Remodeling Street-Level Workers With Quasi-Markets: Comparing Ireland’s Mixed Economy of Welfare-to-Work

Date01 May 2022
DOI10.1177/00953997211050924
Published date01 May 2022
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211050924
Administration & Society
2022, Vol. 54(5) 939 –970
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211050924
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Article
Remodeling Street-Level
Workers With Quasi-
Markets: Comparing
Ireland’s Mixed Economy
of Welfare-to-Work
Michael McGann1
Abstract
Quasi-markets in employment services often follow social policy turns
toward activation. Critics see this as no accident, arguing that marketization
is intended to raise the odds that workfare policies will be implemented.
Drawing on surveys of Irish frontline activation workers, this study harnesses
a natural policy experiment whereby Ireland introduced a Payment-by-
Results quasi-market alongside a parallel program contracted without
outcomes-based contracting. Although the demandingness of activation
remains modest in Ireland, the study finds that regulatory approaches are
more common under market governance conditions, which in turn has
been associated with significant workforce changes and stronger systems of
performance monitoring.
Keywords
payment-by-results, marketization, quasi-markets, activation, welfare-to-
work, Ireland
1Maynooth University, Ireland
Corresponding Author:
Michael McGann, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow, Department of Sociology and MU Social
Sciences Institute, National University of Ireland Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co.
Kildare, Ireland.
Email: michael.mcgann@mu.ie
1050924AAS0010.1177/00953997211050924Administration & SocietyMcGann
research-article2021
940 Administration & Society 54(5)
Introduction
Recent decades have seen an unfolding trend across welfare states toward
reconfiguring social security systems into vehicles for motivating employ-
ment. Summarizing decades of reform, Patrick (2017) argues that welfare has
become “mobilised as a tool of governance” for reconfiguring citizens into
“active” labor market participants (p. 293). This reform trend has accelerated
since the financial crisis, proceeding along two tracks. The first is the so-
called “activation turn” (Bonoli, 2010, p. 435) in social policy, an umbrella
term describing the reconfiguration of labor market policies toward “supply-
side employability interventions” (Whitworth & Carter, 2020, p. 845) focused
on rapidly moving claimants into work. Within the vast literature on activa-
tion, a distinction is often drawn between enabling measures such as training
and work experience programs designed to build skills and subsidies to sup-
port recruitment of the long-term unemployed, and demanding measures that
try to stimulate employment through regulatory means such as tighter eligi-
bility criteria for payments, benefit reductions, and sanctions for noncompli-
ance with work-related conditionality requirements (Dingeldey, 2007).
Whitworth and Carter (2020) argue that this demanding approach, also
termed “workfare” or “welfare-to-work” (Bonoli, 2010; Dingeldey, 2007),
has “become the standard welfare orthodoxy at the heart of international wel-
fare systems,” motivated by governments’ pursuit of austerity and “desire to
responsibilise individuals for their own welfare provision” (p. 845).
The second reform track that has gathered pace is the parallel “gover-
nance” (Bredgaard & Larsen, 2007) reforms in operational services that have
unfolded alongside these activation dynamics. Of particular significance is
the growth of “quasi-markets” in employment services which, Jantz et al.
(2018) argue, have become a “striking feature” of welfare reforms across
Europe (p. 322). Employability services that were once directly provided by
state agencies are increasingly contracted from agencies competing in tender-
ing processes to win clients and government contracts. The contracts, in turn,
are often (though not always) performance-based in that providers are paid
for the outcomes they generate rather than the services rendered. This com-
petitive procurement of public employment services (PES) is underpinned by
a New Public Management (NPM) orientation toward exposing public sector
provision to market competition to stimulate innovation, enhance flexibility,
and reduce costs. While NPM incorporates a range of related governance
orientations, including corporate “goal driven” approaches based on steering
agents through targets and performance monitoring, recent years have seen
an intensification of “market governance” modes based on using “competi-
tion or results-based payments to motivate actors” (Considine et al., 2015, p.
McGann 941
23). However, these governance variants are often “hybridised” (Jantz et al.,
2018, p. 324) in practice. Considine et al. (2015) observe how the conceptu-
ally distinct corporate and market governance modes are increasingly blended
in practice such that they associate NPM with a hybrid “corporate-market”
governance model (pp. 133–135). For instance, agencies that are contracted
through Payment-by-Results may use corporate governance instruments such
as performance monitoring to motivate employees to deliver payable out-
comes for the organization. Accordingly, quasi-market reforms are argued to
constitute processes of “double” (Considine et al., 2015, p. 30; McGann,
2021b), or even “triple” (van Berkel, 2013) activation that go beyond target-
ing the behaviors of claimants to using economic and other performance
incentives to motivate those agents responsible for implementing welfare-to-
work with jobseekers.
Ireland is among the latest countries to turn toward both activation and
PES marketization. Since 2011, benefits have been cut and obligations intro-
duced for claimants to job-search and participate in activation. Meanwhile, in
2015, a new JobPath employment service for the long-term unemployed was
commissioned through competitive procurement and performance-based
contracting. A key question for those who study the frontline delivery of acti-
vation concerns the intersection between these two reform tracks: whether
formal social policy turns toward workfare are intensified by market gover-
nance implementation reforms. This stems from the long-standing recogni-
tion within street-level bureaucracy (SLB) research that policy rarely arrives
“fully formed” but takes shape through how it is enacted by multiple actors at
the ground level (Newman, 2007, p. 365). The field of SLB addresses the key
role played by case managers and other administrative officials as not only
program implementers but also policy producers who continue the process of
policymaking as services are delivered. This was among the key insights of
Lipsky’s path-breaking study on the dilemmas facing public service workers.
Bureaucratic elites and political officials may determine major dimensions of
welfare policies such as eligibility rules and payment levels, but lower-level
workers still hold considerable discretion in determining the nature of ser-
vices and perhaps, more importantly, the use of any sanctions required by
their agencies (Lipsky, 2010, p. 13). Because governance modes change the
conditions under which, and by whom, formal policies are determined at this
micro level, they have important consequences for what shape policies even-
tually take. While “new ways of public management” (van Berkel & van Der
Aa, 2005, p. 331) may be introduced under the pretext of administrative effi-
ciency, they can also be “form[s] of policy politics” (Brodkin, 2011, p. i273)
that bring about “far-reaching” (Bredgaard & Larsen, 2007, p. 288) changes
of policy substance.

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