Sharon Wright

Welfare-to-work, Agency and Personal Responsibility

A strong international reform agenda has been established around the idea that benefit recipients must be ‘activated’ to find jobs. This approach, which has found support across the political spectrum in times of affluence and austerity, rests on previously contested assumptions about human motivation, choice, action and personal responsibility. This article considers the largely untested assumptions within UK welfare-to-work policies and marketised employment services, which are designed to control and modify behaviour through compulsion and incentives. It examines those assumptions in relation to conceptualisations of human agency drawn from social policy literature. A gap is identified between accounts of agency grounded in the lived experiences of social actors (policy-makers, front-line workers and service users) and hypothetical models of individual agency (e.g. ‘rational economic man’) which have been more influential in policy design. It is argued that scope exists for understandings of agency to encompass the motivations, intentions and actions of all social actors involved in the policy process. This highlights the power dynamics of context creation, the universal potential for malevolence and the weight of moral significance. Conceptual and empirical insights point towards understanding the enactment of agency as relational, dynamic, differentiated, interconnected, interdependent, intersubjective and interactive.

Universal Credit, ubiquitous conditionality and its implications for social citizenship

Between 2013 and 2017 Universal Credit replaces six means-tested working age benefits. Backed by a punitive system of tiered sanctions and fines, Universal Credit represents a major expansion and intensification of personalised behavioural conditionality and indicates the ubiquity of conditionality at the heart of twenty-first century UK social citizenship.

Decentralization and centralization: governing the activation of social assistance recipients in Europe

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine the governance of activation in relation to the decentralization and centralization of activation for social assistance recipients in Sweden, The ...

Conceptualising the active welfare subject: welfare reform in discourse, policy and lived experience

The idea of the active welfare subject has become irresistible to both policy makers and academics and has taken a lead role in the transformation of twenty-first century social security systems. Two distinguishable approaches have emerged – the dominant model and a counter model. The dominant model emphasises moralised individual responsibility for ‘wrong choices’ and mandates behavioural change to become active. The counter model situates benefit recipients in the present as disempowered creative, reflexive and resourceful beings. This article develops conceptualisations by comparing benefit recipients’ accounts (from an exploratory qualitative study) of lived experience with both models.

Interpreting the marketization of employment services in Great Britain and Denmark

Marketization is an important component of international shifts in the governance of employment services. Despite contrasting underlying welfare systems and employment services of different scales and character, both Denmark and Great Britain were distinct from many other comparable countries in contracting out employment services in the late-1990s. By comparing the starting positions and divergent trajectories of marketization in these two very different welfare systems, we see some common traits in how it so far has been difficult to make marketization deliver on its promises. We find in both cases difficulties for the contracted-employment services to reduce bureaucracy, save money through innovation, realize user choice, prevent poor quality services or increase efficiency/effectiveness through better job outcomes. Instead we find, paradoxically, that the market could not operate without re-regulation. In the absence of the intended effects, we furthermore question why policymakers in such different socio-political contexts continued to support the marketization strategy. The explanation is found in combination with wider governance and policy shifts, which have contributed towards altering the governance mix to reposition key actors and interests in ways that would have otherwise been contested.

Steering with Sticks, Rowing for Rewards: the New Governance of Activation in the UK

The past decade has seen significant changes to both the content and governance of benefits and services for unemployed people in the UK. Between 1997 and 2010, Labour governments broke a new path following bearings set, to a large extent, by their Conservative predecessors. An extensive programme of welfare reform was justified primarily on the grounds of cost saving, in an uncompromising effort to ‘promote work as the best form of welfare’ (DWP, 2008a). This form of activation was designed for ‘moving people from welfare into work’ (DWP, 2003, p. 3), without a precise official definition of what this work-first approach meant (Lindsay et al., 2007; see below). What emerged was a series of reforms to social security law that offered relatively small carrots and threatened strong sticks in an explicit attempt to reduce the number of people claiming benefits. This focus on stimulating rates of job entry (often at the lower end of the labour market) also influenced the new forms of provider—contractor relationship that have evolved during several stages in the marketization of employment services. The relationships between different providers (in statutory, voluntary and private sectors) have been increasingly permeated by market values and competitive impulses, controlled by the central state through incentives that favour short-term employment placements.

Devolution, social democratic visions and policy reality in Scotland

The Scottish National Party’s election win in 2011 produced the first overall majority for any party since the Scottish Parliament’s inception in 1999, despite the proportional representation system that was supposed to prevent single party governments. This historic election has been followed by much discussion of how much further the powers of the Scottish Parliament could be extended and whether devolution would allow Scotland to have a superior welfare settlement. In this context policy divergence has been the major focus of the developing devolution debate but discussions about greater powers or even independence for the Parliament have increased significantly. They are often presented as a means to achieve a ‘better’ or more ‘fair’ society. This article argues that shortcomings in the steps towards fairness achieved under the current arrangements of devolution highlight the need for a far-reaching and innovative approach to social justice to be carried out alongside any further discussions of independence. Such an approach cannot be taken for granted.

Welcoming Migrants? Migrant labour in rural Scotland

For a decade, Scotland has had a declining natural population, dispersed throughout a diverse geography, including remote highlands and islands, which presents a policy making context that is very different from other parts of the UK. Rural Scotland accounts for 95% of Scotlands landmass and only 18% of the population (Scottish Government 2008). In particular, the familiar challenges, presented by the combination of population ageing with below-replacement level fertility rates, have, until 2007, been reinforced by the extent of out-migration amongst people of working age. Evidence suggests that following EU enlargement in 2004, rural areas have experienced an influx of labour migrants from Central and Eastern European countries on an unprecedented scale. Whilst such large-scale migration into rural communities has provided a major challenge for public service provision and ‘social integration’, it has also addressed local labour market shortages and created opportunities for regeneration. This article explores critical questions about the role and impact of migrant labour in rural communities in Scotland and the role of agencies in addressing the needs of all rural residents.

Continuities within paradigmatic change

In this paper, we examine the inception and development of activation in Slovenia and the UK in order to identify the rationales for its introduction, to plot the direction of reforms and to consider the outcomes of policy implementation for citizens. In this unconventional country comparison, we are interested in understanding third-order (Hall 1993Cpmparitive Politics 25 (3): 25–96) welfare state change as the context for the introduction of activation. The UK and, to a much greater extent, Slovenia, underwent paradigmatic changes in the goals of the economy, structure of the labour market and basis of social provisions in the late twentieth century. This provided the possibility for activation to develop a more distinct character and to be implemented to a greater extent than in other European countries. However, we argue that the nature of the activation strategies pursued in Slovenia and the UK have both retained strong flavours of their earlier policy traditions and point to the role of political institutions and arrangements in adjusting the demands of supranational organisations, particularly in the corporatist Slovenian case.

Relinquishing rights? The impact of activation on citizenship for lone parents in the UK

Despite high levels of lone parents with low labour market participation rates and a common experience of poverty, the UK has, until recently, lagged behind other European countries in applying work-related conditions to lone parents receiving benefits. Traditionally, the UK’s ‘liberal’ model of social insurance (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Gallie and Paugam, 2000a) largely overlooked the situation of social assistance claimants with primary caring responsibilities. This can be understood in the light of a legacy of conservative non-interventionist approaches to family policy and a related lack of investment in a comprehensive formal childcare infrastructure, which, combined with low wages for part-time work, created very significant barriers to paid employment. Since the late 1990s, however, this picture has changed dramatically. For more than a decade, social security in the UK has been fundamentally reformed in order to reinforce a vision of social citizenship in which the primary legitimate societal contribution is conceived of in narrow individual economic terms as active engagement in paid employment. There has been an explicit reformulation of rights and responsibilities, which assumes ‘work is the best form of welfare’ (DWP, 2008). Reforms to systems of income maintenance (1997–2010) were guided by the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020.