management. Clear indications of attenuated discretion are revealed, reflecting the shift to a managerial model of control. Of concern is the emergence of a pattern of formally conformant behaviour in which the letter of the organisational law is obeyed but without genuine commitment. Drawing on the anti‐hero of Ha?ek's celebrated satire, we denote this form of passive resistance ‘?vejkism’. While showing up the absurdities of excessive managerial power, such behaviours are ultimately dysfunctional for the organisation; an alternative governance paradigm, based on professional values, is briefly outlined.     

Towards a Multi‐level Approach on Frontline Interactions in the Public Sector: Institutional Transformations and the Dynamics of Real‐time Interactions

This study develops a multi‐level approach on frontline interactions in the public sector. Previous research suggests that detailed analyses of frontline interactions are essential to our understanding of how welfare services take shape when policies and rules are applied and negotiated in individual cases. The dynamics and performances of real‐time interactions have, however, rarely been analyzed as such. This study shows how the methods developed in the field of Conversation Analysis can contribute to this research. Our multi‐level approach integrates analyses of the policy‐ and institutional transformations that shape conditions for frontline interactions; and analyses of how policies and rules are evoked, negotiated and reshaped in the turn‐by‐turn organization and performances of interaction. The approach is applied on an analysis of how rules regarding financial aid are applied in an authority highly affected by changes in welfare policy towards standardization and detailed regulations. The empirical case is the Swedish Board for Study Support. The empirical study includes analyses of documents, interviews and analyses of taped telephone conversations. The study shows how institutional arrangements of standardization, detailed regulations, monitoring and depersonalization, structure the frontline work and shape narrow frames for officials' discretion in interactions with clients. The study also shows how rules are invoked and negotiated in recurrent practices in the interaction: in the careful design of decisions; in the investigations of alternatives and exceptions from the rules in order to find solutions to the client's problems. The analyses of concrete interactional practices clearly indicate that also a rule‐governed work dominated by task discretion involves recurrent negotiations, flexibility and local policy‐making.