Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

An international group of scholars contribute organizational studies that shed new light on old debates about policies of workfare and activation. Peeling back the political rhetoric and technical policy jargon, these studies investigate what really goes on in the name of workfare and activation policies and what that means for the poor, unemployed, and marginalized populations subject to these policies. By adopting a street-level approach to welfare state research, Work and the Welfare State reveals the critical, yet largely hidden, role of governance and management reforms in the evolution of the global workfare project. It shows how these reforms have altered organizational arrangements and practices to emphasize workfare’s harsher regulatory features and undermine its potentially enabling ones.

As a major contribution to expanding the conceptualization of how organizations matter to policy and political transformation, this book will be of special interest to all public management and public policy scholars and students.

Evelyn Z. Brodkin is an associate professor at the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration. She is the author of The False Promise of Administrative Reform. Brodkin has held visiting professorships in Australia, Denmark, France, and Mexico; received the Herbert Kaufman Award from APSA; and was named a Fellow of the Open Society Institute.

Gregory Marston is a professor of social policy at the School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

Preface

Part I: Introduction1. Work and the Welfare State Evelyn Z. Brodkin2. Street-Level Organizations and the Welfare StateEvelyn Z. Brodkin

Part II: What's at Issue: Politics, Policies, and Jobs3. The American Welfare State: Two Narratives Michael Lipsky 4. The Policies of Workfare: At the Boundaries between Work and the Welfare State Evelyn Z. Brodkin and Flemming Larsen5. Double Jeopardy: The Misfit between Welfare-to-Work Requirements and Job Realities Susan Lambert and Julia Henly

Part III: Governance and Management: Workfare’s “Second Track” 6. Triple Activation: Introducing Welfare-to-Work into Dutch Social AssistanceRik van Berkel7. Active Labor Market Reform in Denmark: The Role of Governance in Policy Change Flemming Larsen8. Performance Management as a Disciplinary Regime: Street-Level Organizations in a Neoliberal Era of Poverty GovernanceJoe Soss, Sanford Schram, and Richard Fording

Part IV: Street-Level Organizations and the Practices of Workfare9. Commodification, Inclusion, or What? Workfare in Everyday Organizational LifeEvelyn Z. Brodkin 10. Race, Respect, and Red Tape: Inside the Black Box of Racially Representative Bureaucracies Celeste Watkins-Hayes 11. Good Intentions and Institutional Blindness: Migrant Populations and the Implementation of German Activation PolicyMartin Brussig and Matthias Knuth 12. Front-line Workers as Intermediaries: The Changing Landscape of Disability and Employment Services in AustraliaGregory Marston

Part V: Administrative Justice: Challenging Workfare Practices13. Challenging Workfare Practices: Conditionality, Sanctions, and the Weakness of Redress Mechanisms in the British “New Deal”Michael Adler14. Redress and Accountability in US Welfare AgenciesVicki Lens

Part VI: Conclusion 15. Work and the Welfare State Reconsidered: Street-Level Organizations and the Global Workfare ProjectEvelyn Z. Brodkin

References

Contributors