Making welfare conditional: A street-level perspective

This article looks at how welfare conditionality is delivered at the street level. It argues that the street-level delivery of welfare conditionality is structured by policies, the governance context in which workers deliver welfare conditionality, the organization in which they work, and the occupation they are part of. Characteristics of these contexts present street-level workers with a variety of signals and incentives that direct their decision making. The article elaborates on this proposition on the basis of a review of academic studies analysing the street-level delivery of various aspects of welfare conditionality: the use of sanctions, service personalization, and the treatment of vulnerable clients. The review shows that context characteristics together have a significant impact on the street-level transformation of welfare conditionality policies into practices. Street-level decision making concerning the use of sanctions is far more complex than can be captured by a perspective on street-level workers as merely policy implementers. Sanctioning practices are sometimes harsher, sometimes more lenient than policies lead us to expect. The “soft” side of welfare conditionality—represented by service personalization—is often under pressure at the street level, potentially strengthening welfare conditionality's tough side. This affects vulnerable jobseekers most: Street-level studies show that the balance between disciplining and enabling aspects of welfare-to-work is most at risk for more vulnerable groups. The article concludes that the contextual pressures street-level workers have to deal with in their daily work hardly reflect the “delicate equilibrium” that they need to deliver welfare conditionality in a professional, responsive, and responsible way.     

Street‐level discretion,emotional labour and welfare frontline staff at the Australian employment service providers

Despite the current controversial debates about discretion in public bureaucracies in general, and in welfare agencies in particular, the current literature on street‐level bureaucracy mainly assumes that discretion is a distinctive feature of the daily work of public servants. Nonetheless, a pertinent question has not specifically been asked in this literature, that is, given the context of privatisation and increased welfare conditionality in the welfare sector that are seriously challenging welfare frontline staff's commitment to social justice and human rights‐based practices, what are forms of street‐level discretion likely to contribute to improving the quality of welfare services? In this study, we attempt to address this question by exploring discretion displayed by welfare frontline staff in four Australian employment service providers. We argue that emotional labour, especially when being informed by critical empathy, is an important and effective form of street‐level discretion that welfare frontline workers can perform to better support welfare recipients and minimise the punitive aspects of welfare policy.     

Personal Services in the Post-industrial Economy: Adding Nonprofits to the Welfare Mix

This article develops linkages between two separate fields of research, namely work on post‐industrial welfare states, and work on nonprofit organizations. It pays particular attention to the emphasis on personal services and the “cost disease” hypothesis found in the former, which places strong constraints on improving pay and job quality in the nonprofit sector. At the same time, it argues that the post‐industrial welfare states literature, despite its emphasis on personal services, has largely ignored the significant and growing role of nonprofits in delivering these services, and thus the potential of these organizations to shape their relevant labour markets. This poses the question about the relative weight of productivity‐related wage restraints in personal services versus the capacity for agency by nonprofits. The final section of the paper engages in a critique of the “cost disease” hypothesis to suggest that space exists to improve pay and job quality in nonprofit personal services, despite productivity‐related constraints.     

Frontline managers' perceptions and justifications of behavioural conditionality

The debate on behavioural conditionality is characterised by abundant controversies. Frontline managers have a particularly important role in implementing these policies because their interpretation of the welfare policies regulates the frameworks of street-level bureaucrat's discretionary powers. A nationwide survey among frontline managers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration revealed that 86% of the managers expressed strong normative support towards welfare conditionality. With this as a backdrop, this paper develops a better understanding of managers' perceptions and justifications of the Norwegian type of behavioural conditionality. Analysis of focus group interview data showed that the managers adopted a broad definition of conditionality, meaning promotion of an overall (re)integration of the client into the society as opposed to the narrow definition focusing solely on labour market integration. Furthermore, the implementation of welfare conditionality primarily was perceived as mild and client sensitive. The managers mainly justified welfare conditionality in terms of care and paternalistic defences, arguing that requirement of work and activities are in the client's best interest, understood in terms of social democratic values.     

Penal and welfare conditionality: Discipline or degradation?

This paper aims to complement analyses of welfare conditionality by examining what can be learned from studies of conditional punishment in the criminal justice system. Drawing on a range of recent studies, I explore lived experiences of the conditionality attendant on penal forms of supervision; penal forms that have expanded rapidly in recent decades. I argue that, to paraphrase Stan Cohen, such supervision is as much about the dispersal of degradation as it is about the dispersal of discipline. Indeed, in contemporary western societies, both in punishment and in welfare systems, I suggest that conditionality functions less to discipline poor and marginalised people and more to disqualify them from the entitlements of ordinary citizenship. In so doing, conditionality constructs them as denizens, thus serving to limit the liabilities for the state that arise from social inequalities. Extending Delroy Fletcher and Sharon Wright's metaphor, the abusive slaps now meted out in concert by both hands of the penal state are as much about degrading and denying the entitlements of “needy” denizens as they are about influencing their conduct. But crucially, even within the increasingly restrictive context created by these developments, penal practitioners can and do provide care and assistance.     

Seeing people in the computer: The role of information technology in remote employment services

Information technologies have been important in the emergence of new forms of control and surveillance of welfare recipients and of those who administer labour market programmes. These technologies have often appeared at the margins of accounts of welfare reform, for example as means of increasing the efficiency or consistency of services, or as constraining frontline discretion. Henman has argued, however, that information technologies need to be analysed not just as administrative tools, but as “non-human actors,” shaping policy development and implementation in ways beyond the intentions of their human creators (Henman, Governing Electronically: E-government and the Reconfiguration of Public Administration, Policy and Power, Palgrave MacMillan). This paper explores the way that the use of government information systems has shaped employment services in remote Australia where over 80 per cent of those included are Indigenous people. The article describes how the production and use of administrative data within employment services have supported and extended the framing of Indigenous people in remote communities as non-compliant and as needing external direction.     

The moral hazard of conditionality: Restoring the integrity of social security law

This article examines the extent to which the Australian and UK social security systems meet their legal obligations to provide basic relief to citizens in need. Conditionality and “mutual obligation” are at the core of both the UK and Australian social security systems and are based on the concept of moral hazard, the goal being to ensure that claimants do not consider living on benefits to be preferable to engaging in paid work. Yet, we argue that the element of “mutuality” is missing in both systems; welfare claimants are subject to myriad conditions and obligations, whilst the state operates free of any legal responsibility to provide even basic relief to those in need, to prevent or alleviate extreme poverty and destitution. We outline the extent to which Australian and UK social security laws require governments to relieve destitution, examining both domestic and human rights law. We conclude that legal protections are weak and that both systems fail to meet the basic conditions of humanity toward their citizens. On this basis, we argue that such failings demonstrate a lack of integrity which undermines the standing of both the UK and Australia to invoke a claim of moral hazard to defend claimant conditionality.     

Punitive benefit sanctions,welfare conditionality,and the social abuse of unemployed people in Britain: Transforming claimants into offenders?

A defining feature of U.K. welfare reform since 2010 has been the concerted move towards greater compulsion and sanctioning, which has been interpreted by some social policy scholars as punitive and cruel. In this article, we borrow concepts from criminology and sociology to develop new interpretations of welfare conditionality. Based on data from a major Economic and Social Research Council-funded qualitative longitudinal study (2014–2019), we document the suffering that unemployed claimants experienced because of harsh conditionality. We find that punitive welfare conditionality often caused symbolic and material suffering and sometimes had life-threatening effects. We argue that a wide range of suffering induced by welfare conditionality can be understood as ‘social abuse’, including the demoralisation of the futile job-search treadwheel and the self-administered surveillance of the Universal Jobmatch panopticon. We identify a range of active claimant responses to state perpetrated harm, including acquiescence, adaptation, resistance, and disengagement. We conclude that punitive post-2010 unemployment correction can be seen as a reinvention of failed historic forms of punishment for offenders.     

Work,welfare, and wellbeing: The impacts of welfare conditionality on people with mental health impairments in the UK

The personal, economic, and social costs of mental ill health are increasingly acknowledged by many governments and international organisations. Simultaneously, in high-income nations, the reach of welfare conditionality has extended to encompass many people with mental health impairments as part of on-going welfare reforms. This is particularly the case in the UK where, especially since the introduction of Employment and Support Allowance in 2008, the rights and responsibilities of disabled people have been subject to contestation and redefinition. Following a review of the emergent international evidence on mental health and welfare conditionality, this paper explores two specific issues. First, the impacts of the application of welfare conditionality on benefit claimants with mental health impairments. Second, the effectiveness of welfare conditionality in supporting people with experience of mental ill health into paid work. In considering these questions, this paper presents original analysis of data generated in qualitative longitudinal interviews with 207 UK social security benefit recipients with experience of a range of mental health issues. The evidence suggests that welfare conditionality is largely ineffective in moving people with mental health impairments into, or closer to, paid work. Indeed, in many cases, it triggers negative health outcomes that make future employment less likely. It is concluded that the application of conditionality for people with mental health issues is inappropriate and should cease.     

Back to Work after Incapacity Benefit: Differences between Ethnic Minority and Native Dutch Workers

Contemporary pleas for an activating welfare state and social security system emphasize that getting benefit claimants back to work is more important than providing income compensation for social risks connected with unemployment or illness. The Dutch system of incapacity benefits, however, is far removed from this normative ideal of a proactive social security system. Resumption of work after a spell of incapacity benefit is the exception rather than the rule. This article examines possible ethnic differences in resumption of work following incapacity benefit. We use a unique register data file from Statistics Netherlands that contains information about all incapacity benefit claimants in the Netherlands in 1999. In the analysis we follow these benefit claimants for three years and examine what their labour market position was in 2002. We find that resumption of work after incapacity benefit is even more the exception for migrant workers with a Turkish or Moroccan ethnic background. Contrary to our assumption, this difference from native Dutch workers cannot be explained by unfavourable personal characteristics of Turkish or Moroccan benefit claimants – their personal characteristics (gender, age, low educational level) appear to be rather favourable for resumption of work. In the current literature, these differences in outcomes between ethnic groups are often attributed to certain ‘ethnic‐specific’ or cultural factors. This article argues that we should be careful of explaining different outcomes between ethnic groups by (alleged) cultural phenomena. There are other explanations possible such as differences in work motivation, lack of ‘transition facilities’ in companies and differential treatment by employers or social security officials.     

Importing Workfare: Policy Transfer of Social and Labour Market Policies from the USA to Britain under New Labour

Britain's New Labour government has put welfare reform at the top of its political agenda. It has followed a radical “workfare” agenda in relation to labour and social market policies and no longer aims to secure full employment mainly through direct job creation or Keynesian demand management. Instead, it promotes equal opportunity for all based on a contract between benefits claimants and the employment service. The New Deal is at the heart of British activation programmes for the unemployed. American policy paradigms have influenced the design of the New Deal. Policy transfer in activation policies from the USA to Britain is due to institutional similarities in British and American welfare states on the one hand, and to the comparable structure of their labour markets on the other hand. The influence of the European social model on British labour market policies thus remains limited.     

Access to justice for Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory

This article discusses research in the Northern Territory on Aboriginal civil and family law needs. It is based on focus group discussions and interviews with legal services providers and other associated organisations. The article argues that key areas of legal need involve discrimination, housing, child protection, social security, credit/debt and consumer law problems. It further argues that welfare conditionality, particularly as embodied in the NT Intervention and subsequent Stronger Futures policies, has exacerbated the need for legal assistance and advocacy for Aboriginal people.     

Fairness, Equality and Legitimacy: A Qualitative Comparative Study of Germany and the UK

The pressures of globalization and shifts towards post‐industrialism are producing policies that increasingly emphasize the common themes of activation and of individual responsibility for outcomes. Such approaches suggest normative principles of equality of opportunity rather than of outcome, and of individual rather than collective responsibility for the outcomes achieved. Does this imply a shift towards a common normative framework for European welfare states, with implications for future policy developments? This article reports a recent qualitative study examining ideas about fairness and social provision in the very different regimes of Germany and the UK. The analysis shows that while respondents in both countries value equality of opportunity as a normative principle, those in Germany are much more likely to argue that an equal opportunity approach requires government to guarantee equal access to basic services. They are also more likely to express concerns about market freedoms which allow those who can afford it better access to health care and education. Real differences in welfare values remain, loosely following differences of regime type, despite the greater emphasis on activation and individual responsibility across European welfare states.     

Slippery Concepts, Shifting Context: (National) States and Welfare in the Veit-Wilson/Atherton Debate

The debate between Veit‐Wilson and Atherton raises key conceptual questions for the analysis of welfare states. Veit‐Wilson, in particular, focuses on the important, but strangely neglected question of when and why a state qualifies as a welfare state. Atherton usefully draws attention to historical debates about the legitimate purposes of state welfare policies and worthy recipients of state benefits, particularly in the Anglo‐Saxon countries. His contribution may draw our attention to the shifting meaning of concepts (such as poverty) over time. In this contribution I seek to broaden the debate. First, without underestimating the importance of such criteria, rather than presenting one single (normatively based) “discriminating criterion” defining welfare statehood, I argue that other conceptions of “the welfare state” may be useful as well—so long as analysts are clear and explicit about how they are using the phrase. Second, in the current conjuncture of the perceived “transformation” perhaps even “destruction” of the welfare state, historical and comparative research grounded on clear and explicit concepts is crucial.     

We have our dignity,yeah? Scrutiny under suspicion: Experiences of welfare conditionality in the Irish social protection system

Conditionality has arguably always been part of welfare and poor relief regimes dating at least as far back as the poor laws and the condition of less eligibility. Nevertheless, there has arguably been a more pronounced turn towards welfare conditionality in the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries and this appears to be continuing across jurisdictions largely unabated and despite the fact that large amounts of evidence continue to suggest the ineffectiveness of welfare conditionality as means of promoting re‐ entry to the workforce for those experiencing unemployment. Alongside this, much evidence also points to the ultimately deleterious effects of welfare conditionality on those at whom it is targeted. This is an area which has seen an abundance of recent contributions in the context of the UK and further afield but that has arguably suffered from a lack of cognate data that sheds light on the Irish example. In attempting to begin to remedy this, this article presents data from a series of interviews carried out with welfare recipients in Ireland in 2018. The purpose of this article is to shed light on experiences of conditionality in the contemporary Irish welfare state and to attempt to nuance further what conditionality can mean. In doing so, this article takes the approach of allowing the data to “speak for itself” in order to best showcase the experiences of those most affected by welfare conditionality.     

From the hidden welfare state to the hidden part of welfare state reform: Analyzing the uses and effects of fiscal welfare in France

This article argues that fiscal welfare in Europe not only forms part of the “hidden welfare state” (Howard, 1997 ), but also constitutes an important yet understudied—and therefore hidden—element of welfare state reform. Using the example of France, and relying both on available data and on an exhaustive database of social tax expenditures (STEs) compiled for 2014, the article begins by providing an overview of the structure of STEs in France (section 2 ). It then analyzes the specific uses and effects of STEs in the fields of employment, health care, and pensions. In particular, it shows, first of all, how STEs have constituted a privileged instrument for circumventing certain institutional features such as high levels of minimum wage and of social security contributions in the field of employment (section 3 ). Second, it also shows that STEs have been used to quietly divert resources away from the earmarked social security funds and into collective private insurance funds, thus fueling their development, in the case of health care and pensions (section 4 ). Lastly, the article engages with the notion of the “social division of welfare” (Titmuss, 1958 ) by considering some of the distributional effects of fiscal welfare in France (section 5 ), before concluding (section 6 ).     

Radical alternative conceptualizations of the classical welfare state? Contrasting the United Kingdom and the Netherlands with Norway

In many countries, new, broad, and normative “conceptions of society” gained prominence that represent fundamentally different discursive alternatives to the classical welfare state. We present two political projects that contain radical alternative conceptualizations of the classical welfare state, the “Big Society” in Britain and the “Participation Society” in the Netherlands, and contrast these with Norwegian developments, where no such a radical alternative conceptualization of the welfare state can be found. We show that the British and Dutch political projects were attempts to replace the welfare state, whereas there is no comparable big idea about a radical overhaul of the welfare state in Norway. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of a fundamental shift in welfare state reform, namely a radical reconsidering of the ideational and normative foundation that defines and underpins what the welfare state is or should be.     

New conditionality in Australian social security policy

The past two decades have witnessed the application of new forms of conditionality to Australian social security policy. This paper argues that a distinctive feature has been the attempt to link receipt of government benefits to parental behaviour in order to address concerns about the welfare of children. With a view to providing a framework that can help to inform debates regarding the merits of these new forms of conditionality, this paper outlines the historical antecedents and philosophical framework of new conditionality. The paper also examines three pertinent Australian social security initiatives: the Maternity Immunisation Allowance, the Improving School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure, and Compulsory Income Management. The paper concludes with some consideration of the potential pitfalls of new conditionality.     

Chinese Perceptions of the Scandinavian Social Policy Model

This paper highlights the stereotypical images characteristic of Chinese social research on the Scandinavian model. How do Chinese commentators explain the development of the Scandinavian social policy model and how do they assess it? Is it deemed morally sound and sustainable? Reasons for the contrasts of interpretation between Chinese and Scandinavian authors are categorized along two dimensions. There are “missing elements”, typically the notions of social solidarity and social citizenship, which tend to be ignored by Chinese writers though underscored by Scandinavian writers. There are also “added elements”, generated from Chinese contexts, which affect Chinese interpretations of the Scandinavian model. The study argues that since each welfare regime type is possessed of its own normative codes, supported by its own particular social order, it is necessary to decode such elements—especially cultural notions of welfare—to appreciate the points of view being expressed.     

Abuses and Uses of Evaluation

In its recent report entitled Through a Glass Darkly, the Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare claims that there is insufficient evidence available to evaluate welfare services, yet even within a brief paper this can be demonstrated to be not so. The Senate Committee however chose to ignore information about services as such, in order to discuss the process of evaluation. The apparent shortcomings of current services and the way the committee largely ignored these must be viewed in the light of the role welfare fulfils within the state—a role in which serving the interests of claimants is clearly not the major component.