ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2262-8216
Current Organisation
Monash University
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Social policy | Public Administration | Public Policy | Workplace wellbeing and quality of working life | Not-for-profit business and management | Policy and administration | Policy and Administration
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Public Services Policy Advice and Analysis | Employment Services |
Related Links
Publications
Activation and Active Ageing? Mature-Age Jobseekers' Experience of Employment Services
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 20-06-2016
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746416000245
Abstract: The number of mature-age Australians registered with employment services is growing, with mature-age jobseekers spending longer unemployed and on income support than younger jobseekers. However, the role of employment services in extending working lives has so far received little attention in policy discourses on ageing and employment. This article examines the effectiveness of Australia's employment services system in supporting mature-age jobseekers, drawing upon interviews conducted as part of wider research on unemployment and underemployment in mature-age. We find that the overriding experience among mature-age jobseekers’ is of a system that exudes ‘carelessness’. We situate mature-age jobseekers’ experiences of systemic carelessness within the context of wider welfare reforms that have contributed to the de-professionalisation and routinisation of employment services’ delivery.
Gendered Ageism in Australia: Changing Perceptions of Age Discrimination among Older Men and Women
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 26-09-2016
Meeting the numbers: Performance politics and welfare-to-work at the street-level
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-12-2022
DOI: 10.1177/07916035211068430
Abstract: Over the past decade, social policy in Ireland has taken an increasingly ‘workfarist turn’. This has proceeded through benefit cuts, tighter eligibility criteria for payments, and claimant activation via penalty rates for breaching new conduct conditions. However, key to understanding the post-crisis reconfiguration of welfare is not just the increasingly workfarist content of social policy but also how the delivery of public employment services has been reorganised through processes of marketisation and tightening performance management of delivery organisations and the staff who work within them. Positioning these governance reforms as processes of ‘double activation’, and drawing on survey and interview research with frontline staff working for agencies contracted by government to deliver activation, this study explores how frontline staff experience performance management as a disciplinary regime: the degree to which frontline workers are subject to management control and performance management in their jobs, what forms this takes, and how it shapes their field of action and choice. In so doing, the study draws attention to the ways in which the governance of caseworkers and the governance of claimants are inter-related, and the degree to which performance management regimes influence frontline practices to motivate the enforcement of workfarist policy practices.
Introduction: Policy Responses to Ageing and the Extension of Working Lives
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 20-09-2016
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746416000269
Abstract: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the relationship between work and ageing has become increasingly visible as a policy issue. It is both reflected in and influenced by changes in macro-economic policy, life-opportunities and social attitudes associated with growing older, as a combination of falling birth rates and increased longevity, and has put pressure on the traditional parameters of the working age. The idea of retiring at a fixed point in the life-course, to enjoy a period of rest or leisure at the end of a working life, emerged in many advanced economies during the 1900s and evolved into policies that encouraged early retirement as the baby-boomers entered the jobs market in the 1960s and 1970s (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Early retirement, itself a relatively recent development, gave rise to the possibility of a ‘third age’ of leisure and active ageing (Laslett, 1987), but as demographic and economic changes make themselves felt, it is again becoming an uncertain prospect for many older workers (Biggs and McGann, 2015).
Some Useful Sources
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 14-02-2022
Innovation labs and co-production in public problem solving
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-12-2021
The political economy of welfare in a time of coronavirus: Post-productivism as a state of exception
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-07-2020
Welfare Conditionality and Blaming the Unemployed
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 27-03-2019
Abstract: Welfare recipients are increasingly subject to various forms of work-related conditionality that, critics argue, presuppose a “pathological” theory of unemployment that stigmatizes welfare recipients as de-motivated to work. Drawing on surveys of Australian frontline employment services staff, we examine the extent to which caseworkers attribute being on benefits to recipients’ lack of motivation, and whether this problem figuration of unemployment is associated with a “harder edged” approach to activation. We find that it is, although it is diminishing. This reflects how frontline discretion has become more routinized from the application of more intensive forms of performance monitoring and compliance auditing.
Equal Treatment and Exemptions
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Date: 2012
Emerging modes of digitalisation in the delivery of welfare‐to‐work: Implications for street‐level discretion
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-06-2023
DOI: 10.1111/SPOL.12939
Abstract: Countries are increasingly looking to ‘digitalise’ how public services are delivered, with welfare‐to‐work and public employment services being key sites of reform. It is hoped that digitalisation can achieve efficient, effective, and targeted services for those in need and there is now a growing body of research on both the opportunities and pitfalls associated with this transition to digital welfare states. However, as a concept, ‘digitalisation’ remains ambiguously defined, hindering understanding of the distinct ways that discrete technological innovations are reshaping citizens' access to social protection and the role of street‐level discretion in welfare administration. Drawing on interviews with expert informants from three countries pioneering digital reforms, this study aims to better understand what digitalisation entails for the delivery of activation. We identify three discrete modes of ‘digitalisation’ in welfare‐to‐work programmes: virtual engagement (remote activation), transactional automation (self‐activation), and digital triaging (targeted activation). Far from digitalisation heralding the automation and curtailment of frontline discretion, the different modes reshape frontline delivery and citizens' access to social protection in specific ways.
Health, freedom and work in rural Victoria: The impact of labour market casualisation on health and wellbeing
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2012
Retirement and Social Policy
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2015
A period of contention? The politics of post-crisis activation reform and the creeping marketisation of public employment services
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-03-2022
The enabling role of employment guidance in contemporary public employment services: A work-first to life-first typology
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-03-2021
Remodeling Street-Level Workers With Quasi-Markets: Comparing Ireland’s Mixed Economy of Welfare-to-Work
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-10-2022
DOI: 10.1177/00953997211050924
Abstract: Quasi-markets in employment services often follow social policy turns toward activation. Critics see this as no accident, arguing that marketization is intended to raise the odds that workfare policies will be implemented. Drawing on surveys of Irish frontline activation workers, this study harnesses a natural policy experiment whereby Ireland introduced a Payment-by-Results quasi-market alongside a parallel program contracted without outcomes-based contracting. Although the demandingness of activation remains modest in Ireland, the study finds that regulatory approaches are more common under market governance conditions, which in turn has been associated with significant workforce changes and stronger systems of performance monitoring.
The rise of public sector innovation labs: experiments in design thinking for policy
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 09-03-2018
Introduction: Towards a Sustainable Welfare State
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 14-02-2022
Some Useful Sources
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 20-09-2016
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746416000257
Abstract: Issues related to population ageing and longer working lives span erse research areas and are linked to a number of conceptual and policy debates. Here we provide details of texts which allow quick access to key debates in the different domains covered by the contributions. We focus first on social policy, retirement and pensions. We then provide key sources on the changing experiences and perceptions of retirement age-discrimination, human resource management and older workers and early exit, mature-age unemployment and activating older workers.
Enabling Participation Income for an Eco-Social State
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 18-11-2022
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746421000750
Abstract: We revise Atkinson’s concept of a ‘participation income’ (PI), repositioning it as a form of green conditional basic income that is anchored in a capabilities-oriented eco-social policy framework. This framework combines the capability approach with an ‘ethics of care’ to re-shape the focus of social policy on in iduals’ capability to ‘take care of the world’, thus shifting the emphasis from economic production to social reproduction and environmental reparation. In developing this proposal, we seek to address key questions about the feasibility of implementing PI schemes: including their administrative complexity and the criticism that a PI constitutes either an arbitrary and confusing, or invasive and stigmatising, form of basic income. To address these concerns, we argue for an enabling approach to incentivising participation whereby participation pathways are co-created with citizens on the basis of opportunities they recognise as meaningful rather than enforced through strict monitoring and sanctions.
Buying and Selling the Poor
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Date: 12-2021
DOI: 10.30722/SUP.9781743327869
Abstract: 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 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?
Income Support in an Eco-Social State: The Case for Participation Income
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 21-09-2023
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746421000397
Abstract: Contemporary models of welfare capitalism have frequently been critiqued about their fit-for-purpose in provisioning for people’s basic needs including care, and longer-term ecological sustainability. The Covid-19 pandemic has also exposed the need for better institutions and a new welfare architecture. We argue a post-productivist eco-social state can deliver sustainable well-being and meet basic needs. Arguing Universal Basic Services are an essential building block and prerequisite for a de-commodified welfare state, we focus on examining the form of income support that might best complement UBS. The article develops, from the perspective of feminist arguments and the capabilities approach, a case for Participation Income. This, we argue, can be aligned with targeted policy goals, particularly reward for and redistribution of human and ecological care or reproduction and other forms of socially valued participation. It may also, in the short term, be more administratively practical and politically feasible than universal basic income.
Contracting personalization by results: Comparing marketization reforms in the UK and Australia
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-04-2020
DOI: 10.1111/PADM.12662
Work, health and the commodification of life's time: reframing work–life balance and the promise of a long life
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 23-05-2016
DOI: 10.1017/S0144686X16000404
Abstract: How to respond to an ageing society has become an increasingly important question, for employers, workers and policy makers. Here we critically engage with that debate, arguing that future approaches to the relationship between work and age should take into account multiple influences on older worker behaviour, including the combination of economic, lifecourse and personal priorities. We consider the international consensus that has emerged about the primacy of work as the solution to what to do with a long life. We then address the uncertain nature of work as it affects older workers, and discuss the commodification of time in relation to a productivist approach to demographic ageing and the attitudes of older workers themselves. A tension is noted between pressures for continuity and discontinuity within the adult lifecourse which is often eclipsed within a policy discourse that tends to focus on continuity as a route to social legitimacy. Thinking about life-time as a meta-narrative, a tension between existential life priorities and commodification, may help to explain the ease with which ‘live longer–work longer’ policies both dominate and obscure the potential of a long life. Finally, we examine the implications for work–life balance and suggest this needs to be radically re-thought when addressing the purpose of a longer working life and the promise of a long life in general.
Locked-in or Locked-out: Can a Public Services Market Really Change?
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 14-11-2020
DOI: 10.1017/S0047279419000941
Abstract: Australia’s welfare-to-work system has been subject to ongoing political contestation and policy reform since the 1990s. In this paper we take a big picture look at the Australian system over time, re-visiting our earlier analysis of the impact of marketisation on flexibility at the frontline over the first ten years of the Australian market in employment services. That analysis demonstrated that marketisation had failed to deliver the service flexibility intended through contracting-out, and had instead produced market herding around a common set of standardised frontline practices. In the interim, there have been two further major redesigns of the Australian system at considerable expense to taxpayers. Re-introducing greater flexibility and service tailoring into the market has been a key aim of these reforms. Calling on evidence from an original, longitudinal survey of frontline employment service staff run in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this paper considers how the Australian market has evolved over its second decade. We find remarkable consistency over time and, indeed, evidence of deepening organisational convergence. We conclude that, once in motion, isomorphic pressures towards standardisation quickly get locked into quasi-market regimes at least when these pressures occur in low-trust contracting environments.
The Netherworld between Work and Retirement
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 03-06-2016
DOI: 10.1017/S147474641600021X
Abstract: A major theme within social gerontology is how retirement ‘is being re-organised, if not undone’. Institutional supports for retirement are weakening, with pension ages rising in many countries. Increasing numbers of older workers are working past traditional retirement age on a part-time or self-employed basis, and a growing minority are joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Drawing upon narrative interviews with older Australians who are involuntarily non-employed or underemployed, this article explores how the ‘unravelling’ of retirement is experienced by a group of older workers on the periphery of the labour market. While policy makers hope that higher pension ages will lead to a longer period of working life, the risk is that older workers, especially those experiencing chronic insecurity in the labour market, will be caught in a netherworld between work and retirement.
Can Robots Understand Welfare? Exploring Machine Bureaucracies in Welfare-to-Work
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 16-03-2022
DOI: 10.1017/S0047279422000174
Abstract: The exercise of administrative discretion by street-level workers plays a key role in shaping citizens’ access to welfare and employment services. Governance reforms of social services delivery, such as performance-based contracting, have often been driven by attempts to discipline this discretion. In several countries, these forms of market governance are now being eclipsed by new modes of digital governance that seek to reshape the delivery of services using algorithms and machine learning. Australia, a pioneer of marketisation, is one ex le, proposing to deploy digitalisation to fully automate most of its employment services rather than as a supplement to face-to-face case management. We examine the potential and limits of this project to replace human-to-human with ‘machine bureaucracies’. To what extent are welfare and employment services amenable to digitalisation? What trade-offs are involved? In addressing these questions, we consider the purported benefits of machine bureaucracies in achieving higher levels of efficiency, accountability, and consistency in policy delivery. While recognising the potential benefits of machine bureaucracies for both governments and jobseekers, we argue that trade-offs will be faced between enhancing the efficiency and consistency of services and ensuring that services remain accessible and responsive to highly personalised circumstances.
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP220100323
Start Date: 2023
End Date: 12-2025
Amount: $327,962.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityLinkage Projects - Grant ID: LP190100686
Start Date: 02-2021
End Date: 01-2025
Amount: $364,112.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity