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Trapped into Reverse Asymmetry: Public Employment Services Dealing with Employers
- DARIO RASPANTI, TATIANA SARUIS
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- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 51 / Issue 1 / January 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 January 2021, pp. 173-190
- Print publication:
- January 2022
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Although often neglected, the availability of employment opportunities is central to the effectiveness of active labour market policies. Employers play a crucial role in this policy field as they are both clients and co-producers of public employment services (PES). This study focuses on that relationship and reports qualitative research conducted in Tuscany (central Italy) from a street-level perspective. The findings show how public job-brokers manage this asymmetrical relationship and develop specific strategies to obtain employers’ cooperation and accomplish the PES mandate. The strategies identified here involve language adaptation, curricula “creaming”, and control of the bureaucratic procedure. These are shaped through a variable mix of four components that will be defined as relational, perceptive, technical, and tactical. This study contributes to the debate on activation policies, analysing in detail how PES frontline workers interact with employers, dealing with market logic in the public encounter.
9 - Consolidating Social Innovation
- Edited by Stijn Oosterlynck, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium, Andreas Novy, Yuri Kazepov
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- Book:
- Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2019, pp 189-216
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter addresses the consolidation processes of socially innovative initiatives and projects, in particular how they are able to stabilise their activities over time. It analyses the relation between the innovative initiatives in the 31 ImPRovE case studies and their welfare contexts. In particular, the chapter aims at understanding which are the conditions favouring or constraining their (at least potential) survival and/or development, considering their integration into mainstream policies as one of the options. It also attempts to identify the influence these initiatives exert on the wider policies to fight poverty and social exclusion.
One of our key assumptions relies on the truism that social innovation is a relational process, which is contextually embedded, and which – at the same time – challenges its own context. It emerges as a reaction to the inability of consolidated policies in meeting emerging or existing needs and its potential growth or consolidation may depend (also) on the governance systems’ capacity to identify, accept and share new ideas (Oosterlynck et al, 2013a).
Even though social innovation may emerge as an isolated initiative, it bears the potential for challenging conventional policy balances, existing stakeholders’ relations and distribution of power and resources. For this reason, it may create conflicts and contestations. It might also challenge the multilevel institutional arrangements with the aim of expanding and influencing broader contexts.
The consolidation of social innovation goes through dynamic processes of (up)scaling diffusion and institutionalisation. These processes could exclude each other, proceed in parallel or combine to become different stages of a complex pattern of change. These stages have already been partially analysed in Chapter 4, in relation to the link between social innovation and the welfare mix and in Chapter 5, in relation to the multiple scales through which innovation takes place. In this chapter, we will focus mainly on the relation and interaction of social innovation with the respective institutional contexts from the perspective of the consolidation of socially innovative initiatives. In particular, we will analyse the conditions at the very basis of this process of the 31 ImPRovE case studies, trying to identify the main dimensions influencing it.
5 - The Multi-Scalar Puzzle of Social Innovation
- Edited by Stijn Oosterlynck, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium, Andreas Novy, Yuri Kazepov
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- Book:
- Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2019, pp 91-112
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Summary
Introduction
Social innovation has been understood predominantly as a local phenomenon by most of the scholars investigating it. The emphasis on the local as the locus of social innovation and on bottom-up dynamics as the modus of social innovation, however, entails manifold risks for both social research and action. Our research question is whether the assumption that all social needs are better met at the local level is overstated, as is the potential of local agency in addressing structural global processes of social exclusion. The same question can be posed about the assumption that other (higher) spatial, institutional and political levels are hostile to social innovation (Oosterlynck et al, 2013a). In other words, we wonder whether considering social innovation a local phenomenon entails the risk of falling into ‘the local trap’: for example the a priori assumption that the local scale is preferable to larger scales (Purcell and Brown, 2005). Escaping the local trap entails challenging the assumption that social innovation is a solely bottom-up practice, embracing a more comprehensive and relational approach on how it actually moves between and across scales, depending on the strategies it adopts and on the institutional scalar arrangements framing its development. This does not mean that the local does not play a relevant and special role. Many initiatives are indeed ‘bottom linked’ and the ‘local’ is the level where all other levels conflate. The same cannot be said about the supra-local dimensions, which might play an irrelevant role in socially innovative initiatives.
Our endeavour at addressing social innovation through the lens of multi-scalarity is organised as follows. The next section introduces the concept of scale in relation to social innovation, and provides a description of the rescaling processes involving social policies in Europe and their implications for social innovation. Section three presents the empirical findings emerging from the analysis of the case studies of the ImPRovE project. Here we identify which scales are mainly involved in social innovation and how opportunities and hindrances are distributed among those scales.
3 - On Elephants, Butterflies and Lions: Social Protection, Innovation and Investment
- Edited by Stijn Oosterlynck, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium, Andreas Novy, Yuri Kazepov
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- Book:
- Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2019, pp 43-62
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Summary
Introduction
In the last 40 years, the post-war European welfare systems have changed profoundly. As shown in Chapter 2, the rise of social innovation as a paradigm for social intervention is part of this ongoing restructuring process and reflects the different views of diverse actors over social policy reforms. In Chapter 2 the (recent) historical development of social innovation discourses and practices was analysed in detail, showing how the predominant meaning of social innovation shifted from bottom-up collective action to being the outcome of a more complex multilevel governance process. This chapter aims to analyse how social innovation relates to other, more institutionalised paradigms of social intervention, namely social protection and social investment. Of course, this distinction is made here primarily for analytical purposes, as actually existing welfare systems combine aspects from each of these three paradigms.
In order to do so, the chapter is divided into four sections. After this introduction, the second section presents the three paradigms, analysing their main characteristics, the conditions within which they have developed, the institutions involved and their aims and functions. It describes the paradigms through a metaphor using animals and their characteristics in order to exemplify the specificities of the three paradigms: elephants, representing the social protection paradigm as awkward, but solid and based on reciprocity and solidarity in the herd; butterflies, representing the social innovation paradigm as flexible and creative, but fragile and unstable; lions, representing the social investment paradigm as assertive, active and competing in order to preserve their own status in a political-economic context increasingly dominated by the market logic.
The third section aims at analysing the relations among the three paradigms as an example of how welfare policies targeted to poverty and social exclusion have changed over time. It will do so through the analysis of the 31 case studies (see appendix), exploring their varying and complex articulations within different policy domains and different welfare regimes and disentangling the potential tensions that emerged in the ongoing processes of social policy restructuring.
The concluding section provides some reflections on the three paradigms’ prospects by gaining an understanding of how their different combinations impact on their capacity to reduce poverty and social exclusion. What are the contextual conditions that allow them to strengthen one another instead of mutually weakening each other?