Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GAII (Governing activation in Ireland: comparing Ireland's mixed-economy of public employment services)
Période du rapport: 2020-01-06 au 2022-01-05
Governing Activation in Ireland (GAII) seeks to understand how different modes of commissioning public employment services (PES)—whether PES are delivered by private, public or community organisations, and on the basis of Payment-by-Results or fees for services—affect the labour market reintegration of long-term unemployed citizens, and the employment support they receive.
The context for the project are the major changes in social welfare in Ireland since 2011, which have unfolded across two tracks. The first is the ‘activation turn’ towards a more conditional (workfarist) approach to welfare through benefit cuts, tighter eligibillity conditions, and new sanctions for claimants who breach work-related obligations. The second is the major institutional reforms accompaning these changes.
Until 2011, Ireland operated a ‘two-tiered’ PES system. Some PES were provided by the state and others such as Local Employment Services (LES) for the long-term unemployed were delivered under contract by not-for-profit organisations. Ireland’s PES system has now evolved into a ‘three-tiered’ system comprising a mix of public, private, and community-delivered PES. This followed the introduction of JobPath, an employment service for the long-term unemployed that is delivered by private firms on a Payment-by-Results basis.
Irelands ‘mixed economy’ of activation is particularly interesting from a comparative governance perspective due to the degree of overlap between JobPath and LES. Both are contracted by the same department, operate under the same policy settings, and are targeted at the same cohorts. What differentiates them is their governance modes: JobPath is steered through market governance whereas LES are commissioned through annual, fee-for-service contracts without tendering. This afforded a rare opportunity to examine how marketisation reshapes PES delivery, which GAII exploited to provide a comparative assessment of the market governance of activation focused on four questions:
1. The influence of the commissioning model on the service delivery models of contracted PES and case management approaches of their staff?
2. Whether different governance frameworks result in qualitatively different activation services?
3. The extent to which the Irish experience of PES marketisation has converged with that of other liberal welfare states?
4. How jobseekers experience the ‘market governance’ of activation?
The project advanced understanding of the intersection between the policy turn towards activation and the governance turn towards marketisation, with GAII finding several differences between how activation is enacted between the marketised and non-marketised components of Ireland’s mixed-economy. Frontline delivery under JobPath was characterised by a significantly stronger emphasis on job-search monitoring, ‘work first’ rather than training, and reporting jobseekers for non-compliance. Conversely, LES staff placed a greater emphasis on supporting clients into education or work experience with less evidence that they monitored job-search instensity or used sanctions. While GAII finds PES in Ireland are less workfarist than other liberal regimes, marketisation precipitated a decided turn towards a more demanding, workfare model in practice. It also brought substantive changes in the PES workforce including the de-skilling and tighter performance management of frontline staff, which reshaped their uses of discretion.
The context for the project are the major changes in social welfare in Ireland since 2011, which have unfolded across two tracks. The first is the ‘activation turn’ towards a more conditional (workfarist) approach to welfare through benefit cuts, tighter eligibillity conditions, and new sanctions for claimants who breach work-related obligations. The second is the major institutional reforms accompaning these changes.
Until 2011, Ireland operated a ‘two-tiered’ PES system. Some PES were provided by the state and others such as Local Employment Services (LES) for the long-term unemployed were delivered under contract by not-for-profit organisations. Ireland’s PES system has now evolved into a ‘three-tiered’ system comprising a mix of public, private, and community-delivered PES. This followed the introduction of JobPath, an employment service for the long-term unemployed that is delivered by private firms on a Payment-by-Results basis.
Irelands ‘mixed economy’ of activation is particularly interesting from a comparative governance perspective due to the degree of overlap between JobPath and LES. Both are contracted by the same department, operate under the same policy settings, and are targeted at the same cohorts. What differentiates them is their governance modes: JobPath is steered through market governance whereas LES are commissioned through annual, fee-for-service contracts without tendering. This afforded a rare opportunity to examine how marketisation reshapes PES delivery, which GAII exploited to provide a comparative assessment of the market governance of activation focused on four questions:
1. The influence of the commissioning model on the service delivery models of contracted PES and case management approaches of their staff?
2. Whether different governance frameworks result in qualitatively different activation services?
3. The extent to which the Irish experience of PES marketisation has converged with that of other liberal welfare states?
4. How jobseekers experience the ‘market governance’ of activation?
The project advanced understanding of the intersection between the policy turn towards activation and the governance turn towards marketisation, with GAII finding several differences between how activation is enacted between the marketised and non-marketised components of Ireland’s mixed-economy. Frontline delivery under JobPath was characterised by a significantly stronger emphasis on job-search monitoring, ‘work first’ rather than training, and reporting jobseekers for non-compliance. Conversely, LES staff placed a greater emphasis on supporting clients into education or work experience with less evidence that they monitored job-search instensity or used sanctions. While GAII finds PES in Ireland are less workfarist than other liberal regimes, marketisation precipitated a decided turn towards a more demanding, workfare model in practice. It also brought substantive changes in the PES workforce including the de-skilling and tighter performance management of frontline staff, which reshaped their uses of discretion.
GAII is the first study of PES in Ireland from a street-level bureaucracy perspective. SLB research focuses on the role of service providers as political actors who shape what benefits and programmes citizens receive. Importantly, frontline workers don’t just implement policies that are already fully formed. They reshape them through how they use their discretion to apply policy guidelines to each individual case. Governance reforms (marketisation) have significant consequences for who holds discretion in policy delivery and the conditions under which it is exercised, making SLB research especially fruitful for studying how governance reforms change policy on the ground.
Four waves of research were undertaken:
1. Qualitative interviews with key policy stakeholders on the drivers and challenges of marketisation
2. Survey research with frontline staff delivering PES services under different governance conditions
3. In depth interviews with frontline JobPath and LES staff
4. In-depth interviews with service users about their experiences of employment services
The survey instrument has also previously been used to study the relationship between marketisation and frontline PES delivery in other countires; enabling GAII to evaluate not only differences in frontline delivery internal to Ireland's ‘mixed economy’ but also to compare the Irish experience of marketisation with that of other liberal states.
Empirical findings and conceptual work on the nexus between workfare and marketisation are disseminated via:
9 peer reviewed articles
2 guested edited journal issues
5 hosted conferences/workshops
10 presentations at external conferences/seminars
6 online blogs and interviews
Forthcoming book, 'The marketisation of welfare-to-work in Ireland'
Four waves of research were undertaken:
1. Qualitative interviews with key policy stakeholders on the drivers and challenges of marketisation
2. Survey research with frontline staff delivering PES services under different governance conditions
3. In depth interviews with frontline JobPath and LES staff
4. In-depth interviews with service users about their experiences of employment services
The survey instrument has also previously been used to study the relationship between marketisation and frontline PES delivery in other countires; enabling GAII to evaluate not only differences in frontline delivery internal to Ireland's ‘mixed economy’ but also to compare the Irish experience of marketisation with that of other liberal states.
Empirical findings and conceptual work on the nexus between workfare and marketisation are disseminated via:
9 peer reviewed articles
2 guested edited journal issues
5 hosted conferences/workshops
10 presentations at external conferences/seminars
6 online blogs and interviews
Forthcoming book, 'The marketisation of welfare-to-work in Ireland'
GAII pioneered SLB research in Ireland, bringing new analystical tools to the analysis of welfare reform. Analytically, it has advanced understanding of ‘double activation’ as a key lens for integrating two welfare reform tracks: the social policy turn towards activation, and the admminstrative governance towards marketisation. Empirically the project has broken new ground, collecting data on the frontline delivery of PES in Ireland for the first time. The survey dataset is available, open access, for future reuse; providing benchmark data that can be harnessed going forward to examine how future reforms may further reshape frontline PES delivery in Ireland. The project empirically focuses on Ireland but its findings have wider international significance. PES delivery remains an ongoing area of public sector reform in many countries, with a deepening trend towards performance-based contracting. GAII’s comparative study of Ireland’s mixed economy of activation shows that marketisation is associated with a significant deskilling and de-collectivisation of frontline staff, who in turn come to face increased supervisory oversight and tighter performance management. Frontline workers’ understandings of welfare in terms of their perceptions of claimants motivation to work are also reshaped by marketisation.
GAII also shows that marketisation is associated with an increased disposition towards apply sanctions and enacting a ‘work-first’ approach, where the locus of support shifts from building employability through upskilling, work experience and training towards a tighter focus on job search monitoring and generic job-search training on writing CVs and preparing applications for low-skill, minimum wage jobs rather than matching jobseekers to jobs that fit their preferences and skills. Importantly, GAII shows that the effects of marketisation on reorientating PES in a workfarist direction are interlinked with how marketisation remodels the professional identities and beliefs of frontline workers and the performance management regimes they work under. By reconfiguring who implements activation, and under what performance conditions, marketisaton changes what activation policies are produced.
GAII also shows that marketisation is associated with an increased disposition towards apply sanctions and enacting a ‘work-first’ approach, where the locus of support shifts from building employability through upskilling, work experience and training towards a tighter focus on job search monitoring and generic job-search training on writing CVs and preparing applications for low-skill, minimum wage jobs rather than matching jobseekers to jobs that fit their preferences and skills. Importantly, GAII shows that the effects of marketisation on reorientating PES in a workfarist direction are interlinked with how marketisation remodels the professional identities and beliefs of frontline workers and the performance management regimes they work under. By reconfiguring who implements activation, and under what performance conditions, marketisaton changes what activation policies are produced.