Jay Wiggan

Telling stories of 21st century welfare: The UK Coalition government and the neo-liberal discourse of worklessness and dependency

Policy documents are a useful source for understanding the privileging of particular ideological and policy preferences (Scrase and Ockwell, 2010) and how the language and imagery may help to construct society’s assumptions, values and beliefs. This article examines how the UK Coalition government’s 2010 Green Paper, 21st Century Welfare, and the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, assist in constructing a discourse about social security that favours a renewal and deepening of neo-liberalization in the context of threats to its hegemony. The documents marginalize the structural aspects of persistent unemployment and poverty by transforming these into individual pathologies of benefit dependency and worklessness. The consequence is that familiar neo-liberal policy measures favouring the intensification of punitive conditionality and economic rationality can be portrayed as new and innovative solutions to address Britain’s supposedly broken society and restore economic competitiveness.

Reflecting the Public Value of Sport

Abstract This article draws on qualitative research that explores the concept of public value in the delivery of sport services by the organization Sport England. The research took place against a backdrop of shifting priorities following the award of the 2012 Olympic Games to London. It highlights the difficulties that exist in measuring the qualitative nature of the public value of sport and suggests there is a need to understand better the idea. Research with organizations involved alongside Sport England in the delivery of sport is described. This explores the potential to create a public value vision, how to measure it and how to focus public value on delivery beyond the aim of ‘sport for sports sake’ and more towards ‘sport for the greater good’. The article argues that this represents a game of ‘two halves’ in which the first half focuses on 2012 with the second half concerned with its legacy.

Choice and Welfare Reform: Lone Parents’ Decision Making around Paid Work and Family Life

Welfare-to-work policy in the UK sees ?choice? regarding lone parents? employment decisions increasingly defined in terms of powers of selection between options within active labour market programmes, with constraints on the option of non-market activity progressively tightened. In this paper, we examine the wider choice agenda in public services in relation to lone-parent employment, focusing on the period following the 2007 Freud Review of welfare provision. (Freud, 2007) Survey data are used to estimate the extent to which recent policies promoting compulsory job search by youngest dependent child age map onto lone parents? own stated decision-making regarding if and when to enter the labour market. The findings indicate a substantial proportion of lone parents targeted by policy reform currently do not want a job and that their main reported reason is that they are looking after their children. Economically inactive lone mothers also remain more likely to have other chronic employment barriers, which traverse dependent child age categories. Some problems, such as poor health, sickness or disability, are particularly acute among those with older dependent children who are the target of recent activation policy.

Reforming the United Kingdom's public employment and social security agencies

The creation, during Labours second term, of the Department for Work and Pensions and the new delivery agency Jobcentre Plus, was a significant reorganization of the administration of employment and social security policy. Drawing on Regulation theory the article argues that reform was structurally driven by the need to ensure delivery mechanisms aligned with Labours vision of an `employment first welfare state. The organization and objectives of the Employment Service and Benefits Agency that Labour inherited hindered moves to promote joined-up working to deliver employment opportunities for the economically inactive. To overcome this problem the Government embarked on a merger to break down the organizational, historical and cultural barriers that had separated the work of each agency. The administrative function of delivering social security and employment policy has been shaped into an active exponent of the Governments socioeconomic strategy for supporting an evolving neo-liberal regime of accumulation.

Reading active labour market policy politically: An autonomist analysis of Britain’s Work Programme and Mandatory Work Activity

Drawing on Autonomist Marxist theory this article situates the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Coalition government’s active labour market policy as the most recent phase in a state ‘strategy of underdevelopment’ (Cleaver, 1977) to erode the autonomy of labour power and facilitate a reconfiguration of labour and work to impose (competition for) undesirable jobs on the terms and conditions offered by capital (Peck, 2001: 349). The article contends that Mandatory Work Activity and the Work Programme facilitate a pattern of differentiated activation, where segmentation and stratification of the non-employed population (re)produces an insecure, disciplined, segmented and stratified labour power for insecure, segmented, stratified labour markets. From the perspective of capital and the state the differential job outcomes associated with these programmes are less a mark of policy failure than of policy success.

Mapping the Governance Reform of Welfare to Work in Britain Under New Labor

Abstract This article draws on Newmans (2001, 2007) typology of the modernization of governance under New Labor, to examine the development of British welfare to work administration. Concentrating on the delivery of active labor market policy, the article suggests network forms of governance occupy a marginal role in welfare to work delivery. Managerialist and hierarchical forms of governance dominate administration of activation policy. In accordance with UK tradition, a national centralized, top down system exercises control of social security and employment services administration, but increasingly seeks to realize its goals through a market system of delivery.

Reforms of Welfare Administration and Policy—A Comparison of Complexity and Hybridization: An Introduction

Reforms of Welfare Administration and Policy—A Comparison of Complexity and Hybridization: An Introduction Tom Christensen a , Matthias Knuth b , Per Laegreid c & Jay Wiggan d a Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway b Institute for Work, Skills and Training, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany c Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway d School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom

Marketization and Varieties of Accountability Relationships in Employment Services Comparing Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain

In the past decade, European countries have contracted out public employment service functions to “activate” working-age benefit clients. There has been limited discussion of how contracting out shapes the accountability of employment services or is shaped by alternative democratic, administrative, or network forms of accountability. This article examines employment service accountability in Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain. We find that market accountability instruments are additional instruments, not replacements. The findings highlight the importance of administrative and political instruments in legitimizing marketized service provision and shed light on the processes that lead to the development of a hybrid accountability model.

Varieties of marketisation in the UK: examining divergence in activation markets between Great Britain and Northern Ireland 2008–2014

This article examines the sub-national diversity in activation quasi-markets in the United Kingdom (UK). Through comparison of four active labour market programmes in Great Britain and Northern Ireland between 2008 and 2014, the article clarifies and maps intra-UK diversity in employment service governance and unpacks the shifting configurations of market structures in each jurisdiction to reveal a temporally and spatially distinct patterning of marketisation. Drawing on Gingrichs approach to analysis and classification of quasi-market variation, the article proposes that between 2008 and 2014, Great Britain rapidly evolved a provider-directed activation market. In contrast, the activation market structure in Northern Ireland, up to late 2014, is better characterised as state directed. A recent reconfiguration of the activation market in Northern Ireland does however indicate some (modified) convergence on Great Britains approach. One common and consistent feature of the configuration of activation markets in each jurisdiction is the few powers given to direct users of employment services to shape contracted out provision.

Contesting the austerity and ‘welfare reform’ narrative of the UK Government: Forging a social democratic imaginary in Scotland

Purpose n n n n nThe “welfare reform” narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Government emphasises public spending reductions, individual responsibility and strengthening of benefit conditionality. The purpose of this paper is to cast light on how this narrative is challenged and disrupted by the Scottish Government through their articulation of a social democratic welfare state imaginary. n n n n nDesign/methodology/approach n n n n nThe study draws together a decentred governance perspective that emphasises ideational tradition for understanding (re)construction of governance (Bevir, 2013, p. 27) with critical discourse analysis to examine how welfare interpretations/representations are carried into the policy and public arena. The Scottish Government documents are deconstructed to interrogate the ideas and form of their emergent discourse and its relation to the independence referendum and welfare governance reform. n n n n nFindings n n n n nResponding to changing socio-economic contexts and welfare governance, the Scottish Government has developed a discourse of modernisation rooted in British and Scandinavian social democratic traditions. Fusing (civic) nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts, they conjure up imaginaries of a prosperous, solidaristic, egalitarian welfare state as a feasible future reality, recuperating “welfare” as a collective endeavour and positioning a maldistribution of power/resources between groups and constituent countries of the UK as the “problem”. n n n n nOriginality/value n n n n nThe paper is of value to those interested in how changes to centralised-hierarchical welfare governance can open new spaces for actors at different levels of government to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Its originality lies in the analysis of how the Scottish Government has reworked social democratic traditions to weave together a welfare imaginary that directly contests the problem-solution narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Governments.