Abstract
Since the 1990s, the rich liberal democratic states of the OECD have embarked upon a suite of reforms to social security and employment policy and governance. The aim being to ‘activate’ various groups of unemployed and ‘economically inactive’ benefit claimants to intensify their engagement in job search and other work related activity (Lødemel and Moreira, 2014). In this text, McGann details how the post 2009 imposition of austerity in Ireland created the space for a radical institutional restructuring of Ireland's prior corporatist model of welfare governance and attendant ‘passive’ system of social protection. The following decade of path breaking policy change creating a workfare like system of activation for (unemployed) claimants and a market managerialist model in employment service governance. Whereas the former mandates participation in work related activity, backed by benefit sanctions to discipline claimants, the latter uses performance management and competitive market pressure to control the activity of (para) state employees. Situating Ireland in relation to the broader literature McGann explains how marketisation is a recurring feature of activation reforms, which various scholars have conceptualised as a process of ‘double activation’ (i.e., activation of claimants and Street Level Bureaucrats – SLBs).
The utility of this concept lies not in its use as a descriptive label for developments McGann argues, but rather in pointing to how these co-constitute the curtailment of claimant and employee autonomy as a necessary step to achieving an active welfare state. In short, SLBs discretion over policy implementation means a potential always exists to obstruct/ subvert government objectives. The adoption of radically new ‘workfare’ policy measures therefore implies a concomitant restructuring of the state labour commodification apparatus to better align SLB incentives with new policy preferences. Performance targets and monitoring providing a means for State Managers to tighten control over frontline delivery, while marketisation circumvents existing employees, introducing new actors, cultures and expectations. In remaking the terrain of welfare governance, we should expect claimant experience of activation to alter.
Drawing on the multi-method, Governing Activation in Ireland (GAII) study, this is what the book sets out to explore. What makes the examination of the Irish case particularly interesting for McGann (and other scholars of activation) is that from 2015 the Irish State operated two different models of governance for delivering services to activate long-term unemployed benefit claimants. Each with their own logics, preferred practices, priorities and understandings of the causes of unemployment. First, the Local Employment Service (LES), rooted in the Social Partnership model of governance of the 1990s and early 2000s, geared to supportive claimant engagement and guidance with funding provided on a non-competitive basis to meet service costs. Second, the JobPath (JP) programme, operating a market based system of governance involving competition for contracts and a Payment by Results system that rewarded providers for (rapidly) securing and sustaining (any) job outcome.
Through interviews and surveys of LES and JP claimants and SLBs McGann details how different forms of governance affected the behaviour of SLBs and the experiences of unemployed claimants. The contemporary process and practice of double activation being made all the clearer by this active comparison of the ‘old’ logics and practices (LES) with the ‘new’ (JP). The survey of SLBs for example draws out the differences in expectations, attitudes and reported behaviour between the LES and JP with respondent LES staff reporting considerably more reticence to refer claimants for benefit sanction than JP staff. Similarly, McGann recounts how a majority of respondent LES staff did not regard their role as encouraging claimants to take any low paid job that was available and placed greater emphasis on upskilling claimants, in contrast to respondent JP staff. Adding weight to this, claimants participating in JP indicated considerable pressure to take any job, as quickly as possible, irrespective of their stated preferences.
Given the recent contracting out of the LES along the lines of the JP programme we can surmise State Managers regard the effects of market managerialism (and by implication – workfare) a success in promoting labour discipline and commodification. Overall, this is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated account of welfare reform in Ireland that adds to our understanding of how and why market managerialist forms of welfare governance improve the state's capacity to enact punitive activation of benefit claimants and work against claimant–SLB solidarity. Well-written and tightly structured this book warrants a place on the reading list of anyone interested active labour market policy and governance.