Frontline Delivery of Welfare-to-Work Policies in Europe ─ Activating the Unemployed

Frontline, street-level delivery of welfare-to-work or activation policies refer to those programs and services that are aimed at promoting the employability, labor-market and social participation of benefit recipients of working age, usually by combining enforcing/obligatory and enabling/supportive measures. Frontline workers are conceived of as policy implementers, as policy makers, and as actors mediating politics in an arena where conflicting interests are at stake. Frontline work plays a crucial role in determining what welfare-to-work practically means and how they affect the lives of the people they target, yet few books have deliberatively focused on comparing what happens when professional social workers/welfare to work actors meet clients.

Pioneering the provision of scholarly reflections on both theoretical and policy relevance of studying frontline practices of delivering activation, internationally renowned researchers present the first systematic comparative analysis of how welfare-to-work/activation policies are actually delivered by frontline staff in selected EU countries and in the United States. In trying to understand and interpret frontline practices in welfare-to-work and activation, each contribution:

• Provides insights into what ‘welfare-to-work in practice’ looks like, what services are provided and how;
• Examines whether client selection takes place and if so, what clients are selected;
• Explains how monitoring of clients and sanctioning takes place; how clients are ‘motivated’ in activation; how they are (or are not) involved in decisions concerning activation;
• Analyse why and what clients are referred to external service providers and how relationships with external providers can be characterized at frontline levels;
• Explore what jobs are considered suitable for clients.

This book is an important acquisition for scholars and researchers of social policy, public administration, public management, social work and policy implementation.

Rik van Berkel is an associate professor at the Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research interests are situated on the interface of social policy, public administration and public organization studies, and include welfare state transformations, the introduction of new models for the provision of social services, and processes of change in public organizations responsible for the implementation of social policy and governance reforms.

Dorte Caswell is an associate professor at Institute of Sociology and Social Work (SAB), Aalborg University, Denmark. She is also the head of SAB, a research group focusing on social work at the frontline of active labour market and social policy. Her research focuses on social work under the canopy of active labour market and social policy. An important research interest has been to analyse the institutional interactions that take place between professionals and clients of the welfare state. Another focus in her research is the use of economic sanctions, client categories and standardised methods used when working with cash benefit recipients in Denmark.

Peter Kupka is a senior researcher at the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg, Germany. His research interests include processes of counselling and job placement, the situation of – and case work for – unemployed persons with mental health problems.

Flemming Larsen is a professor at the Centre for Labour Market Research (CARMA), Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on labour market and social policy. One major research topic has been labour market models, including international comparative research applying the concepts of flexicurity and transitional labour markets. Another important field of research is analyses of labour market and social policy reforms, studying changes (and trends) in policies, as well as the motives and consequences of introducing new governance and operational reforms.