EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book assesses how the practice of contracting-out public employment services via competitive tendering and Payment-by-Results is transforming welfare-to-work in Ireland. It offers Ireland's introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground. It draws on unprecedented access to, and extensive survey and interview research with, frontline employment services staff, combined with in-depth interviews with policy officials, organisational managers and jobseekers participating in activation.

This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovatively address the impact of crisis on the welfare state in Northern Ireland. The result is to isolate key drivers of structural welfare reform, and assess how globalisation, financialisation, neo-liberalisation, privatisation, marketisation and new public management have deepened and diversified their impact on the post-crisis Irish welfare state. This in-depth analysis will appeal to sociologists, economists, political scientists and welfare state practitioners interested in the Irish welfare state and more generally in the analysis of welfare state change.

This book analyzes the changing shape of Irish society over the hundred years since the 1916 rising, arguing that there are distinctive master patterns that characterize its development of a welfare state that triangulates among church, state, and capital. Fred Powell charts the influence of social movements that resisted oppressive power structures, including the labor and feminist movements, organizations working for the rights of tenants and the homeless, survivors of institutional abuse, groups of asylum seekers and refugees, and activists for gay rights and minority and ethnic cultural rights. The tension between these groups and the more conservative institutions that have dominated Ireland raises major questions about whether an inclusive welfare state is possible in a quasi-religious society.

Buying and Selling the Poor ventures behind the scenes of the multibillion-dollar welfare-to-work system, offering new insights into how Australia responds to unemployment and disadvantage. As the authors tell the story of four local employment offices, they paint a vivid picture of a critically important social service which many people are aware of but which few properly understand. They also reveal the wider impacts that processes of marketisation and welfare reform have had on these frontline services over decades, and how the work of frontline staff and service providers has been transformed. Buying and Selling the Poor looks closely at how these services operate, why some succeed where others fail, and what can be learned from the stories of local staff and clients who have navigated the system. Three decades into this market experiment, how well are we doing in supporting our most vulnerable citizens to get back to work? 'Buying and Selling the Poor takes a rigorous but accessible look inside the 'black box' of our privatised jobseeker market, and at the commodification of the people within it. The authors, academics in the fields of politics, public policy and social science, combine their 20 years of survey data with immersive fieldwork...This revealing, often heart-wrenching work will prove enlightening for not only those within the policy field, but also anyone with an interest in or experience dealing with a system that often feels like a race to the bottom.' -- Kim Thomson, Books+Publishing

Inspired by ideas from economic theology, this provocative book uncovers deep-rooted religious concepts and shows how they continue to influence contemporary views of work and unemployment.

Getting Welfare to Work traces the development of the Australia, UK and Dutch employment services systems. Each system has undergone radical policy change since 1998, with a trend toward outsourcing and service privatisation, as governments search for ways to get welfare systems working in effective, efficient and politically acceptable ways. Using interviews and survey data, this book tells the story of those bold reforms from the perspective of thefrontline staff who work directly with jobseekers, over a fifteen year period. It shows how new ways of thinking about public services have impacted on service delivery organisations and those who work with welfareclients.

Over the past three decades, market reforms have transformed public services such as education, health, and care of the elderly. Whereas previous studies present markets as having similar and largely non-political effects, this book shows that political parties structure markets in diverse ways to achieve distinct political aims. Left-wing attempts to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state are compared with right-wing wishes to limit the state and empower the private sector. Examining a broad range of countries, time periods, and policy areas, Jane R. Gingrich helps readers make sense of the complexity of market reforms in the industrialized world. The use of innovative multi-case studies and in-depth interviews with senior European policymakers enriches the debate and brings clarity to this multifaceted topic. Scholars and students working on the policymaking process in this central area will be interested in this new conceptualization of market reform.