Contracting–out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance

Contracting–out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance is an edited collection focused on the design and re–design of welfare–to–work systems around the world. The welfare state has undergone a radical change over the past 30 years. Nowhere have the changes been more fundamental, and the results more pronounced, than in relation to welfare–to–work, employment services privatization, and jobseeker activation. This book represents a new standard in the field of employment services scholarship; authors from around the world, all experts in the field, draw on a much longer intellectual legacy, in particular New Public Management; social policy; public policy; activation; the welfare state; the third sector; ‘flexsecurity’; mission drift; and quasi–markets. This book confirms employment services delivery as a discrete field of research, and uses employment services as a case study to advance understanding in relation to a host of broader principles and concepts.  Each of the papers included in this book utilises a national/program case study, and each considers employment services policy in general, and activation practices in particular; essays stand as unique and standalone contributions to the literature, and combined, present a significant contribution to scholarship, and practice, in this important field.

List of Contributors Introduction: Contracting–out Welfare Services – Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance Mark Considine and Siobhan O′Sullivan 1 Worlds of Marketization – Employment Policies in Germany, Italy and the UK Compared Katharina Zimmermann, Patrizia Aurich, Paolo R. Graziano and Vanesa Fuertes 2 Varieties of Market Competition in Public Employment Services – A Comparison of the Emergence and Evolution of the New System in Australia, the Netherlands and Belgium Ludo Struyven 3 Governance, Boards of Directors and the Impact of Contracting on Not–for–profit Organizations – An Australian Study Mark Considine, Siobhan O′Sullivan and Phuc Nguyen 4 Quasi–markets and the Delivery of Activation – A Frontline Perspective Rik van Berkel 5 Conditionality and the Financing of Employment Services – Implications for the Social Divisions of Work and Welfare Isabel Shutes and Rebecca Taylor 6 Support for All in the UK Work Programme? Differential Payments, Same Old Problem James Rees, Adam Whitworth and Elle Carter 7 Broken Hierarchies, Quasi–markets and Supported Networks – A Governance Experiment in the Second Tier of Germany′s Public Employment Service Matthias Knuth 8 The Public Accountability of Privatized Activation – The Case of Israel Avishai Benish Index  

Mark Considine is Professor of Political Science and Dean of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has a long–standing interest in employment services having studied the evolution of the Australian, UK and Dutch systems over many years. He has published widely in the field, including Enterprising States: The Public Management of Welfare–to–Work (2001) and Making Public Policy: Institutions, Actors, Strategies (2005). Siobhan O′Sullivan is a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where her research specialises in the delivery of employment services in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands. She is the author of Animals, Equality and Democracy (2011).