Public Service,Private Delivery: Service Workers and the Negotiation of Blurred Boundaries in a Neoliberal State

Abstract

Neoliberal restructuring blurs the state/market boundary in introducing the position of ‘private state workers’: employees of for-profit providers who deliver publicly funded, state-prescribed services. Despite their prevalence, these workers have received scant scholarly attention. Addressing this gap, this article studies Employment Goal Planners (EGPs) employed at private for-profit providers of activation services in Israel. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, it argues that far from detached ‘mercenaries’, private state workers are committed actors who advance a distinct vision of public service delivery suited to the neoliberal state. These workers navigate their liminal position along an ever-shifting state/market divide by intertwining contemporary market tropes onto outdated schemas of state work. While the literature commonly views the market as an imposition on public service workers, this study finds that the market can also serve as a resource for inspiring alternative public service ethics and work models.

Keywords

boundary work Israel neoliberalism outsourcing privatization public services restructuring service workers

Introduction

One dramatic aspect of neoliberal restructuration of the state since the 1980s is public service work’s transformation: the adoption of private management techniques, flexible employment and a wide-scale shift from a direct toward an indirect mode of public service delivery (Jessop, 1999; Rhodes, 1994). Ample sociological research over two decades shows the ways these trends have affected public service organizations and their workers’ employment conditions, professional practice and ethos. Studies have also described public service workers’ perspectives and collective reactions to these changes, including their strategies of opposition and adjustment, demonstrating public servants’ role in public service transformation (Currie and Croft, 2015; Gleeson and Knights, 2006; Kirton and Guillaume, 2019; McDonough, 2006; Thomas and Davies, 2005; van Bochove et al., 2018).

In contrast, limited research has been conducted on the recently created cadre of employees of non-state organizations contracted by the state to provide state-prescribed public services at an arm’s length distance from the state. The research on non-state service workers that does exist focuses on non-profits and partnerships, addressing a primary concern with employees’ precarious status and inferior conditions (Baines, 2004; Broadbent, 2014; Cunningham, 2016; Smith, 2012). Little attention is given to ‘private state workers’: state-authorized employees at for-profit market providers of state-prescribed services. Studying private state workers can provide a window into the workings of contemporary states, particularly in furthering understanding of how market-oriented restructuration affects the development of service delivery motivations and ethics beyond bureaucracy.

This article attempts to begin meeting this aim via an in-depth study of Israeli activation workers – Employment Goal Planners (EGPs) – as private state workers. Following dramatic retrenchment of the welfare state in 2003–2004, EGPs were introduced in 2005 as a new occupational group with the aim of advancing a shift from a de-commodifying welfare state to an active, re-commodifying one. Similar to activation workers elsewhere (including case-managers, advisers and coaches), EGPs were authorized by the Israeli state to activate unemployed, ‘passive’ jobseekers and to encourage responsible and self-sufficient citizenship. Activation workers generally work to accomplish this goal by targeting jobseekers’ behaviours and attitudes via individual counselling and enforcing discipline (Jordan, 2018; Newman, 2007; van Berkel and van der Aa, 2012).

In authorizing private actors to carry out state work beyond its formal boundaries, the state blurs the state/market boundary. As a result, private state workers practise their work in an ambiguous environment, straddled between bureaucratic appraisal and market norms. Attending to this institutional ambivalence, the article addresses two interrelated questions. As private employees of for-profit service providers, how do Israeli EGPs symbolically position and establish themselves as legitimate and competent state workers? What may EGPs’ efforts tell us about changing conceptions of public service work in the neoliberal state? In response to these questions, this article argues that EGPs navigate their liminal position by intertwining contemporary market tropes onto previously dominant schemas of state work to advance a distinct vision of public service delivery suited to the neoliberal state.

The article opens by presenting shifts in the state/market boundary and changing conceptions of state work in the context of a market-oriented restructuration of public services. The next section introduces the case study of private state workers providing activation services in Israel, offering context of their emergence. Following the methods section, the study’s main findings are presented, wherein private state workers articulate their commitments to policy goals and the clients they serve by weaving together market and public service tropes. The article next discusses the ways EGPs’ efforts at navigating their new occupation in an undefined space enable them to define a new mode of neoliberal service delivery. It concludes by identifying the study’s contributions and limitations.

Market-oriented reform of public services: Between shifting boundaries and boundary work

Since the 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism has led to a gradual, but far from consensual, transition from one state project, the Keynesian welfare state, toward another, namely, the Schumpeterian competition state (Jessop, 2002). Advocates of these competing state projects pursue conflicting goals; the former wishes to restrain the market and compensate for its adverse outcomes, while the latter seeks to reinvigorate the market and emulate it in developing New Public Management (NPM) reforms in the public sector (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Jessop, 1999, 2002; McDonough, 2006; Rhodes, 1994). This contestation generates both material and ideational effects, as various actors and groups advance competing claims on the nature of the state, its purpose and its desirable modes of action (Jessop, 2002: 41).

Market-oriented public service reforms, including the introduction of market actors and market logics (e.g. competition and seeking profits) to public projects, threatens public service workers’ employment arrangements and challenges their entrenched practices and ethos. This ethos includes devotion to public goals and to the state, a commitment to impartiality and universality, and an intrinsic, non-instrumental motivation toward improving the wellbeing of individuals and communities (e.g. McDonough, 2006; Rhodes, 1994).

In contrast, NPM reforms rest on the assumption that the public interest is best served by delegating all but core state functions to cost-effective private providers. This new regime requires public service workers to shift from ‘rowing to steering’ and take on new roles as facilitators and regulators of services provided by non-state organizations, rather than providing them directly. This new mode of public service delivery privileges economy, cost-efficiency and effectiveness, instituting a new ethos of professional management, performance measurement, consumer satisfaction and ‘getting value for money’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997; McDonough, 2006; Rhodes, 1994).

In using for-profit providers to deliver public services, contemporary states redraw the boundary between the public and private sectors. During such episodes of boundary work, state and non-state actors negotiate the appropriateness of revised boundaries (Mayrl and Quinn, 2016). Mayrl and Quinn’s (2016) theorization of the mechanisms of state boundary formation can be used to conceptualize the privatization or outsourcing of public services and the reactions these processes generate. Initially, ‘demarcation’ emphasizes certain differences between the state and private providers (creating administrative separation and hierarchic, principal-agent relations). Following demarcation, especially if boundary revision violates conventional views on what the state is and does, ‘politicization’ of the boundary including increased monitoring and ‘policing’ emerge. In this context, negotiation between state and non-state actors manifests via ‘matching games’. Actors evaluate the revised boundary in light of existing state schemas: entrenched cognitive structures that classify practices and discourses binarily as belonging either to state or market categories (Mayrl and Quinn, 2016: 9).

By encouraging and expanding the role of market actors and market-oriented action in the delivery of public services, states blur the state/market boundary, generating dissonance – particularly in regard to schemas of adequate ‘state work’. Historically, state work is characterized by rule-following, hierarchy, impartiality and democratic accountability, popularly viewed as indifferent, arbitrary, mechanical and inefficient. In contrast, market work is celebrated as generating prosperity, growth and innovation. As a work model, the market promises to remedy bureaucratic work’s failings by re-joining private and professional lives, thus allowing emotion, desire and zeal back into the workplace. The market is lauded as a morally superior work model, providing individuals the liberty to pursue authenticity and self-fulfilment and achieve efficacy at work (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999; Dardot and Laval, 2013).

In light of revised boundaries and changing conceptions of public service work, boundary work emerges as an important practice by which actors respond to challenges by creating or contesting institutionalized differences and categories to secure their status and resources (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 168; McDonald, 2009; van Bochove et al., 2018). However, while shifts in the state/market boundary involve interactions and symbolic efforts by both state and non-state actors, market actors’ perspectives and roles in these dynamics remain understudied. This article examines private state workers’ attempts to gain legitimacy as they engage in symbolic claim-making over state boundaries and associated conventions of state work. The next section presents Israeli EGPs and explains how this case can provide a window into the emerging market-oriented worldview of private state workers as key figures in the construction of the neoliberal state.

Case and research context

This research examines Israeli activation workers (EGPs), who offer a compelling case for studying the emerging occupational group of private state workers in the context of public service restructuration. Prevailing across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world, activation workers reflect recent decades of blurring state/market boundaries in service delivery (Grover, 2009; Newman, 2007). Moreover, the extra-bureaucratic status of activation workers intensifies due to their liminal position and role in-between the state and the market. On the one hand, EGPs must follow the state’s mandate to advance labour market reintegration and independence among under- or unemployed citizens. On the other hand, they must also steer clear of the very state bureaucracy that fortified dependency in the first place. Activation workers are thus positioned at arm’s length from the bureaucratic state, governed via arrangements common to the private sector (e.g. monetary incentives, untenured employment) and frequently employed by non-state organizations (Grover, 2009; Newman, 2007; van Berkel and van der Aa, 2012).

Israeli EGPs experienced an intensification of this tension due to the radical privatization of delivery in Israel’s first trial of activation between 2005 and 2010, in which public sector organizations were outright banned from contributing to activation’s implementation. Instead, private for-profit organizations, dominated by a business-oriented approach, were contracted by the state to set up and operate one-stop job centres and employ EGPs. The radical design of Israel’s first activation experiment drew substantial public and political critique, leading to its discontinuation in 2010. While activation soon returned in a ‘softer’ version, delivered this time by non-profit providers, this study focuses on activation’s initial stage, which carries lingering ramifications for activation policy and neoliberal service delivery.

Since the 1980s, the Israeli government has steadily expanded the outsourcing and marketization of welfare, education and health services, yet activation’s privatization is singular for two reasons. First, activation rested on a far-reaching delegation of state authority, including the authority to determine jobseekers’ eligibility for social assistance benefits (Benish, 2014; Maron, 2014). Second, following Israel’s most comprehensive welfare state retrenchment in 2003–2004, activation participated in a radical experiment aimed at changing the social contract between the state and the long-term unemployed. Israeli activation violated entrenched conventions of state work, inviting modulation, but also reflection among its new workers, spawning articulations of alterative models of public service work.

Activation’s radical privatization in Israel was no accident, emerging from intra-state struggles in the context of neoliberal restructuration. Increasingly frequent and long unemployment spells and rising social spending in the late 1990s propelled conflicts over policies addressing working age unemployment. Having always provided unconditional social assistance, Israel’s welfare state was charged by its critics as responsible for socializing tens of thousands of disadvantaged citizens into passive, incompetent and inactive welfare abusers. Based on an elaborate narrative of welfare state failure, state actors such as the Public Employment Service (PES) drew mounting criticism from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and other advocates of neoliberal policy. To introduce an activation policy that it could directly control, the MoF promoted extreme privatization, fully removing the resistant PES from the programme’s implementation. MoF officials believed that for-profits would make efficient and obedient providers, which they could easily govern via economic incentives (Maron and Helman, 2017).

Similar to the UK, Israeli activation follows an ‘economic springboard’ activation regime (Pascual, 2007: 301–302). Viewing jobseekers as passive and incompetent individuals, Israel’s ‘work-first’ policy attempts to change individual behaviour through conditionality and compulsion via personalized relations between activation workers and jobseekers. This type of activation creates an imbalanced social contract between the jobseeker and the state, as jobseekers face stringent demands unmatched by new commitments by the state. Such matching could take the form of new social rights, high-quality training, or job opportunities (Pascual, 2007: 299–300).

The Economic Policy Act (2004) defines EGPs as ‘employees of private corporations contracted by the state to operate job centres’. By law, EGPs are responsible for ‘advancing the integration of social assistance recipients for work that exhausts their earning potential (and meets their health and physical conditions), by sharing responsibility and enabling a transition from social assistance dependency to social and economic independence’. In practice, for each recipient, EGPs would create an individual participation programme that contained tasks such as meeting with the EGP, participating in soft skills workshops and conducting job searches. EGPs supervised recipients’ progress and determined eligibility for social assistance based on evaluations of compliance. If programme demands were unmet, EGPs were authorized to revoke benefit eligibility for up to two months.

The state gave private providers substantial discretion in selecting and training their EGPs, specifying only that EGPs have a complete high school matriculation certificate, one year of prior employment experience, no criminal record and a passing score on a qualification test to be repeated annually. Upon their hiring, EGPs’ professional preparation included a basic course of three to seven weeks long and on-the-job training. Their actual demographic profile reveals that, as a whole, EGPs’ qualifications surpassed the minimum. Some 70% held academic credentials (18% with master’s degrees or higher) and one-quarter had received academic education in the welfare state’s ‘caring’ professions (social work, education and psychology). EGPs with experience working with disadvantaged populations amounted to 63%, with nearly one half having previously worked for public service organizations. In addition, 70% were women, half were over 32 years of age and 18% were between the ages of 45 and 58 years (King et al., 2006). Their prior education and income (at 7% above the national average) placed EGPs in the middle class.

EGPs worked in job centres that provided services to a nationally mixed (Jews and Arabs), working age population of local social security claimants. This study was conducted in two (out of four) job centres with comparable sizes, clientele and labour market conditions. The first operated in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital and a nationally mixed city (with a population of 789,000 in 2010). The second operated in Hadera, a medium size northern city (with a population of 81,000 in 2010). This job centre provided services to the region’s mixed urban/rural population (367,000 in 2010).

Methods and data

The data presented here were attained through a comprehensive study of the governance and implementation of activation policy in Israel between 2009 and 2010. Formal permission to access job centres and conduct the study was obtained from the regulatory authority of activation. Although not required, the job centres’ managements also granted shop-level approval. The author presented himself as a sociologist conducting research on the role of activation workers in the transition from welfare to work. During interactions with informants, the author established an interested yet independent position, maintaining a safe distance from ongoing conflicts between EGPs, recipients and management (see below), and attempting to minimize his influence. This was vital for gaining EGPs’ trust.

First, the author conducted ethnographic observations in two job centres for the duration of 10 months, comprised of 64 research sessions of five to eight hours each. In each job centre, the author accompanied EGPs in their daily work, observing interactions with service recipients (recipients hereafter), colleagues, managers and regulators, held informal conversations, and asked spontaneous questions about mundane work issues. The first eight weeks of ethnographic work generated emerging themes, which together with theoretical questions informed the construction of interview questions. The author conducted semi-structured interviews in Hebrew (from 70 to 120 minutes in duration) with 25 EGPs, 14 administrative job centre personnel, as well as nine officials of the regulatory agency overseeing activation’s delivery. All interviewees spoke fluent Hebrew (n = 48). The author asked EGPs to reflect on their daily work and employment status, the public role of activation and their relations with recipients and regulators. For other interviewees, questions aimed to gauge their role in relation to EGPs, as well as their perspectives on activation, unemployment and the state’s role in both.

The analysis phase began with an evaluation of each empirical source separately: ethnographic field notes and transcribed interviews. Then, triangulation between methods and sources was conducted to provide depth, capture multiple perspectives and validate the findings. This was followed by formal content analysis of all collected data. A qualitative analysis software (ATLAS.ti) was used to identify and code recurring themes such as: EGPs’ role (compared with other jobs/professions), work practices, employment conditions, views of recipients, discretion, bureaucratization and ethos. Finally, super-codes were constructed, including: EGPs and the state, EGPs as public workers, trust, creativity and authenticity. The following section presents and discusses the findings in relation to these themes. Pseudonyms are used throughout.

Research findings

The study found that in pursuit of activation policy and legitimacy within the liminal and complex space of the oscillating state/market boundary, EGPs commonly engaged in discursive boundary work. Findings emerged in three main areas: (1) EGPs defended their position outside the public sector’s formal boundaries, as private employees implementing a radical state policy; (2) EGPs reframed work schemas associated with the welfare state’s ‘passive’ occupations, using flexibility and authenticity as market-oriented scripts to construct a new type of public service delivery work; and (3) EGPs creatively interwove tropes from both the public and private realms to justify their conduct of effective state work beyond bureaucratic supervision.

By the state, for the state, outside the state: Manoeuvring a blurred state/market boundary

EGPs’ discourse regarding the state’s privatization and their positioning as state workers external to the public sector featured contradictions. While EGPs complained about their undermined status and legitimacy as unprotected non-public workers, they also argued that their extra-state position was vital for accomplishing the state’s goals, as bureaucratic state work had failed to meet them.

In interviews, EGPs recognized their ambivalent position as useful to the state. A senior team leader who had previously co-managed his family’s business, Abraham (male, age 56) commented on his weaker position to the state’s advantage:

I can’t strike and stop the service. If I do, they’ll shut me down and sack me. [. . .] This is precisely the reason the state took on private companies that are compact, efficient, and must obey directives. [. . .] The state takes a private person and signs a contract. [. . .] That’s the advantage of using a private company for the state. For me it’s bad, but for the state it’s an advantage.

Most EGPs considered themselves as workers who served the public interest, yet also felt that as private company employees, their public stature was undermined. Detached from the public sector, EGPs did not receive the benefits and security associated with public servants, including tenure and union protection. It was therefore unsurprising that most of the EGPs interviewed for this study reported experiencing job insecurity. Employed via temporary individual contracts, they were easily replaceable.

Activation’s extreme privatization was publicly viewed as violating entrenched conventions of the state’s social responsibilities. In this context, EGPs’ liminal positioning as private state workers carried unintended political consequences. EGPs endured public condemnation for ‘robbing’ from poor populations the scant support they receive. Although EGPs served the state and delivered state-mandated services, the public did not regard them as legitimate providers of public services. As a result, EGPs encountered significant resistance and opposition on various fronts (Maron, 2014; Maron and Helman, 2017).

As street-level agents of activation, EGPs were responsible for coercing and sanctioning unemployed social assistance recipients, thereby triggering recipients’ grievances. In interviews, EGPs described these daily struggles as requiring highly demanding mental labour, leading to emotional stress and exhaustion. Moreover, EGPs reported numerous occasions of outright violence perpetuated on them by recipients. On one occasion, mass demonstrations were held outside a job centre resulting in damage to the building, with violent incidents occurring throughout the programme’s implementation. All interviewed EGPs reported verbal violence, with several reporting incidents of violent retribution occurring just outside the job centre.

Holding a vulnerable position outside the formal boundaries of the public sector, EGPs reported feeling unprotected and even neglected by the state. A veteran EGP and former high-school teacher who had been physically attacked by a recipient, Mustafa (male, age 57) shared his concern with much emotion:

No one in the world is as dishonoured as EGPs. We are not like public employees at the post office, the National Insurance Institute, the police or any public organization. They are secure; they have respect; someone protects them. No one can punch or curse them! At the national insurance offices or at the Ministry of Domestic Affairs, you see citizens wait quietly in line for their turn. Otherwise they’re thrown out! Here, it’s heaven! Recipients enjoy all the amenities, and what do we get in return?! Everyone attacks us, telling us we are bastards and liars!

[At other agencies], they have authority. We don’t. Here, recipients tell us you are a private company who is looking for profit, so **** off! Everyone attacks us: public committees, the regulating authority, the public, even our own management. Everyone can take out their aggression on us.

For EGPs, their precarious status was of prime concern. Nonetheless, many outright stated that they did not wish to become employees of the public bureaucracy. Some opposed tenure, contending it would undermine their motivation and productivity. Others argued that their extra-bureaucratic position was necessary to accomplish their goals. Abraham conveyed this dissonance:

The EGP should receive the stature of a public servant. It’s unthinkable that I’m unprotected and a thug can just come in, slap me and threaten me, because the state sends me to do state work. But I’m a private person! I don’t want more state authority. I have enough, but I want to enjoy the same protection as public servants. I’m an agent of the state. The work I conduct is prescribed by the state, but I mustn’t be a bureaucrat because then I’m in a ‘conflict of interest’. If I bluntly tell the jobseeker ‘my only purpose is to get you a job so the state can economize on your allowance money’, there is no way he will trust and follow me.

As a whole, EGPs perceived their positioning outside of the state bureaucracy as essential for their work. As private state workers, EGPs found innovative, cunning ways to reframe and personalize the state’s goals, enabling them to establish a new type of informal provider–recipient relation that ultimately served the state. Using non-state workers provided the state with an opportunity to spearhead radical change in its entrenched social contract with unemployed citizens, in an arena where official public servants have failed and where direct state responsibility can undermine its legitimacy. A veteran EGP who had once worked for a high-tech firm, Joseph (male, age 41) graphically expressed his awareness of the state’s ploy:

The state tells me: ‘Take the sword and cut off the head. I don’t have the guts, so you do it! I don’t want to get my hands dirty!’ You know, the state can simply abolish eligibility to all social benefits, but the political price the government will pay is too high. It’s easier to let us do it. It’s very simple. And you know what? It’s even legitimate. Someone has to do the dirty work.

Defining activation’s disciplinary and punitive goals, the state then used EGPs to enforce them at a safe distance (Maron, 2014). By establishing EGPs as external private workers, the state delegated authority and displaced responsibility in order to divert accusations associated with a radical neoliberal policy. EGPs responded to the state’s designed exclusion of them from the public sector with mixed emotions. They desired protection, employment security and esteem from the state, but at the same time wanted to avoid bureaucratic entanglement. This liminal positioning required EGPs to carefully negotiate the state/society boundary, to vacillate between being state ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.

The following section shows how EGPs further defended their extra-state position and explained its vitality. Lacking the formal relations conferred on the welfare state’s bureaucratic providers, EGPs reformulated provider–recipient relations to define an effective form of service delivery work.

‘We are certainly not social workers!’: Inscribing boundaries to establish new service delivery skills and ethics

EGPs’ work extended beyond helping recipients find and keep jobs. They pursued the broader aim of enabling recipients’ self-change from dependency to independency. In order to succeed, EGPs had to develop unique occupational skillsets and advance a new mode of service provisioning. EGPs developed their work orientation and practice in contrast to established roles and professions in the welfare state, most notably PES and National Insurance Institute (NII) bureaucrats and welfare bureau social workers.

Sylvia (female, age 38), who trained as a special education teacher and was formerly employed by a municipal welfare organization, explained EGPs’ unique work:

We know our recipients better than social workers and far better than Public Employment Service bureaucrats. We know everything about our recipients’ lives, intimate things they won’t reveal elsewhere. [. . .] Social workers focus on treatment and maintenance. We move the participant from where they are. This is the EGP’s skill: EGPs must change the recipient. [. . .] I think we established something new in this state . . . a different type of work compared to the Public Employment Service or the welfare bureaus.

EGPs attempted to gain footholds in recipients’ inner worlds, to uncover vital information, including feelings of shame, doubt and anxiety. Such intimate information helped EGPs diagnose individual barriers that may have been keeping recipients unemployed, but it also enabled surveillance. EGPs investigated and gained knowledge that held the possibility of prosecution for welfare fraud, yet they often abstained from reporting suspicions and instead leveraged this knowledge to pose ultimatums and enforce collaboration. Relations between EGPs and recipients were thus both intimate and intensive (Maron, 2014).

EGPs’ work extended beyond obtaining a better and richer knowledge of recipients than they believed public workers could achieve. All of the interviewed EGPs commented that establishing personal relations was paramount for guiding and supporting recipients’ individual self-change. A medical doctor by training, Ashraf (male, age 25) drew on a metaphor of a key and door to describe the value of intimate acquaintance:

You must get to know the recipients. For each person there is a specific key and if you manage to find the right key for that door you can get inside and change whatever you want. But if you don’t have the key, you can stand on the outside and shout, but you’ll achieve nothing. [. . .] If you find the path to his heart, you can talk to him as one person to another, on his level, and then he will truly listen to you. As long as he sees you as an outsider who doesn’t really care about him, a bureaucrat following orders, he will not fully cooperate with you.

To achieve their goals, EGPs suggested that they must be flexible, reformulate the provider–recipient relation as a personal relation, and refrain from replicating the paternalism, formalism and disinterestedness associated with bureaucratic service providers. EGPs worked to cultivate authentic commitment and care to form a new mode of communication, becoming trustworthy guides and effective activators. Khalil (male, age 30), who had recently completed a master’s degree in social work and had previously worked with at-risk populations, stressed that authentic and effective activation work must not be bound by bureaucratic guidelines and procedures:

The EGP is not a bureaucrat who implements a law. Anyone can work by the book: you open the book and follow the law, clause by clause. It’s not how we work. We bring a human value into the work. [. . .] Each recipient is unique and each path into the workplace differs. [. . .] Our job is to pull them out from where they are and lead them to a new place, and this guiding takes time and is different from one recipient to another.

Creating an informal atmosphere and drawing on their own personal life experiences played a key role in EGPs creating authentic interactions. Having formerly worked for a private human resources firm, Alice (female, age 39) explained how she made use of her life experience in her work:

[I tell my recipients,] ‘You have the power in you, and you need to find the strength to pull your power out. I’m here to help you do it. I know because I’ve been there myself.’ That’s the difference in our work: the social worker can’t help her and send the message: ‘You can! I believe in you!’ Social workers discuss problems and perceive the recipient as a miserable person. For me, no one is miserable.

In contrast to bureaucratic work requiring clear boundaries between work and private life, EGPs integrated personal experiences and insights in their work. In fact, job centre managers ranked high the ability to overcome challenging life situations (e.g. depression, illness, or death in the family) when selecting EGP candidates (interviews with senior job centre officials, job centres 1 and 2).

EGPs constructed their distinct work by emphasizing what differentiates them from ‘passive’ bureaucrats and ‘ineffective do-gooders’ of the welfare state. Toward meeting state-mandated goals, EGPs reformulated boundaries with jobseekers, making them informal and porous. However, having personal relations with recipients did not mean they were forgiving ones. An important aspect of EGPs’ work was the ability to practise ‘tough love’. In aiming to propel change and overcome passivism, EGPs could not be ‘soft’. Anna (female, age 40), a young team leader who had earned a degree in social work but never practised the profession, emphasized her ability to be assertive and enforce discipline as pertinent for her EGP work:

It’s important to clarify: this is not the Public Employment Service, where you did nothing for years. Those days are over. [. . .] Here, we only assist those who start working. [. . .] Often, we must be tough, very clear and strict with recipients. We are certainly not social workers! It’s wrong to go there. When working with a new participant, the minute I see he is abusing my empathy by not trying to progress, I’ll change and become tougher and stricter.

Previously an elementary school teacher, Julia (female, age 29) explained how ‘tough love’ and personalized commitment make perfect bedfellows:

I think social workers are too soft. They nurture recipients’ problems instead of attempting to solve them. [. . .] We also provide a service . . . but we must also be assertive, which is a little like police officers who also have authority. [. . .] From time to time we must penalize our recipients. [. . .] My job is a lot like being a teacher: It’s about setting boundaries. Although I loved my students, I wasn’t their friend! If I’m their friend, I’ll spoil them. I can’t set an example. I have to concede – ‘cut corners’ and then they learn nothing. [. . .] My job [as an EGP] is about setting boundaries and educating. The programme teaches [recipients] to report on time at 8:00 a.m., work with other people, learn to obey authority and complete tasks on time.

Social workers are sometimes derided as ‘do-gooders’. Instead, EGPs viewed them as ultimately doing bad by spoiling recipients, reproducing their difficulties and disadvantages, and failing to encourage self-change. This perspective connects to a more general critique of the welfare state’s scandalous long-term abandonment of long-term jobseekers, entrenching in them passivism and despair. By advancing a new service ethos and a commitment to recipients’ wellbeing, EGPs implemented a tough-love approach in coercing recipients to undertake change to improve their lives.

As a whole, EGPs regarded the passive workers of the welfare state as ineffective. Either they were detached or too soft. Their bureaucratic, inauthentic approach to service work prevented them from ‘getting through’, touching recipients’ lives, and genuinely activating them. In contrast, EGPs formulated an informal service approach and established authentic-like relations with recipients, while maintaining a vital ability to discipline and coerce recipients as part of an altered provider–recipient relation.

‘Keep us private and let us do our [public] work!’: EGPs respond to boundary policing by the state

In 2004, when private corporations began setting up job centres, the state created a new regulatory agency under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour (the agency, hereafter) to govern and review the implementation of activation services. Initially engaging in minimal intervention, the agency grew increasingly involved in EGPs’ daily work over time. Notably, its encroaching regulatory practice developed in an environment of public and political critique. Advocacy organizations objected to what they saw as a privatized, harsh and punitive neoliberal policy. A few politicians led a high-profile onslaught against the privatization of activation, establishing public committees to critically examine its implementation and outcomes (Maron, 2014; Maron and Helman, 2017). The agency responded to this critique with increased boundary policing aimed at upholding the state-over-provider hierarchy.

The agency’s regulatory practice envisioned private for-profit organizations as shirking their legal commitment to provide quality services at lower cost via ‘cream-skimming’ practices. A senior agency official emphasized the need to ‘put limits on privatization’, insisting on maintaining boundaries between state authority and responsibilities (declaring, ‘We are the state!’) and private providers’ interests and discretion (interview with senior official, the regulatory agency).

EGPs interpreted the agency’s intensive monitoring as reflecting a mistrust of their professional competency and commitment to recipients’ wellbeing and the goals of activation. EGPs quickly became preoccupied with their contested relations with the agency, which emerged as a major theme in the author’s front- and back-office observations, informal conversations and interviews. EGPs reacted to the state’s policing of the state/market boundary by underscoring their social and professional commitment to activation, using it to justify the state’s initial redrawing of its frontiers of trust and autonomy.

In response to new and intensive regulation, most EGPs reported feeling condemned by the same ministry that mandated its work. Julia summarized this position:

We like, belong to the state, so protect and support us! The feeling is that they are government and we are private, a private business, so we are not together with them. They inspect us and condemn us more than they help us.

All EGPs reported that the agency’s regulation, consisting of the frequent issuance of new guidelines and procedures, bureaucratized and standardized their flexible and authentic work and adversely affected their daily conduct. Frequently, EGPs saw their authority circumscribed and their decisions overruled (Maron, 2014). In return, EGPs revolted against the agency’s perception of them as uncommitted workers. Challenging the strict boundaries erected by its new regulatory practices, EGPs attempted to convince the agency that they too were committed to a public sector ethos. A seasoned EGP and a clinical psychologist by training, Isaac (male, age 42) challenged what he perceived as the derogation of private service delivery:

I can’t do what I think is right. [. . .] They don’t trust me! [For example,] they won’t let me accept the morning tardiness of a recipient who has a hard time leaving his son at the kindergarten. [. . .] That’s stupid. They trust me to find him a job, and entrust me with 200,000 NIS worth of social benefits per month, but they don’t trust my word when I say he has legitimate reasons to be late?! The agency doesn’t know it, but I know his son’s teacher. [. . .] I’m an effective EGP and there are many others like me. [. . .] The agency just doesn’t get it. This is what we do here!

Anna offered an explanation as to why the state did not trust EGPs:

You know, we are profession-less. Employment Goal Planner is not a profession. It’s not like a medical doctor. [. . .] We are underrated. Other professions like lawyers or accountants are not required to take an annual qualification test. [. . .] Even bureaucrats at the National Insurance Institute are not required to do that! [. . .] They need to give us more credit. Once you decide that we are part of the system and this is our role, trust us!

The annual qualification test – consisting of questions on state-issued guidelines and procedures – was required for EGPs’ continual employment. However, instead of evaluating what EGPs view as relevant knowledge, the state used the test to mandate that EGPs master bureaucratic directives.

Attempting to protect their discretion and secure their autonomy, EGPs proactively navigated external demands and regulations. In the context of NPM reforms, some professions may succeed in striking a balance between external demands and professional ethics, while others may experience an untenable clash and resist authority (Gleeson and Knights, 2006). Unlike established professionals, EGPs revolted against external public regulation, which they interpreted as demeaning acts of mistrust and undermining of their status as public service providers. Nora (female, age 32), a former police officer, based her plea for confidence on EGPs’ distinct skills attained as non-bureaucratic private state workers:

I feel mistrusted. [. . .] The agency doesn’t back me up. [. . .] You authorized us so give us credit that we are not liars and we’re not monsters. [. . .] We are coming with good intentions. [. . .] If you don’t trust the people you brought in for this programme then shut it down! Announce you only trust public workers and give it back to the Public Employment Service. [. . .] But if you hire private companies for the job, believe [their employees] are at least as good as public employees. [. . .] Give us space . . . to use our creativity. But the agency doesn’t think my creativity is important. [. . .] It’s a pity, because you brought in private people who want to work here, people with creative minds, something different from the administrative mindset. We can deliver! We can put jobseekers back to work. Just let us do our job.

Guided by the traditional perception of the public sector ethos (McDonough, 2006), state officials at the agency suspected that as employees of private companies, not socialized within the public service sector, EGPs followed impure motives by attempting to reduce costs and increase profits (interviews with senior agency officials). Its regulatory scrutiny of EGPs and their employers re-imposed the state/market boundary, situating EGPs as non-public workers and thereby illegitimate and untrustworthy.

On many occasions, EGPs followed their street-level sensibilities and acted contrarily to regulatory guidelines, which they perceived as bureaucratic dictums disconnected from day-to-day situations. Ronni (female, age 26), who had begun her work at the job centre in a secretarial position before becoming an EGP, explained why she would bend the rules:

There is a grey spectrum. [. . .] Anyone who tells you it’s either black or white is lying! No one works like this. It’s inhumane to work by the agency’s rules! [. . .] I’m not afraid if the agency’s review finds out how I work. [. . .] I’ll speak my mind in order to expose the problems, and I’m fine with it. If you believe you are right and you’re authentic, stand behind it and follow it through. Don’t chicken out! [. . .] All day we justify our actions to the agency, and with all due respect, they don’t see the recipients. They don’t know the population we’re facing. They make their stupid regulations from their ivory tower, but they don’t know the field.

EGPs responded to the agency’s discrediting of their work by actively following neoliberal tropes of authenticity, flexibility and innovation to establish their status as legitimate and competent workers of the state. Using their field wisdom and discretion, EGPs advanced an alternative public service ethos, criticized bureaucratic and hierarchic rule following, and called for a regulation-free workplace wherein the state must extend its trust to private workers, acknowledge their commitment, and respect their discretion.

Discussion and conclusions

The repositioning of the state/market boundary (redrawn through privatization and then highlighted via the ongoing regulation and policing of market providers), situated EGPs as service workers operating beyond the public sector’s formal boundaries. In reaction, EGPs used boundary work to establish their position as legitimate private state workers. EGPs engaged in a complex navigation and negotiation of the boundary, embracing their position as extra-bureaucratic workers while challenging state schemas attributing to them an inferior service ethos, inadequate motivations and a dampened commitment to public goals. Despite the efforts of critics, EGPs wished to maintain their extra-bureaucratic position, which they perceived as essential for executing the kind of work the state needed them to do but was unable to implement directly.

Actors apply ‘matching games’ to challenge state boundary revisions that do not comply with entrenched state schemas (schemas which reflect previous policies and the state–society relations they mould). In response, the state may attempt ‘repurposing’: appropriating the revised boundary by incorporating ‘existing institutions that already fit within a schema of “the state”’ (Mayrl and Quinn, 2016: 9). According to Mayrl and Quinn (2016), repurposing contributes to a path-dependent reproduction of state schemas. In contrast, this article argues that repurposing is a potentially transformative practice. By embedding new elements from schemas belonging to the other side of the boundary (the market), actors may attempt to convert the meaning of existing state schema. In attempting to gain recognition as legitimate and competent state workers, EGPs intertwined contemporary market tropes onto outdated schemas of state work to actualize a new mode of service delivery and articulate a revamped vision of the state. As such, EGPs were creative agents of neoliberalism who articulated a market-oriented ethos and goals in moulding a new mode of neoliberal state action.

EGPs modelled a new type of state worker in claiming a right to perform state work outside of the public sector and free from the state’s bureaucratic supervision. Their plea for autonomy and trust from the state was not based on public sector socialization nor professional training, but rather on their individual creativity and ability to deliver results with authenticity. In substantiating their legitimacy as public service providers, EGPs employed neoliberal scripts to mould a new mode of state work, distinguishing it from what they viewed as the reserved, artificial and inauthentic work of the welfare state’s passive professionals. They viewed formalized and standardized practices in working with jobseekers as more than ineffective; indeed, as counter-productive. EGPs established informal relations with jobseekers and cultivated personal commitment and ‘tough love’, arguing that flexible, unregulated service work was vital since each jobseeker was unique and multifaceted.

In contrast with their perception of the bureaucratic office’s strict separation between professional authority and private lives, EGPs used authenticity – including their personal experiences – to mediate and legitimize the state’s neoliberal goals. Akin to public servants’ distinctive ethos and motivations, EGPs also articulated a solid commitment to the policy goals they served, which they perceived as socially and politically invaluable. EGPs also reported having an intrinsic motivation toward bettering society and the lives of unemployed citizens. However, unlike their bureaucratic counterparts, EGPs’ version of public service motivation was framed by an economized vision of society, wherein a self-sufficient citizenry replaces society’s collective institutions and responsibilities.

EGPs drew upon market ideals to propel self-change among ‘passive’ jobseekers, encouraging them to take up a new lifestyle (become innovative, self-sufficient and entrepreneurial), and approach obstacles with positive ‘can-do’ attitudes (proactivity, resiliency and responsibility). For EGPs, the good neoliberal society is an active society in which responsible, proactive individuals support a growing economy by unburdening the state from excesses in social spending and by serving the market with flexible labour. EGPs expressed neoliberal values for reformulating notions of public commitment and social responsibility, demonstrating that the public service ethos ‘is not a reified concept, but one that changes in the light of ongoing struggles’ (McDonough, 2006: 642).

Previous scholarship on public service work in neoliberalism focuses on the ways market-oriented NPM principles encroach upon the public sector, carrying implications for service workers and professionals. Market principles may erode the public sector ethos, generate a new set of state commitments (to fiscal prudence, managerial accountability and performance standards) (Rhodes, 1994), trigger opposition (McDonough, 2006), or lead to a synthesis of public and private ethics (Hebson et al., 2003; McDonald, 2009). Studies convincingly show how occupational groups in the public sector use their agency to mediate market principles without relinquishing their professional identities and ethics (Gleeson and Knights, 2006; Hebson et al., 2003; McDonald, 2009; Thomas and Davies, 2005). This study contributes to this literature by showing how the market may also serve as a resource for emerging groups with occupational and political motivations, who may draw upon it to envision new work models and build esteem in a changing public sector.

This study is not without limitations. Israel’s radical privatization of activation was as an extreme case, generating circumstances that may have encouraged private state workers to be more proactive in the face of disapproval than in other settings. It remains uncertain if the experience of activation workers is indicative of private state workers delivering services in policy domains where porous state/market boundaries are the norm (Mayrl and Quinn, 2016: 16). This study’s findings seem most relevant for understanding private state workers who are required to innovatively modify or provide an alternative to an existing state role or function. Findings may also illuminate the experiences of private state workers who assume roles from the state’s core responsibilities and carry statutory authority, such as in the realms of security, policing, border control and imprisonment. This possibility is one that remains for future research to explore.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Asaf Darr, Yuval Feinstein, Dana Zarhin and three anonymous reviewers of Work, Employment and Society for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant #115-2008.

ORCID iD

Asa Maron

Asa Maron is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, University of Haifa. A political and economic sociologist, his research focuses on the intersection of the welfare state and neoliberalism, exploring the role of state organizations, economists and international policy ideas in social politics and policymaking. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism as a State Project: Changing the Political Economy of Israel (Oxford University Press, 2017). His current research project applies a comparative perspective to study limits to the financialization of the state in the case of Social Impact Bonds.

References

Baines

(2004) Caring for nothing: work organization and unwaged labour in social services. Work, Employment and Society 18(2): 267–295.

Benish

(2014) The public accountability of privatized activation – the case of Israel. Social Policy & Administration 48(2): 262–277.

Boltanski

Chiapello

(1999) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Broadbent

(2014) ‘I’d rather work in a supermarket’: privatization of home care work in Japan. Work, Employment and Society 28(5): 702–717.

Clarke

Newman

(1997) The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare. London: SAGE.

Cunningham

(2016) Non-profits and the ‘hollowed out’ state: the transformation of working conditions through personalizing social care services during an era of austerity. Work, Employment and Society 30(4): 649–668.

Currie

Croft

(2015) Examining hybrid nurse managers as a case of identity transition in healthcare: developing a balanced research agenda. Work, Employment and Society 29(5): 855–865.

Dardot

Laval

(2013) The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso.

Economic Policy Act (2004) Labor Market Integration of Social Assistance Recipients, Ministry of Finance. Jerusalem: Knesset.

10.

Gleeson

Knights

(2006) Challenging dualism: public professionalism in ‘troubled’ times. Sociology 40(2): 277–295.

11.

Grover

(2009) Privatizing employment services in Britain. Critical Social Policy 29(3): 487–509.

12.

Hebson

Grimshaw

Marchington

(2003) PPPs and the changing public sector ethos: case-study evidence from the health and local authority sectors. Work, Employment and Society 17(3): 481–501.

13.

Jessop

(1999) The changing governance of welfare: recent trends in its primary functions, scale, and modes of coordination. Social Policy and Administration 33(4): 348–359.

14.

Jessop

(2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Malden, MA: Polity.

15.

Jordan

(2018) Evidence from the ‘frontline’? An ethnographic problematisation of welfare-to-work administrator opinions. Work, Employment and Society 32(1): 57–74.

16.

King

Neumann

Walda-Chadik

, et al. (2006) Evaluation of the Welfare to Work Policy – First Report. Jerusalem: Meyers-JDC-Brookdale and the National Insurance Institute.

17.

Kirton

Guillaume

(2019) When welfare professionals encounter restructuring and privatization: the inside story of the probation service of England and Wales. Work, Employment and Society 33(6): 929–947.

18.

Lamont

Molnár

(2002) The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28(1): 167–195.

19.

McDonald

(2009) Market reforms in English primary medical care: medicine, habitus and the public sphere. Sociology of Health & Illness 31(5): 659–672.

20.

McDonough

(2006) Habitus and the practice of public service. Work, Employment and Society 20(4): 629–647.

21.

Maron

(2014) Activation via intensive intimacies in the Israeli welfare-to-work program: applying a constructivist approach to the governance of institutions and individuals. Administration & Society 46(1): 87–111.

22.

Maron

Helman

(2017) Unravelling the politics of activation reforms: exploring the unusual Israeli trajectory. Social Policy & Administration 51(3): 405–423.

23.

Mayrl

Quinn

(2016) Defining the state from within: boundaries, schemas, and associational policymaking. Sociological Theory 34(1): 1–26.

24.

Newman

(2007) The ‘double dynamics’ of activation: institutions, citizens and the remaking of welfare governance. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 27(9–10): 364–375.

25.

Pascual

(2007) Activation regimes in Europe: a clustering exercise. In: Pascual

Magnusson

(eds) Reshaping Welfare States: Activation Regimes in Europe. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 275–316.

26.

Rhodes

RAW

(1994) The hollowing out of the state: the changing nature of the public service in Britain. The Political Quarterly 65(2): 138–151.

27.

Smith

(2012) ‘Monday will never be the same again’: the transformation of employment and work in a public–private partnership. Work, Employment and Society 26(1): 95–110.

28.

Thomas

Davies

(2005) Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: new public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies 26(5): 683–706.

29.

Van Berkel

van der Aa

(2012) Activation work: policy programme administration or professional service provision? Journal of Social Policy 41(3): 493–510.

30.

Van Bochove

Tonkens

Verplanke

, et al. (2018) Reconstructing the professional domain: boundary work of professionals and volunteers in the context of social service reform. Current Sociology 66(3): 392–411.