Informed by institutional theories of microfoundations, this study elucidates how employment service caseworkers negotiated the configuration of welfare conditionality based on age, thereby establishing a microfoundation for policies aimed at extending job-seeking lives. Through conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-four frontline social workers and a context-mechanism-outcome analysis, the findings uncover how service providers incorporated age-specific considerations and redefined the meanings of work in later life. While organisational adjustments extended the service goals and mobilised extra resources, structural constraints forced caseworkers to adopt pragmatic attitudes towards workfare measures. Consequently, a ‘more-than-employment’ approach to older jobseekers was formulated concerned with age, relationship, and health. This research contributes to social policy studies by theorising welfare conditionality as a product of negotiated configuration that crafts the microfoundation of activation policies. Empirically, this study enriches the literature by linking extending job-seeking lives and older claimants to welfare conditionality within Hong Kong’s work-first model.

Employer engagement is increasingly emphasised in the context of efforts to bring more disadvantaged people into work. A new approach in the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Service (NAV) combines demand-side and supply-side measures in a ‘combined workplace-oriented approach’. Through qualitative interviews with frontline staff – including job coaches following the Supported Employment (SE) method – the paper examines the intermediary role of the street-level organisation (SLO) through the targeted use of SE methods directed at young users and employers. The findings suggest that young users are ‘creamed by motivation’ into the SE programme, which can be explained by the importance the SLO places: on maintaining inter-organisational relationships with employers, on job coaches’ performance goals and the need to uphold an organisational structure in the SLO that seemingly works efficient to shift caseloads of young unemployed into work. Hence, creaming is not specific to outsourcing but can also occur when insourcing employer engagement services into a public SLO. Although relational work directed at both employers and young clients is seen as the benefit of a combined workplace-oriented approach, it appears a rather flimsy foundation for successful ALMPs unless supported by more structural demand-side measures.

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.