The Australian Welfare and Work Lab pioneers collaborative research with industry partners on new ways of commissioning and delivering employment services to help some of the most disadvantaged people in Australia into sustainable employment.
The Lab builds on a program of policy-engaged research that has been tracking the impacts of welfare reform on the frontline delivery of employment services in Australia and internationally for over 20 years.
The Lab is focused on developing collaborative research partnerships with industry and government to test practice innovations in welfare-to-work programs and to build the evidence base for ‘best practice’ models in the governance and delivery of employment services.
Professor Mark Considine
Professor Mark Considine is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. He is one of Australia’s most respected political scientists, with a career spanning both academic research and applied policy work for government and civil society organisations. He and his collaborators have won numerous major international research prizes, including the Marshall Dimmock Award (2000) and the Jan Kooiman Award (2013), for their comparative work on the contracting of employment services and the governance of welfare-to-work program delivery.
Mark has been an advisor to the OECD Local Economic and Employment Development Program, and has worked with state and federal governments in the design of social services and strategies for place-based innovation. He assisted the Brumby Government with its review of employment programs and was seconded by the Gillard Government to the departmental Working Group to review the jobactive Star Ratings system. He was later appointed to chair the federal Working Groups charged with developing a quality measure for rating job agencies.
Professor Jenny M. Lewis
Professor Jenny Lewis is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Melbourne, and was the Founding Director of the Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne. Jenny is currently President of the International Research Society for Public Management.
The author of six books and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, Jenny is one of Australia’s most respected experts on public policy, with a career spanning policy roles in state treasury departments, academic research, and applied policy work for government organisations. This has included consulting for the Department for Victorian Communities on approaches to evaluating community development partnerships, and assisting the National Public Health Partnership and VicHealth to develop strategic public health priorities.
Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan
Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan was an Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of New South Wales and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She specialised in the study of welfare states, especially their delivery of employment services and ‘mission drift’. Her recent research focused on the delivery of contracted employment services.
Siobhan was a pivotal member of the Welfare to Work team from 2008 to 2023. We respectfully acknowledge the sad passing of Siobhan in 2023 and recognise her enormous contribution to our research over 15 years of working together.
Dr Michael McGann
Dr Michael McGann specialises in the sociology of work and social policy on employment, with a particular focus on issues related to welfare-to-work and the marketisation of public employment services as well as ageing and employment.
From 2020 - 2022, he led the EU Horizon 2020 project, Governing Activation in Ireland. Prior to rejoining Melbourne, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Social Sciences Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Previously, I was also an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne (2012-2019) and a researcher for the Parliament of Victoria's Family and Community Development Committee and the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Research and Policy Centre.
Dr Phuc Nguyen
Dr Phuc Nguyen is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University, Australia. Before joining La Trobe University in 2018, Dr Phuc Nguyen was a lecturer at the Foreign Trade University in Vietnam, and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia). She also worked as an import-export specialist. Her current research interests include welfare state, especially the delivery of employment services; and service supply chain management. She has published three book chapters and nearly 20 journal articles in Public Management Review, Journal of Social Policy, Public Administration, Journal of Social Policy and Administration, Australian Journal of Political Science and Third Sector Review.
Dr Sarah Ball
Dr Sarah Ball is a lecturer in public policy. She is currently working on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’ and an ESRC project exploring 'Ethics and expertise in times of crisis: Learning from international varieties of ethics advice'.
Prior to this she completed her PhD at the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. Her research explored the use of behavioural insights and experimental methods in the development of social policy in the Australian Federal Government. She has worked for both the Australian Public Service Commission and the Department of Social Services, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.
Dr Corey Carter
Dr Corey Carter is a postdoctoral researcher on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’. He holds a PhD in economics from Federation University and specialises in factors affecting labour force participation and employment in regional areas. Prior to his current role, he served as a research fellow studying labour force participation in the Latrobe-Gippsland region as part of a project commissioned by the Latrobe Valley Authority and the Victorian State Government.
Dr Emily Corbett
Dr Emily Corbett is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and the Research Coordinator for the Welfare-to-Work Lab. She is currently engaged in the University of Melbourne’s 'Getting Welfare-to-Work' research program, examining trauma-informed service delivery models within employment services.
Emily recently completed her industry-based PhD with the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University, in collaboration with the Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria (CASA-CV). Her research provided insights into rural women's experiences of sexual revictimisation, viewed through a material feminist lens. Emily brings to her current role a wealth of experience gained from nearly a decade of work and volunteer service in the domestic and sexual violence sectors, including her most recent position as the Sector Integration & MARAMIS Project Officer at Sexual Assault Services Victoria (SASVic).
Visiting Scholars
2023
From January to June 2023, we hosted Marthine Thøgersen from Oslomet University.
Marthine Thøgersen
Marthine Thøgersen is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for the Study of Professions at Oslo Metropolitan University. In her PhD project, she is researching the organisation of service provision and interagency collaboration concerning youth not in employment, education, or training (NEETs) in Norway. Marthine is a social worker and holds a master’s degree in Collaborative Management in Health and Social Services.
2019
In 2019, the Entitlement to Experiment research project hosted Niklas Andreas Andersen (University of Aalborg), and Associate Professor Jo Ingold (University of Leeds), for short visits and research collaborations.
Niklas Andersen
Niklas Andersen is a PhD Fellow at the University of Aalborg within its Centre for Labour Market Research, who is currently undertaking a research project on local innovation in social and employment services.
Associate Professor Jo Ingold
Associate Professor Jo Ingold conducts research that focuses on the overlap between public policy and human resource management, and has led research projects studying employer engagement in welfare-to-work programs in the UK and Denmark.
2018
Dr Sophie Danneris (University of Aalborg)
In 2018, the Entitlement to Experiment project hosted Dr Sophie Danneris Luthman for two months to conduct comparative work with the Employment Services research team.
Sophie holds a PhD in Sociology, and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her areas of research are social and employment policies, labour market participation for hard-to-place unemployed as well as qualitative longitudinal studies, conversation analysis and practice research.
During her visit, Dr Danneris Luthman presented a public lecture on her research examining changes in the Danish approach to welfare income support for those out of work. While Denmark is widely perceived to have a more socialist welfare regime, changes in its approach over recent decades have mirrored similar developments in liberal welfare regime countries like the UK and Australia. This has been accompanied by a shift towards putting income welfare recipients into work placements and developing their work experience to transition them into employment. In her qualitative research focusing on the experience of the long-term, vulnerable unemployed, Dr Danneris Luthman shows how these large-scale ideologies play out and are negotiated locally in meetings between the recipients and the government case managers. This research provides novel insights into the experiences of the hard-to-place long term unemployed and illustrates the difficulties and frustrations they experience with the system. It sheds light on how benefits and services are received and administered as well as on what is received.
Dr Sharon Wright (University of Glasgow)
Dr Sharon Wright is an international expert in welfare reform, specialising in the marketisation of employment services. Her research focuses on the lived experience of welfare policy recipients and front-line workers, and considers the agency of welfare subjects in networks of welfare governance. She is an expert Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Social Security Committee, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
The Entitlement to Experiment research project hosted Dr Wright for two weeks in 2018. During this time, she gave a keynote address at the Jobs Australia National Conference on conditionality in welfare policy, and participated in a workshop comparing implementations of conditionality in welfare-to-work policies across Australia and the U.K., jointly hosted by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the University of Melbourne.
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Best practice models in employment services provision
Exploring how to assist very long term unemployed jobseekers with complex challenges into employment
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SDET Model: Best practices in placing DES jobseekers into work
Exploring how to improve overall servicing and ultimately employment outcomes for jobseekers with intellectual and developmental disabilities
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Evaluation of Pre-Employment Card Implementation
This research project evaluates the implementation of Re-employment Card program – a major shift in the Indonesian government’s approach to helping jobseekers.
For more information or to work with us on our research, please contact:
- Emily Corbett
- Research Coordinator, Australian Welfare and Work Lab
- emily.corbett@unimelb.edu.au