Getting Welfare to Work: Research on Employment Services
Housed at the University of Melbourne, in conjunction with the University of New South Wales and La Trobe University, Getting Welfare to Work is a long-standing research program on welfare and employment services reform at a national and international level.
About Getting Welfare to Work
Employment services policy and delivery is constantly in flux. The sector is persistently subject to design, redesign, regulation and re-regulation in Australia and elsewhere. It needs dedicated, independent, reliable research that can inform policy design and provide both government and providers with evidence of best practice.
Our current research focuses on the next wave of employment services reform – the digitalisation of social services delivery – and what this means for:
- The nature of not-for-profit and contracted providers involvement in services delivery; levels of professionalisation and service tailoring at the frontline, and
- Jobseekers’ access to and experience of employment support
Getting Welfare to Work began in 1998 with surveys of frontline staff working in the employment sector in Australia, the UK, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Since 2008, in partnership with Jobs Australia, the National Employment Services Association (NESA), and Westgate Community Initiatives Group (WCIG), we have continued to closely monitor reforms in Australia and internationally through what is now the world’s largest and longest running comparative study of employment services delivery.
We have collected more than 20 years of data on frontline practice and the impacts of welfare reforms on services delivery, across multiple countries. We have built on this core body of research over subsequent Australian Research Council Linkage projects with additional interview and case-study based research on:
- The practices of high performing agencies in supporting more disadvantaged jobseekers into sustained employment, as part of the From Entitlement to Experiment project (2016-19); and
- Mission drift among not-for-profit organisations, as part of the Increasing Innovation and Flexibility in Social Service Delivery project (2011-15).
Information on our current and past research projects is available at the Research Projects tab.
Research team
Professor Mark Considine
Professor Mark Considine is Professor of Political Science and Provost of 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 the Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts, and 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.
Dr Siobhan O’Sullivan
Dr Siobhan O’Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of New South Wales and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She specialises in the study of welfare states, especially their delivery of employment services and ‘mission drift’. Her recent research focuses on the delivery of contracted employment services. She also has an interest in animal welfare legislation, ethics and environmental matters.
Dr Michael McGann
Dr Michael McGann is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI). He 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. His current research involves a study of the governance of activation in Ireland, looking at the impact of recent marketisation reforms on how public employment services are delivered.
Dr Phuc Nguyen
Dr Phuc Nguyen is a Lecturer in Management at La Trobe University. Her research interests include the welfare state, employment services delivery, and public services contracting. She also has an interest in supply chain integration and sustainability.
Dr Sarah Ball
Dr Sarah Ball is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’. 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. Prior this she worked for 5 years in the Australian Public Service, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.
Visiting scholars
2019
In 2019, the Entitlement to Experiment research project will host 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.
Books, book chapters and journal articles
Books
Considine, M., Lewis, J., O'Sullivan, S. and Sol, E. (2015), Getting Welfare to Work: Street-Level Governance in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Getting Welfare to Work traces the radical reform of the Australian, UK, and Dutch public employment services systems. Starting with major changes from 1998, this book examines how each national system has moved from traditional public services towards more privately provided and market-based methods.
Considine, M. and O'Sullivan, S., (eds.) (2015), Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell
Contracting-out Welfare Services focuses on the design and overhaul of welfare-to-work systems around the world in the light of the radical re-design of the welfare system; internationally based authors utilise a national/program case study, considering employment services policy and activation practices.
Book chapters
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S. and Nguyen, P. (2015), “Governance, Boards of Directors and the Impact of Contracting on Not-for-profit (NFP) Organisations: an Australian study,” in Considine, M. and O’Sullivan, S. (eds.,) Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 55-74
Journal articles
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S., McGann, M. and Nguyen, P. (2020), “Contracting personalization by results: comparing marketization reforms in Australia and the UK”, in Public Administration: An International Quarterly. Wiley, March 2020
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S., McGann, M. and Nguyen, P. (2019), “Locked-in or locked-out: Can a public services market really change?” (280kb pdf) in Journal of Social Policy, pp. 1-22. Please see infographic on ‘Can a public services market change: flexibility at the frontline?’
- McGann, M., Danneris, S., and O’Sullivan, S. (2019), “Introduction: Rethinking welfare-to-work for the long-term unemployed," accepted for publication in Social Policy & Society
- McGann, M., Nguyen, P. and Considine, M. (2019), “Welfare Conditionality and Blaming the Unemployed,” (460kb pdf) in Administration and Society
- O’Sullivan, S., McGann, M. and Considine, M. (2019), “The Category Game and its Impact on Street Level Bureaucrats and Jobseekers: An Australian Case Study," (360kb pdf) in Social Policy & Society. Please see infographic on ‘Streaming and Assessment’
- Considine, M., Nguyen, P., and O’Sullivan, S. (2018), “New Public Management and the Rule of Economic Incentives: Australian Welfare-to-Work from Job Market Signalling Perspective,” in Public Management Review, 20(8), pp. 1186-1204
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S. and Nguyen, P. (2018), “The Policy-maker’s Dilemma: The Risks and Benefits of a ‘Black Box’ Approach to Commissioning Active Labour Market Programs,” in Social Policy and Administration, 52(1), pp. 229-52
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S. and Nguyen, P. (2014), “New public management and welfare-to-work in Australia: Comparing the reform agendas of the ALP and the Coalition,” in Australian Journal of Political Science, 49(3), pp. 469-485
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S. and Nguyen, P. (2014), “Mission-drift? The Third Sector and the pressure to be business-like: Evidence from Job Services Australia,” in Third Sector Review, 20(1), pp. 87-107
- Considine, M., O’Sullivan, S. and Nguyen, P. (2014), “Governance, Boards of Directors and the Impact of Contracting on Not-for-profit (NFP) Organisations: an Australian study,” in Social Policy and Administration, 48 (2), pp. 169-187
- Considine, M. and O’Sullivan, S. (2014), “Introduction: Markets and the New Welfare - Buying and Selling the Poor,” in Social Policy and Administration, 48 (2), pp. 119-126
Other engagement
- Considine, M., McGann, M., O’Sullivan, S., Nguyen, P. and Lewis, J.M. (2018) Improving Outcomes for Disadvantaged Jobseekers: The Next Generation of Employment Services (1.9Mb pdf) The Policy Lab, The University of Melbourne
Since 2008, the Employment Services Research Team has worked in partnership with the National Employment Services Association (NESA), Jobs Australia and the Westgate Community Initiatives Group (WCIG). These partnerships have supported research across three linkage grants, detailed in the Research Projects tab (above), and have enabled two-way knowledge transfer between the Research Team and frontline welfare-to-work staff.
National Employment Services Association
NESA is the peak advocacy body representing Australian employment services providers. It acts as a bridge between the Employment Services sector and government, providing advocacy, professional development activities and practitioner advice to private sector employment services providers, as well as hosting conferences and offering policy advice to government.
Westgate Community Initiatives Group (WCIG)
“WCIG is a community based not-for-profit organisation committed to improving lives through practical responses to unemployment and disadvantage. Our programs focus on assisting people make positive changes in their lives.
We deliver employment, disability, youth and training programs, as well as operating several social enterprises. WCIG has an established network of community organisations, allied health services, employers, community groups and other businesses. Our network enables us to provide the most holistic approach possible to assist people to reach their goals.”
Contact us
For more information on Getting Welfare to Work, or if you would like to be involved with out research, please contact:
Professor Jenny Lewis
Email: jmlewis@unimelb.edu.au
Location: Room W636, West Tower, John Medley (Building 191)