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Fifteen - Fulfilling the promise of professionalism in street-level practice
- Edited by Peter Hupe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Michael Hill, Aurélien Buffat, Université de Lausanne
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- Book:
- Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 08 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 263-278
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Summary
Introduction
As was argued in Chapter One, street-level bureaucrats work in roles with bureaucratic and professional characteristics. In an era of complex social problems, professionalism may be seen by street-level bureaucrats, policymakers and public managers as a foundation for delivering public policy that looks more promising than bureaucratic control, which may therefore result in reconsidering the mix of professional and bureaucratic work characteristics. Professionalism as an occupational value (Evetts, 2009) favours street-level decisions based on the acknowledged occupational standards, craftsmanship and ethics of workers (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001). Enactment of professionalism requires ‘discretion-as-granted’ for workers to be able to make their own judgements, as well as sufficient trust in their capacities to do so (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Hasenfeld, 1999; Freidson, 2001). Professionalism holds the promise of dealing effectively with wicked social problems and offering tailor-made public services. As was discussed in Chapter One, professionalism may offer a suitable reference for the horizontal, intercollegial accountability of street-level bureaucrats’ behaviour, in addition to or as a replacement for traditional vertical modes of accountability.
Surprisingly, this potential promise of professionalism for public policy production has received modest attention among street-level bureaucracy researchers, on the one hand, and researchers of professionals, on the other (Evans, 2010). Lipsky (2010), of course, did observe that most street-level bureaucrats consider themselves to be professionals. However, he did not elaborate on how professionalism actually affects street-level decision-making. The sociology of professions has produced a large body of literature on contemporary professionalism in various fields (Evetts, 2003; Noordegraaf, 2011). However, in so far as these studies look at public professionals, they mainly focus on their professional roles in changing contexts, and less on their bureaucratic roles and impact on public policy production.
This relative lack of attention can be considered to be somewhat problematic as, for various reasons, the fulfilment of the promise of professionalism by street-level bureaucrats is far from self-evident. First of all, many street-level bureaucrats can be considered to be organisational professionals (Evetts, 2009), working in public agencies responsible for delivering public policies. Therefore, workers have to deal with standards for doing their work that originate in various sources: public policy, their organisation and their occupation.
New Welfare, New Policies: Towards Preventive Worker-Directed Active Labour-Market Policies
- Rik van Berkel, Paul van der Aa
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- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 44 / Issue 3 / July 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 April 2015, pp. 425-442
- Print publication:
- July 2015
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Debates about the new welfare, and the new social policies that go (or should go) with it, share an emphasis on risk-prevention strategies and pluralistic risk management. Focusing specifically on the risk of unemployment, this article discusses the case for so-called preventive worker-directed active labour market policies as part of the new welfare architecture. These policies are aimed at preventing unemployment and promoting labour-market transitions and employability. They involve responsibilities on the part of the state, social partners and employers. First, the case for these policies is elaborated by analysing the social investment, flexicurity and transitional labour-market literature. In this context, several issues related to the feasibility of the pluralistic management of preventing unemployment, as well as the possible impact of pluralistic risk management on dualisation, are discussed. Secondly, recent policy initiatives in the Netherlands are presented as an illustration of the incremental emergence of preventive worker-directed active labour-market policies. It is argued that although these policy initiatives were initially introduced as responses to the crisis, they may eventually turn out to reflect a more fundamental reorientation in managing and dealing with the risks of unemployment. The conclusion critically reflects and argues that pluralistic risk management may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the insecurities of flexible and non-standard workers.
12 - Control of Front-Line Workers in Welfare Agencies: Towards Professionalism?
- Edited by Mirko Noordegraaf, Bram Steijn
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- Book:
- Professionals under Pressure
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 09 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 25 February 2013, pp 193-210
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Summary
Local welfare agencies and their workers
Over the past decades, developed welfare states have gone through major reform processes. In the field of employment benefits, one of the main objectives of these reforms was to ‘activate’ social security arrangements for unemployed people who are able to work and, thus, to promote labour- market participation and reduce welfare dependency (Gilbert 2002). These reforms affected substantive and operational characteristics of welfare states (Borghi & Van Berkel 2007). Not only the entitlements and obligations of unemployed people have changed, but also the ways in which social security arrangements are administered and social services are provided. Many countries introduced forms of marketization in the provision of activation services, changed traditional ways of balancing central regulation and decentralized room for policy-making and policy implementation decisions, established so-called ‘one-stop agencies’ for the unemployed, and started to make use of New Public Management strategies in managing benefit and public employment services agencies (Kazepov 2010; Van Berkel 2010; Van Berkel et al. 2011).
For benefit and local welfare agencies these reforms have had important consequences: it changed their ‘core business’ from administering income protection schemes to activation, even though their traditional tasks did not disappear (Van Berkel et al. 2011). The exact nature of these consequences strongly depends on national contexts. The urgency to transform organizations, services and tasks of front-line work in countries with a long tradition in providing employment services to unemployed people, such as the Scandinavian tradition of active labour-market policies (Hvinden & Johansson 2007), will differ from the urgency experienced in countries without such a tradition. Countries where the administration of social insurance and the provision of employment services used to be integrated will experience other problems with coordinating social security and labour-market policy than countries where these tasks were carried out by different agencies. But despite path-dependent reform trajectories and urgencies in individual coun tries, the transformation of passive into active welfare states affects the core business of benefit and local welfare agencies in all developed welfare states.
From the perspective of organizational and public management studies, the transformation of welfare states and their impact on the tasks and responsibilities of public agencies and their front-line workers raise some interesting issues.
Activation Work: Policy Programme Administration or Professional Service Provision?
- RIK VAN BERKEL, PAUL VAN DER AA
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- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 41 / Issue 3 / July 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 22 March 2012, pp. 493-510
- Print publication:
- July 2012
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This article focuses on the design of frontline work in public agencies involved in the delivery of activation programmes and services. More specifically, it raises the following questions: should we think of activation work as an administrative function or as a form of professional service provision? And does the design of activation work matter in terms of the effectiveness of activation services? In answering these questions, the article provides a meta-analysis of two strands of literature. First, we analyse the available literature reporting on studies of activation frontline work and its organisation and management in public agencies responsible for delivering activation programmes. Secondly, we look at those studies of the effectiveness of activation that focus on the impact of characteristics of frontline work and its organisation and management on activation policy outcomes. We conclude that although the desirability of a professional design of activation work meets relatively wide support among scholars, the feasibility of this professionalisation project is highly contested. In addition, the debate on the nature of the activation profession has only just started. Finally, evaluation studies show that activation work characteristics do affect the outcomes of activation programmes. Against this background, we conclude that a more prominent place of activation work on the research agenda of social policy scholars is recommendable.