School Choice in London and Paris – A Comparison of Middle‐class Strategies

Education is one major public service in which quasi‐markets and other choice‐based mechanisms are now established methods of delivery. The types of school people choose, and the extent to which their choices are realized, have a fundamental impact on the outcomes of any mechanism of school choice. In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of the school choice strategies of middle‐class families in London and Paris. We draw on approximately 200 in‐depth interviews carried out across the two cities. This enables us to investigate the extent to which middle‐class school choice strategies transcend the institutional context provided by both the local (state and private) schools market and national education policy in England and France. We discuss these findings in the context of current school choice policy and consider their implications for future policy design.     

Subverting Social Policy on the Front Line: Agencies of Resistance in the Delivery of Services

An understanding of policy implementation issues in many of the core fields of social policy requires attention to the mode of service delivery that is characteristic of those fields: face‐to‐face interaction between frontline service staff and service users. A focus on implementation as interaction between these groups reveals the significance of ‘agency’ to the analysis of why and how certain social policy outcomes occur – and in particular why outcomes may sometimes be different from those anticipated by formal policy objectives. This article considers how the agency of workers and users shapes the processes of mediation, negotiation and adaptation that occur in different service delivery contexts, and identifies ways in which resistance to intended policy outcomes, and to the practices expected to deliver them, is formed and expressed. Drawing on a wide range of empirical research material, the article shows how agencies of resistance produce outcomes that are uncertain, fragile and contested, and whose effect can be the subversion of formal policy intentions.     

Income Security During Sickness Absence. What Do British Middle‐classes Do?

Income maintenance during sickness absence is an under‐researched field within social policy analysis, and yet it is conducive to exploring the interplay between statutory, corporate and private forms of income protection. Drawing on original qualitative interview data, the article shows that British middle‐class couples largely ignore or dismiss public provision, which is due to a relatively low level of sickness benefits, but also based on misconceptions about social rights and the role of employers as mandatory (and voluntary) sick pay providers. Despite a considerable degree of mistrust, mortgage‐related private sickness insurance mattered to some extent, although this does not necessarily reflect policyholders’ strategic choices vis à vis current household needs for income security. Other potential sources of income replacement, such as savings, are relied on much less. In general, the analysis shows a heavy middle‐class reliance on, and strong confidence in, employer‐based sickness pay. This finding may be contrasted with questions about the sustainability of voluntary corporate provision, as well as its capacity to provide income security for the workforce as a whole.     

Activation Reform and Inter‐Agency Co‐operation – Local Consequences of Mixed Modes of Governance in Sweden

Organizational reform has become a recurring solution to problems of social exclusion and unemployment. In Europe, and other parts of the world, there is a trend towards policies of ‘activation’ in employment and social policy. The idea of flexible, individualized and tailor‐made services is coupled with managerial and market‐based reforms as well as collaborative governance. In these complex structures of service provision, coordination and inter‐agency co‐operation have become key concerns. Based on a study of a recent reform of programmes for newly arrived refugees in Sweden (Etableringsreformen), this article seeks to contribute to the literature on governance of ‘activation’ by examining the consequences of mixed modes of governance (market and collaborative) on local inter‐agency co‐operation. Drawing on data from in‐depth case studies in two municipalities, it is demonstrated how the coupling of managerial practices and quasi‐markets with existing collaborative arrangements has created barriers for inter‐agency co‐operation. The results indicate that institutional tensions between governance forms represent an important factor for explaining governance failure in this policy area.     

Explaining Different Paths in Social Health Insurance Countries – Health System Change and Cross‐border Lesson‐drawing between Germany,Austria and the Netherlands

The issues of ‘policy diffusion’ or ‘policy transfer’ and ‘mutual learning’ have become important topics in comparative research on social policy and health systems. In current debates on explaining reform in ‘Bismarckian’ social (health) insurance systems, however, these issues have been neglected. In particular, the role of ‘negative lesson‐drawing’ in the sense of avoiding mistakes of others has not often been considered. This article compares health system change in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with health systems of the social insurance type. In contrast to the existing literature, our analysis stresses that these countries have taken different reform paths since the 1990s. By applying a most similar systems design, we analyze how far cross‐border lesson‐drawing has contributed to health system divergence in the three countries. The empirical basis of the analysis is semi‐structured qualitative expert interviews, a method appropriate for tracing processes of lesson‐drawing. We argue that in order to fully understand the diverging reform trajectories, we need to take into account how political decision‐makers refer to (negative) experiences of other countries. Generally, national driving forces for health system change were at the heart of many crucial reforms during the period studied. Nevertheless, we claim that it was the German bad practice role model that kept the reform paths of Austria and Germany apart in the Austrian health reform discussion between 2000 and 2005.     

Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions – ‘Gold Standard’ or ‘Fool's Gold’ in Public Policy and Management?

In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making and management. The UK has been in the forefront of this movement but similar movements have been identified internationally. This interest in outcome‐based decision‐making has been given particular impetus through the ‘results’‐based movement in evaluation and performance management since the 1980s, which has increased in scope over time, slowly changing its emphasis from cost reduction and measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. This change has been widely welcomed by policymakers, practitioners and academics. However, there is evidence that the reality is often rather less than the rhetoric. Moreover, the ‘attribution problem’ of attributing changes in outcomes to specific social policies has remained a major issue. The conceptual solution of constructing ‘cause‐and‐effect’ models, imported from the policy evaluation field, has only recently become common for operationalising these models. This article outlines the evolution of interest in outcome‐based social policy‐making up to recent times and the growing realization of the importance of the attribution problem. It then outlines both how the ‘cause‐and‐effect’ policy modelling approach can partially tackle the attribution problem, but also its inherent limitations. Lastly, the article uses several case studies in current UK social policy‐making to demonstrate the potential importance of the reasoning embedded within cause‐and‐effect models but also the dangers in policy‐making which adopts this approach without understanding its conceptual basis or in fields where it is inappropriate, given the current state of our knowledge of social policy systems.     

Putting the parity into service‐user participation: An integrated model of social justice

Models of service‐user participation have derived from citizenship or consumerist agendas, neither of which has achieved the structural reforms important for the most marginalised social work clients. This article proposes Fraser's model of ‘parity of participation’ as an appropriately multifaceted frame for capturing the social justice aspirations of service‐user participation. A qualitative case study compared the experiences and expectations of people who had used Australian mental health services with a sample who had used Australian homelessness services to examine their expectations of participation at individual and representative levels. The findings reinforce concerns from Fraser's research about the tendency for identity‐based consumerist notions of participation to reify group identity. This leads to tokenistic service‐user involvement strategies that have little impact on participation at a structural level. Fraser's parity of participation is shown to have untested potential to reshape service‐user participation to meet the social justice aspirations of social work clients. Key Practitioner Message: ● Innovative, service‐user driven strategies for collaboration will be those which challenge existing power structures; ● Service users want their contributions to decision making to generate identifiable change in the system of social services; ● The success of service‐user participation strategies might be the extent to which political, economic and cultural opportunities are enhanced.     

Garbage‐can Policy‐making Meets Neo‐liberal Ideology: Twenty Five Years of Redundant Reform of the English National Health Service

The garbage‐can theory of decision‐making (Cohen et al. 1972), has been adapted into a perspective on policy‐making, with adaptations of the approach placing notable emphasis upon the health sector (Kingdon 2006; Paton 2006). This article creates an adapted ‘garbage‐can’ framework to help explain each stage of the reform of the English National Health Service (NHS) over the last 25 years. The emergence of the key idea and resultant policy at each stage of reform of the English NHS has been arational and indeed sometimes irrational. Policy has reflected advocacy by policy‐salesmen (Kingdon 2002), proffering ‘solutions’ to ill‐defined problems and answers to unasked questions, and politicians' short‐termist responses at each decision‐point. Yet the garbage‐can alone is not enough: if arationality rules in policy‐making day to day, this does not mean that there is not an overall ideological context, trend or bias in reform. The article also posits that ‘market reform’ has derived from the ideological hegemony of a naive anti‐statism (hostility to a misleadingly defined and often mythological ‘centralist state’) in public services and enthusiasm for market competition rather than any evidence‐based application of pro‐market ideas to health policy. A question arises: how are these two approaches (short‐term arationality and longer‐term ideological bias) combined in explanation of how policy over time is biased in a particular direction while seemingly arbitrary and directionless at each messy decision‐point. The article attempts to combine the insights of a garbage‐can approach with wider explanations of ideological hegemony.     

Social work with middle‐class Spanish families: The challenge of the work–family conflict

In the current economic crisis, middle‐class families often find themselves immersed in a process of downward social mobility. These are families in which both spouses work, and where many relational conflicts begin in the sphere of work–family reconciliation and the allocation of household responsibilities. This article presents the results of a research study we conducted on middle‐class families in Spain. We focus specifically on the problems associated with work–family reconciliation and gender, and the mitigating role played by social support. Based on our results, we want to call the attention to a prevalent and ‘new’ conflict in family‐based practice social work in Spain: the work–family conflict.     

Leadership and Listening: The Reception of User Voice in Today's Public Services

Over the last decade leadership has become a watchword in public service provision, especially in its association with the seemingly ubiquitous ‘delivery’ agenda. As leadership styles change in response to developments in the contemporary public service environment, it has become imperative for service providers to find ways to listen to service users. However, listening is itself widely recognized as an underdeveloped public sector competency. This article addresses the relationship between leadership and listening. Using findings from recent research, it identifies a ‘listening gap’ in public services, before pointing to ways in which this gap might be better understood and subsequently narrowed. In doing so, it seeks to present new ideas about the essential balance between ‘leadership’ and ‘listening’, and how this can be struck in today's public service environment. First, the nature of the user voice is examined. By talking to service users who have communicated their views in different ways in each of three different services (housing, social care and leisure), the article seeks to understand the nature of users' ‘projects’ in the expression of their views. These projects are compared with those of public service leaders. Second, the congruence (or incongruence) of these projects is considered through a comparison of the world views of both users and leaders. Finally, aspects of the context are considered in the discussion of the way public service organizations might go about defining the relationship between leadership and listening.     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

Anglo‐Australian and non‐Anglophone middle classes: ‘foreign accent’ and social inclusion

Building on the concept of ‘multicultural middle class’, this paper explores social inclusion of professionally educated and employed non‐Anglophone immigrants in Australia. We focus specifically on the perceptions and implications of ‘foreign accent’ in the interaction between two groups of middle‐class Australians: non‐Anglophone immigrants and Anglo‐Australians. ‘Non‐Anglophone immigrants’ are defined as those who arrived in Australia as adults, grew up speaking a language other than English, and therefore usually speak English with a ‘foreign accent’. ‘Anglo‐Australians’ are defined as people born in Australia who grew up in families/households where only English was spoken, therefore speaking with a ‘native Australian’ accent. Through a survey of a targeted sample of respondents, the two groups were asked about their intergroup communication, wider interaction (e.g., intermarriage, friendships and working together) and mutual perceptions. Our findings indicate high levels of agreement between the two groups that Anglophone/non‐Anglophone communication is minimally hindered by comprehension problems due to foreign‐accented speech and cultural differences. Although the positive picture that emerges may reflect specific experiences and attitudes of middle‐class professionals and may not be generalisable, increased contact of the 'multicultural middle class' with its Anglo‐Australian counterpart is likely to be a factor in dissociating foreign accent and negative stereotyping.     

Service Users with Experience of Poverty as Institutional Entrepreneurs in Public Services in Belgium: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Policy Implementation

In this article, we report on a qualitative and interpretative research project in which we gained in‐depth knowledge about dynamics in ten federal public policy units in Belgium where a service user with experience of poverty was employed. Starting from an institutional theory perspective, it was argued that these service users with experience of poverty can possibly feature as institutional entrepreneurs or agents of change who initiate a critical reflection in the mindset of fellow social administrators about taken‐for‐granted practices, routines and rationales. In order to fulfill this ambition, we equally stressed that service users with experience of poverty should be able to perform two other roles as well: to provide direct support to citizens, especially those living in poverty during their contacts with a public policy unit, and to formulate concrete propositions to change some of the policy units' internal procedures. Our research findings reveal that these two roles provide a necessary breeding ground for further interaction and (in)formal dialogue between service users with experience of poverty and fellow social administrators about the quality and accessibility of service delivery. However, installing this shared responsibility proves to be a valuable but also gradual process, and we argue that it is therefore undesirable when service users with experience of poverty act as so‐called ‘heroes’ in changing these taken‐for‐granted institutional practices, routines and rationales.     

The Roles of Race,Class, and Residential Preferences in the Neighborhood Racial Composition of Middle‐Class Blacks and Whites*

Objective. This analysis extends the residential attainment literature by examining the neighborhood racial composition of middle‐class blacks and whites while controlling for residential preferences. Methods. Using the Multi‐City Study of Urban Inequality and 1990 Census data, the spatial assimilation and place stratification theories of locational attainment are tested. Results. As in previous research, support is shown for both theories; for blacks, stronger human capital characteristics translate into neighborhoods that are less racially segregated. However, even when middle‐class blacks prefer to live in integrated neighborhoods, on average, they live in neighborhoods that are about 60 percent black and 30 percent white, while middle‐class whites who prefer to live in integrated neighborhoods reside in neighborhoods that, on average, are 10 percent black and 85 percent white. Conclusions. Although incorporating residential preferences into models that predict neighborhood racial composition proves important, the relative inability of middle‐class blacks to implement their preferences indicates powerful social forces that maintain “American apartheid.”     

Person‐centredness in the community care of older people: A literature‐based concept synthesis

‘Person‐centredness’ is a ubiquitous term, employed in modern care services to signify policies and practices that attend to the uniqueness of each individual user. Despite being highly regarded in older adult community care services, there is much ambiguity over its precise meaning. Existing reviews of person‐centredness and its attributes have tended to focus on the medico‐nursing literature, neglecting other interpretations, such as those relevant to community social care. A new literature‐based concept synthesis reported here identified 12 common attributes within the broad themes of ‘understanding the person’, ‘engagement in decision‐making’ and ‘promoting the care relationship’. The review also contrasts how these attributes are applied across different interpretations of person‐centredness. The article argues that not all attributes necessarily pull in the same direction, and that older adults may require them to be delivered in different ways than they are to younger people. Thus, a ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ approach should be discouraged in community care. Key Practitioner Message: ? ‘Person‐centredness’ is open to multiple interpretations, causing difficulties for services trying to gauge performance and quality; ? Three themes are central to person‐centred services: ‘understanding the person’, ‘engagement in decision‐making’ and ‘promoting the care relationship’; ? A ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ approach to applying person‐centredness is to be discouraged.     

Social Inclusion and Place‐Focused Initiatives in Western Sydney: A Review of Current Practice

This paper presents a review of the range of policies and programs that currently direct resources to disadvantaged communities in New South Wales, with a specific focus on the western Sydney region. These ‘place‐focused initiatives’ are the main sources of funding for community renewal from a range of government agencies at federal, state and local government levels. The research on which this paper is based identified thirty‐six programs administered or managed through thirteen government agencies or departments with a combined budget in excess of $163m in 2000/2001. It is argued that this diverse range of programs, while important, is highly fragmented, lacks a coherent spatial targeting framework, is poorly related to either local social or physical planning processes, and is poorly integrated in terms of its local outcomes. Moreover, beyond the public housing estates, existing policies lack the capacity to address the poor housing market conditions that generate local concentrations of disadvantage. A number of alternative policy ideas are presented that, if developed, might offer a better framework for the delivery of integrated policies to address the problems of social disadvantage and exclusion at the local level.     

Trust as a Means of Bridging the Management of Risk and the Meeting of Need: A Case Study in Mental Health Service Provision

Shifts in public policy towards an increasing focus on risk have been deemed problematic at a number of levels, particularly the tendency for concerns over reputational risk to institutions to trump the interests and needs of service‐users. This article explores the tension between these two dimensions, of risk and need, in a case study of local mental health services – a setting where conflicting objectives to manage risk and meet need are apparent. Media‐driven pressure to ward against the ‘risk’ represented by service‐users tends towards more coercive policy which may obstruct the meeting of need, which in turn may undermine service‐user engagement and hinder risk management. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with service‐users, professionals and managers, the article explores the process of trust and its facilitative role in meeting need and managing risk. Findings suggest that while existing foci on risk are at times counter‐productive, trust plays a significant role in service‐users' initial and ongoing engagement, communication and co‐operation with professionals. Yet inherent obstacles to trust within mental healthcare contexts remain, due to cultural pressures on professionals, the nature of the illness experience and negative past experiences of in‐patient care.     

From Official Supervision to Self‐monitoring: Privatizing Supervision of Private Social Care Services in Finland

In October 2011, a new Act on Private Social Care Services came into force in Finland. The Act included a provision on a ‘self‐monitoring plan’. According to the provision, providers of private social care services are required to draw up a self‐monitoring plan and to follow its realization. The plan must be kept publicly on view so that clients and their relatives can also keep an eye on the realization of self‐monitoring. In this article, self‐monitoring is first explained and then briefly analyzed against the background of a wider theoretical discussion on accountability. It is argued that the introduction of client involvement in the supervision of private social care services represents a new mechanism of accountability that is typical of the Post‐Keynesian welfare state. Because public authorities are no longer able to supervise the growing number of private social care service providers, the responsibility has been partly shifted to service providers themselves as well as to clients. However, it is argued that the idea of self‐monitoring lends itself poorly to ‘delegated’ private social care services, i.e. to services that are outsourced to private service suppliers. Supervision of private social care service providers should not be too eagerly delegated to service providers themselves, or to clients, because we are here dealing with the constitutional right to adequate social care services. Client involvement also involves numerous practical problems, as shown at the end of the article.