ORCID Profile
0000-0001-8088-8262
Current Organisations
Australian Catholic University
,
University of Leeds
,
Deakin University
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Business and Management | Human Resources Management | Public Policy |
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 17-07-2018
DOI: 10.1017/S004727941800051X
Abstract: This paper draws on insider accounts from UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) officials to analyse the relationship between evidence and policy making at a time of rapid policy development relating to Universal Credit (UC). The paper argues, firstly, that evidence selection within the DWP was constrained by the overarching austerity paradigm, which constituted a Zeitgeist and had a significant bearing on the evidence selection and translation process, sharpening the focus of policy officials and analysts on the primacy of quantitative evidence when advising Ministers. Secondly, while methodological preferences (or an ‘evidence hierarchy’) impacted on evidence selection, this was not as significant as practitioners’ perceived capabilities to handle and develop evidence for policy. These capabilities were linked to departmental structures and constrained by political feasibility. Together, these dimensions constituted a significant filtration mechanism determining the kinds of evidence that were selected for policy development and those omitted, particularly in relation to UC. The paper contributes to debates about the contemporary role of evidence in policymaking and the potential of the relationship between future evidence production and use.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-03-2023
DOI: 10.1177/00221856231159512
Abstract: This paper examines the under-explored demand-side of active labour market programmes that aim to transition people without jobs into employment. The paper's contribution centres on understanding the benefits that government-funded employment services can offer to employers and how they can work with employment service providers to leverage these. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with employers in Australia, our findings extend pre-existing concepts of employer engagement by illustrating the human resource, corporate social responsibility, and financial benefits to employers of engaging with employment services and how firm size affects their engagement. The findings offer improvements to policymaking and practice to facilitate the effectiveness of employment services in Australia and elsewhere.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-11-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-04-2013
Abstract: In industrialized countries women have increasingly become a target group for active labour market policies, or ‘activation’. However, to date, the burgeoning literature on activation has tended to overlook its link with the highly gendered nature of welfare. This article presents the first comparative analysis of activation approaches for partnered women in the UK, Australia and Denmark. Three core arguments are put forward that emphasize how the ideas (causal claims, beliefs and assumptions) articulated by key policy actors were crucial to both the construction and delivery of activation policies. First, women’s differentiated access to benefits directly conflicted with the focus on the in idual within activation policies. Second, activation was premised upon paid labour, embodying ideational assumptions about the meaning of (paid) work, in turn devaluing caring labour. Third, the ‘problematization’ of women outside the labour market resulted in their gendered ‘processing’ through the social security and activation systems.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 09-12-2014
DOI: 10.1017/S0047279414000890
Abstract: In 2011, the UK Coalition government introduced its flagship welfare-to-work programme, ‘The Work Programme’ (WP). Based on a ‘payment by results’ model, it aims to incentivise contracted providers to move participants into sustained employment. Employer involvement is central to the programme's success and this paper explores the ‘two faces’ of this neglected dimension of active labour market policy (ALMP) analysis: employer involvement with the programme and the engagement between providers and employers. This paper draws empirically from a regional survey of primarily private and third sector SMEs, and from interviews with providers and stakeholders about provider engagement with SMEs and large employers. Findings indicate that SMEs had recruited few staff through the WP and had little awareness of it, and that providers engaged in intense competition to access both SMEs and large employers. Employers are critical to the success of ALMPs, but an underpinning supply-side ideology and a regulatory context in which business interest associations are weak policy actors means that their involvement is based on implicit and flawed assumptions about employers’ interests and their propensity to engage.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 19-09-2018
DOI: 10.1111/PADM.12545
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 02-01-2020
DOI: 10.1111/SPOL.12552
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-2017
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2012
Abstract: The increasing number of recipients of disability and long-term sickness benefits has resulted in the introduction of specific employability programmes in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. In the UK Pathways to Work involved enabling and support measures for benefit recipients with long-term health conditions. In Denmark ‘flex-jobs’ are an integral occupational health intervention for both employed and unemployed people with reduced working capacity. Through a comparative analysis primarily based on stakeholder interviews in both countries, this paper argues that the concept of an inclusive labour market strategy is crucial to assisting these groups into work, underpinned by governance and a politics of representation. In Denmark both the role of the social partners and subsidized employment are significant. In the UK governance has been constrained and insufficient attention has been paid to income security. Comparing these two models highlights policy learning for the UK from the successes of and challenges to the Danish model.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-02-2022
DOI: 10.1111/SPOL.12803
Abstract: Local state and third sector actors routinely provide support to help people navigate their right to social security and mediate their chequered relationship to it. COVID‐19 has not only underlined the significance of these actors in the claims‐making process, but also just how vulnerable those working within ‘local ecosystems of support’ are to external shocks and their own internal pressures. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with organisations providing support to benefit claimants and those financially struggling during COVID‐19, this paper examines the increasingly situated nature of the claims‐making process across four local areas in the United Kingdom. We do so to consider what bearing ‘local ecosystems of support’ have on income adequacy, access and universality across social security systems. Our analysis demonstrates how local state and third sector actors risk lifying inequalities that at best disadvantage, and at worst altogether exclude, particular social groups from adequate (financial) assistance. Rather than conceiving of social security as a unitary collection of social transfers, we argue that its operation needs to be understood as much more fragmented and contingent. Practitioners exhibit considerable professional autonomy and moral agency in their discretionary practice, arbitrating between competing organisational priorities, local disinvestment, and changing community needs. Our findings offer broader lessons for understanding the contemporary governance of social security across welfare states seeking to responsibilise low‐income households through the modernisation of public services, localism, and welfare reforms.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-06-2020
Abstract: Active labour market programmes (ALMPs) are critical preparation mechanisms to assist people to enter the workplace. This article analyses qualitative data from a hard-to-access group of in iduals with mental health conditions (MHCs) participating in a large-scale UK ALMP, the Work Programme (WP). Using the lens of the ‘extended social model of disability’ and the concept of the ‘ideal worker’, the article demonstrates that ableist norms of the ‘ideal jobseeker’ were embedded within the Programme’s design, prioritising in iduals with certain abilities and behaviour over others. Second, the article extends Acker’s framework of inequality regimes to demonstrate that formal and informal inequality practices within the Programme maintained, rather than challenged, disability inequality. This was visible along four dimensions: (1) ALMPs as organising processes producing disability inequality (2) the visibility of disability inequality (3) the legitimacy of disability inequality and (4) control and compliance derived from hierarchical social relations within ALMP design and implementation, involving either stabilising or destabilising effects on disabled jobseekers. The theoretical and practical contributions of this article demonstrate that the design of the WP as an employment preparation mechanism pushed disabled jobseekers further away from paid employment, rather than towards workplace inclusion.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-07-2023
DOI: 10.1111/SPOL.12848
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 04-2016
DOI: 10.1332/147084414X13988707323088
Abstract: This paper combines the evidence-based policy making and ‘policy as translation’ literatures to illuminate the process by which evidence from home or overseas contexts is incorporated into policy. Drawing upon focus groups with Department for Work and Pensions officials, a conceptual model of ‘evidence translation’ is introduced, comprising five key dimensions which influence how evidence is used in policy: the perceived policy problem, agenda-setting, filtration processes, the policy apparatus and the role of translators. The paper suggests the critical role of ‘evidence translators’ throughout the process and highlights the perceived importance of methodology as an evidence selection mechanism.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-02-2023
DOI: 10.1177/09500170211063094
Abstract: Active labour market policies (ALMPs) have evolved as pivotal social policy instruments designed to place the unemployed and other disadvantaged groups in sustainable employment. Yet, little is known about what drives employer participation in such initiatives. This article provides a nuanced account of the socio-economic aspects of the demand-side of ALMPs, by investigating employer embeddedness in wider social networks created by employer associations and employee collective voice as enabling mechanisms for employer participation in ALMPs. Drawing on an original survey of employers in the United Kingdom (UK) and Denmark, we found that the extent of employer embeddedness in such social networks is positively associated with employer participation in the UK but not in Denmark, where the effect was indirect and mediated through collective bargaining. The effects of employer network ties and employee collective voice affirm the importance of a more integrated analysis of the interactions between network ties and institutions in ALMP research.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 05-2023
End Date: 04-2026
Amount: $190,691.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
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