The frontline of service delivery is the turf on which the struggles between
the interests of individuals and authorities are played out. Whether by
intent or not (see for example Barnes and Prior (Prior
2009))
individuals and workers influence outcomes in the ways they interpret and
apply policies and rules in practice.
Workers in employment services face significant conflicts and strains borne
from the dual role of delivery of both help and hassle. Lack of trust is an
issue that has been identified elsewhere, as the relationship between job
seekers and workers has shifted from one of helping to hassling (McDonald
and Marston 2005; Marston
and McDonald 2008),
backed by threats to financial security which is already a significant cause
of concern for welfare recipients.
Using Bourdiesian concepts this chapter further explores the theme of the role
of inter-subjective recognition and its role in the validation of capital in
employment service exchanges between workers and clients. By exploring the
dynamics of the ways in which capital is recognised and legitimated in
inter-subjective exchanges this study adds depth to understanding the
properties of street level exchanges.
The first section explores the ways in which capital is employed and
constrained for workers in their street level exchanges with job seekers.
“Capital” denotes the resources individuals possess and its relational value
on the fields of welfare exchanges. The value of the capital is obtained from
Habitus and is articulated in hard forms like rules, or soft forms
subjectively in the way in which it is recognised in inter-subjective
exchanges.
The second section explores the importance of recognition and misrecognition
of workers. Governmentalist conceptions of surveillance are highlighted here
because of the way in which domination is achieved by governing through people
by prescribing the right forms for their actions. The impact this has on
individual workers is explored in some detail.
The final section explores the tensions between employment services and
Centrelink to illustrate the way in which the contradictory values and
interests underpinning welfare to work policy result in intra-departmental
system noise and conflict for the agents of delivery.
Understanding the concepts of capital in use
The section pauses to provide an explanation of the Bourdesian concepts of
capital, field and Habitus and to illustrate their dynamic and relational
qualities. The logic and theory of practice according to Bourdieu (Bourdieu
1977; Bourdieu
1990; Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992) are
that capital, field and Habitus are dynamically interrelated and relational.
Effective action is only resourced using forms of capital that are valid in
any given exchange, whether it be economic, social or cultural. Capital can
only be effectively deployed if it holds currency within the field of its
exchange according to dominant beliefs, ideologies or values inherited through
exposure to Habitus.
The symbolic value of the forms of capital is upheld by the rules that govern
the forms of social exchange, such as the law, the economy or other
institutions which can assume a taken for granted nature. Roles and positions
in the social field can be prescribed by the forms of capital agents possess,
that is their symbolic distinctions, and assume varying degrees of power
according to what is “valued”. What is valued is provided with greatest
symbolic power in the form of dominant interests.
Agents such as workers and service users occupy
roles or positions within
overlapping fields of social
relations. Field boundaries are hard to define (Grenfell
2012) (Grenfell
2010)
therefore the “field” is not strictly bounded, meaning agents will bring
resources and strategies they have learned from different parts of their
socialisation in Habitus to these exhanges.
Imagine the service exchange of employment services as part of the broader
“field” of social welfare. The field boundaries are unclear because they
overlap across several dimensions of activity including possible relationships
with Centrelink, housing, mental health and other services; their policies
being defined across multiple government services agencies and with staff
whose professional commitment and ethos vary according to the nature of the
work and their attitude towards it.
Service users or clients perceive these networks of services differently. In
some cases they separate them into distinctly different spheres, but in others
they are the networks with which they are involved because of hardship or
inheritance that have caused them to need the assistance of human service
agencies. In other words their relation to these fields is defined by their
subjective apprehension of boundaries
of the field and the role
or identity (position) they occupy within it and this has been obtained
through exposure to Habitus.
All the players on the field occupy relative positions
of interest which are
intersubjectively produced and reproduced in welfare exchanges. One of the
most critical elements that define outcomes is the way in which capital
is legitimated intersubjectively and
in which subjective attachment to symbolic positions and values occupied and
held by the different players on the fields influence those outcomes.
It is useful to understand worker-client relations from this perspective
because it enables us to see the multi-dimensionality of the exchanges, and
perhaps to better understand what factors are at play in these encounters.
Importantly it enables us to diagnose the reasons why these exchanges do not
play out in the ways policy makers imagine (and where certain assumptions
about human behaviour and motivation are the basis of service model design).
Workers too perceive the boundaries of the field differently depending on
their education and the degree to which they believe their work is part of a
humanist project, or specific to a certain program (refs). Boundary disputes
are part of professionalisation of occupations shared by social workers,
educationalist, psychologists and a range of human service workers. These
boundary disputes help to define practice and theory for these separate
disciplines. Workers are driven by their own personal motives and attitudes
towards others which also help to define their position in the field.
Ultimately, in practice, workers’ activity in the field will be (to some
extent) constrained by organisational resources and the rules which define how
they are used. These rules are critical to determining how capital and
resources are distributed and have far reaching implications for all the
agents involved in welfare exchanges. The rules reflect government’s
intentions to create certain outcomes from the rules based on (often untested)
perceptions and construals of the social problems they wish to ameliorate.
The relevance of this approach to the analysis of exchanges in welfare
contexts such as employment services is that it draws into focus the
complexity of policy implementation at the point of delivery. Barnes and Prior
contend that it is by studying micro level of interactions between different
individuals and groups in a variety of policy development and service delivery
contexts we can understand what constitutes policy in practice (Barnes
2009)(p.198).
Also from the perspective of understanding policy implementation outcomes,
Bevir (Bevir
and Trentmann 2007) propose
the idea of situated agency as a way of resolving the structuralist dispute
about the ways in which individuals are able to influence outcomes in
micro-level exchanges. Bevir provides a fuller explanation of the distinction
between the socially constructed and constituted idea of identity, and it’s
relation to agency, suggesting agency is a form of power or discretion we all
have to act in ways according to the ways we process information to undertake
“local reasoning” (a view similar to philosopher Margaret Archer).
The negotiated outcomes of the interactions of citizens and officials, results
in what Prior calls Prior counter-agency (Prior
2009).
This notion builds on the idea that although identity is formed through
dialectical processes, it does not impede individuals from exercising forms
choice or local level decisions that influence outcomes in social contexts.
Therefore in the social realm discretionary local decision making and
reasoning undertaken by individuals form counter-agency, in the ways in which
the outcomes other than those officially mandated by policy makers are
produced.
David Prior suggests there are three forms of resistance to public service
policies and practices that can be expressed by public officials and citizens
alike. The forms are “revision, resistance and refusal, and are useful
categories for understanding the ways in which officials and citizens can
negotiate new interpretations of policies, negotiate roles and identities and
consciously or unconsciously resist or undermine government policy objectives.
Prior 2009 in (Barnes
2009).
These points are important to the exploration of types of resistance being
explored in this research because it underscores the fact that policy outcomes
are co-constructed at the point of service delivery, not only through the
influence of street level discretion (Lipsky
1980),
but through the interactional behaviour of citizens and public servants.
Part 1 The importance of capital
In this research I have regularly encountered how service outcomes are
dynamically constructed because of the way forms of capital hold value that
are relative to the positions held by the agents in the exchange. The social
relations of welfare exchanges are always dynamic because they are co-created
in situ and hold temporally
contingent (i.e. point in time) specific characteristics.
Rules are interpreted and mediated by workers who exercise interpretations
that vary according to their position within the field of symbolic relations
and their role as agents of the state obligated (at least in part) to uphold
the rules. At the least empowered extreme their” agency” they strictly adhere
to rules and guidelines because they have to. They employ the capital that
inheres in the institutional forms they represent to uphold the rules and in
which contemporary welfare to work in Australia are highly disciplinary.
Institutional power involves the capacity to provide and withdraw the economic
capital required to resource or support job seekers whether in the form of
services or payments.
As worker capacity for autonomy grows, workers mediate system rules with
interpretations based on their values; or they realise and articulate the
symbolic values inherent in the exchange and impress new versions of the rules
and advocate for improved versions of them.
In these situations agents mobilise the forms of capital they possess
according to their symbolic value in order to attempt to negotiate outcomes
that better align with their interests. The effectiveness of their capacity to
achieve better outcomes depends on the dynamic interactions that take place
between themselves and workers who are also agents operating according to the
rules which assign the relative value of the forms of capital available.
Classification struggles
A useful way of understanding what occurs in welfare service exchanges is
based on the idea of classification struggles. Goldberg notes how
classification struggles often emerge as the result of changes in policy
settings, in which they
provide a window of opportunity to define the status and rights of the
policy’s clients relative to other clients in the field. Since the standing of
clients is relational, already existing policies serve as important benchmarks
in these classification struggles, providing models to be avoided or standards
of treatment to which clients can aspire. Furthermore, policies and their
elite patrons frequently stand in a competitive relationship, which may
contribute to classification struggles as well.
Goldberg cites Bourdieu:
they are struggles to class claimants as citizens or paupers. At stake in
classification struggles is ‘‘the power to make people see and believe, to get
them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the
divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make nd unmake groups’’ (Bourdieu,
1991, p. 221). Cited in (Goldberg
2008) (p.88-
89)
Classification struggles in the welfare field are complicated because “state
officials, service providers, employers, clients, unions and social movements
struggle to convert the resources they possess (economic, political, cultural
or symbolic) into the kinds of capital they seek to accumulate (greater
legitimacy, better services and benefits, lower taxes, influence over policy
administration and so forth)” (Peillon
2001).
In policy administrator and development circles, classification struggles also
provide battle grounds over expert opinion where individuals compete to obtain
higher legitimacy for their views in battles for prestige (x in Grenfell
2012).
Classification struggles reflect the battles occurring in administrative back
rooms where workers find themselves in conflict with one another and which are
observed by service users when they are transferred between workers, an
experience widely reported by participants in this research.
Crossley (Crossley
2003) explored
the ways in which classification struggles are the source of crises which
result in collectivisation of interests and the mobilisation of capital in
pursuit of new political arrangements (or power arrangements).
In the analysis of the case studies of this research it is possible to
identify the misalignment of interests between the dominant and the
subordinate to be the location of ongoing conflict otherwise known as
classification struggles. These battles take place in service contexts in
which rules and attitudes (obtained from Habitus) are mediated through
inter-subjective exchanges in which the relative symbolic positions of
different interest are represented by agents who themselves occupy positions
relative to those interests. The outcomes of service exchanges are therefore
co-constructed during the exchanges in which these positions of interest are
mobilised through the exercise of capital.
Re-classifications enacted through policy changes introduce new configurations
of the way institutional capital is mobilised to achieve different ends.
During the transition from one set of classifications to another conflict over
the symbolic status of different welfare groups becomes highly visible as a
form of rupture to the norm, like seismic fault lines. Once the end change
has been achieved the rupture may not be as evident to those who have not
experienced the prior state although the memory of the re-classification
persists for those who have.
The topic of conflict theory will be explored in more detail later. The
following section focuses on the effects of classification struggles on
workers.
Shifting classifications – the welfare field in Australia
The transition from the Job Network to the newly branded Job Services
Australia (JSA) was a period during which workers experienced change to
externally mandated requirements in the treatment of job seekers. Contrary to
espoused policy intent, the analysis from workers who experienced this
transition indicates a loss of flexibility in the treatments available to job
seekers. Worker caseloads increased exponentially, and a new focus on
employment outcomes came to dominate practice for those with the most complex
barriers to employment especially for clients who had previously been
quarantined in the Personal Support Program.
The rules of welfare to work have also increasingly resulted in the
re-classifications of welfare recipients into categories which government
contracted employment agencies are required to “service”. Examples of these
changes include changed eligibility for parenting payment recipients,
increasingly tougher qualifications for Disability Support Pensioners, and
heightened activity requirements for long term unemployed people.
Workers experienced the impact of the shift in classification of their clients
in job seeking became a state of “neglect, deficit or deceit” (refs). The
label job seeker itself imposes immediate obligations on the welfare
recipient, who within the system rules no longer fulfils a role of interest
other than that. The definition of job seeker is predicated on the assumption
of work avoidance, and is underpinned by several decades of policy development
intended to eradicate it.
These assumptions become the defining feature of the symbolic position of
those classified as job seekers. For example, parents no longer have the right
to put their caring first, as the obligation to meet activity tests becomes
the primary focus of those who work with them. The re-classification of
parents signifies a symbolic shift in field position in employment services
exchanges in which they come to be treated differently than before.
During this transition, workers experienced change in external conditions that
imposed changes in the way their practice were tolerated and they were
required to learn new skills such as reverse marketing, and chase job
outcomes.
Change in externally mandated requirements affects workers in profound. It is
not simply a matter of one day implementing a certain set of treatments for
job seekers. Change requires adjustments in worker outlook or attitude,
adjustments that do not always sit well with the individuals personal or
professional beliefs. These changes created conflict for the worker, conflicts
that are difficult for them to resolve and which have resulted in the exodus
of the “professionalised” workforces from employment services.
The conflicts in the case of these workers centre around two key issues: the
level of coercion that the system demands them to implement, and the level of
commitment they feel to getting job seekers into “crap” and unsustainable jobs
in order to maintain their employers’ performance ranking. Workers were
required to adopt disciplinary strategies, employing the institutional power
derived from the dominance of governmental economic capital to obtain
outcomes, in ways that conflicted with their view of what was really in the
best interest of the job seekers they work with.
Professionalised workers with experience of prior conditions strongly resisted
the mandate to punish job seekers with participation reports (PRs) and other
forms of punitive activities such as job search clubs. Their belief that
these disciplinary tools are negative to real engagement is based both in
their professional ethics, and through observations of the challenges this has
created in worker-client relationships amongst their colleagues. They had
experienced clients who had long histories of PRs who presented angrily (etc
etc) who were very difficult to bring back on side once they had received
financial penalties.
Professionalised workers implement a range of strategies to avoid having to
PR; they were “resourceful” in using their cultural capital (professional
knowledge about what might be going on for their clients, and their clients
probable reactions to PR-ing) to develop strategies to avoid having to PR
their clients.
Of course workers who entered the employment services workforce after the
transition from JN to JSA did not experience the same level of conflict over
the newly mandated treatments of job seekers even those with the most complex
barriers. In contrast to workers such as Mel see PRs as part of a standard set
of tools they have to use. Even Mel, an employment consultant who is
relatively new to the sector, reports having no choice but to submit PRs even
in circumstances she hopes the job seeker will get off. Although Mel plays
strictly by the rules with Centrelink, there are times when she wants them to
exercise discretion based on the notes she provides with her participation
reports.
In Sarah’s case she records an increasing emphasis in her colleagues using
PR’s to reconnect clients during the transition from JN to JSA. The
colleagues who are most likely to use PRs are those from the former JN with no
professional background. The workers were sceptical about the extent to which
their colleagues actually tried to contact job seekers who missed
appointments. Jo notes how they would just let the phone ring twice and
hang-up, as if the effort of contacting them was wasteful, when a PR would get
them in.
While professionalised workers see the hassle and help elements of the
services they provide as diametrically opposed, others are obliged to make
this work in their case management practice. They therefore have
less capital to resist what
dominant requirements dictate they do.
Capital and reflexiveness
Professional workers have qualifications which align with the “interests” of
their professions in the such fields as social work and psychology. Workers
with these qualifications display levels of cultural capital to be able to
reflect on their experiences from an informed position which involves the
synthesis of their own and their colleagues’ practice experience; and
emphasises the professional nature of their judgements and those of colleagues
they respected.
The perspective required to critically reflect and resist practice mandate is
lacking in junior workers who have been brought in recently, and who enact, in
word and action, the letter of “the contract”. They explain to their clients
this is what they are required to do by the contract, using the words and
language of the contract because they lack referent beyond this.
Cultural capital in the form of their professional qualifications enable Sarah
and Jo, or as in the case of Barbara 11 years practice experience, to reflect
critically on the practices required in their workplace, and resist these when
there is conflict with their preferences. Cultural capital enables them to
engage in strategies which may utlimately result in them needing to leave the
employer, yet with the option of finding work elsewhere.
Some of the workers don’t have so many options because they don’t have formal
qualifications, and even if she did her location makes it harder to get a job
at the right pay level that will enable her to live comfortably. This is an
example where the cultural capital obtained through qualifications or strong
and long history and performance in a job is not enough because of the
constraints on economic capital which exist in the form of a weak labour
market. Once again these stories illustrate how possession of capital is
dependent on it having a practical use which is dependent on a range of
external factors, some of them structural as in the case of the labour market.
xxxxxxxx
In the stories of welfare recipients I have identified a strong element of
subjective recognition as a mediating factor in treatments by workers. There
is often conflict between their own subjective apprehension of the needs of
clients, and the treatments they are required to implement. Furthermore, they
are required to treat them all as job seekers where the primary focus is
employability (Peck
and Theodore 2000).
This label of job seeker enables workers to distance themselves from clients
with whom they don’t readily identify, and give preferential treatment to
those they do. For example, Jo identifies the way in which subjective bias
enters workers judgements, especially those without qualifications, treatments
of job seekers.
Where there others in the office who had more of a PR compliance focus than
you?
There were a couple who had been on reception or in admin, they were very much
like the training package that we were given by DEEEWR, was very much A+B=C
and you follow this process and la de da de da, they just booked their
appointments, tried to call them once, and there was this whole thing of ring
ring. Oh it rang twice and they didn’t answer,
They had ones they like and ones they didn’t? What were those differences
based on?
Oh people they could identify more with
OK, so it was a subjective identification of some people more than others?
Oh absolutely, like one of the girls was from x herself, so anyone who was
kind of Anglo, young, same sort of lifestyle, couple of kids, they were her
favourites…So if there was some old Arab guy on payments for 5 years, she was
very hard line, and you could because it’s all under the guidelines.
The most wasteful activity the workers agree is job search clubs. Jo says, and
she notes how they are used selectively to punish certain types of job seekers
the workers don’t identify with.
Yeah you know we’ll show him, we’ll teach him, this one’s lazy therefore we’ll
put him in job club so he’ll have to come twice a week for four hours a week,
chuck him in the computer room in front of a computer, get him to flick
through newspapers that’ll motivate him, that’ll put the fire up him
(sarcastic). And that’s what, they were panicking we weren’t getting outcomes
so the more the higher ups were going arghh you’re not getting your outcomes,
the more hard core we were being encouraged to be. When I started it was all
kind of flowers and sweetness, yeah give people what they need and help them,
help them, then within 6 months it had gone to we’re not getting the outcomes
we need to start pushing people into job clubs which are the biggest waste of
time. We need to bore people and waste their time until they decide a job is
better. That’s it basically.
The two week intensive activity, compliance activity, was about boring people?
Yep.
Jo notices how this validation of their roles could be used as a power trip
for those who have not had power before, and who once they have been granted
this power in their (quasi) professional life, mete it out in questionable
doses. Worker recognition appears to be closely associated with the degree to
which workers experience empowerment as a result of the conditions they are
required to impose on job seekers, with Jo describing workers who positively
seemed to relish the new forms of power they have obtained in their jobs,
particularly punitive powers for people from “other” backgrounds.
Jo reflects on how some colleagues appear to thrive on the new form of
institutional power that comes into their possession.
It’s a power trip for someone who has not had the kind of power before, to go
well here you go love you’re now a professional person, and no reflection, no.
You’ve worked in admin, you know the system. Do the training package off you
go.
So that power trip was about them having authority to make significant
decisions relating to other people’s lives
In contrast, Sarah’s practice illustrates the ways in which discriminate use
of institutional power can be used to effectively engage welfare recipients in
negotiating their outcomes.
Yes so that’s my personal belief, and that’s why I was quite happy to explain
your responsibility, so that’s OK you don’t have to do what we say but these
are the consequences I don’t 100 per cent agree with it, but this is the way
it is, if you want to change but you can’t change overnight so either you are
going to be bothered by my letters, my contact, or Centrelink, or we can work
together, if you explain this to them like this, you have to pick the right
time, they usually prepared to negotiate.
So you reach a position of negotiation?
Sarah was able to articulate that this process involves the exercise of
institutional power, and how this was appropriate to use when compliance was
needed.
Yes so I have to utlize a bit of authority that I have, and I know some
workers weren’t very comfortable using these power strategies, but personally
I am comfortable because the world is not that fair all the time. You know
everyone has ups and downs in life, maybe you are not very happy and angry,
and I am here to help you to maybe ease the pain, or maybe help you get what
you want. So if you give them a choice, the feel like they have options, that
eradicate a bit of anxiety, this was when I was able to have a meaningful
discussion with them.
Yes its realty interesting so it sound like that you are able to take control?
Yes
But then you give them some power back for them to have some choices, so then
when you negotiate what the person wants to do now between certain pathways,
is that the beginning of the development of trust between you?
Yes, absolutely so and I always believe in peoples strengths and strengths in
their networks. (Sarah)
The subtlety of Sarah’s approach involves the application of measured forms of
capital to the welfare exchange. She applies institutional authority in the
right measure that is needed to get the job seeker’s engagement. She then
transitions the exchange to a more balanced domain of negotiation as the basis
on which to build the job seekers trust. It is a model of handling the
transaction that requires great skill to pull off.
Such a delicate balancing act can only be achieved when the conditions
dictating the terms of the exchange are set to accommodate this. It also
involves workers being in possession of the freedom, capacity and willingness
to engage with job seekers of all types without prejudice. Workers without the
capacity to use their power discriminately succeed only in increasing job
seeker disengagement. While the uncoupling of hassle from help would alleviate
this, to achieve any real and effective change to employment services, the
example provides a model on which such transactions can proceed in a way that
engages job seekers by empowering them as parties to their own future. This
empowerment is based on recognition of their needs and interests.
Sarah spoke of her attempts to influence the practice of colleagues she found
ill-equipped to handle the complexity of her clients. Peer to peer education
in which colleagues “struggle” to inform the work place with classifications
that align with their interests can only be successful relative to the degree
to which there is tolerance for these values; and as reform of employment
services for JSA resulted in changed classifications for job seekers with the
most complex barriers who had previously been quarantined from employment
focused employment assistance in the Personal Support Program (PSP).
xxx
This section has explored the ways in which capital hold value that is
relative to the context in which it is exercised. If it is recognised and
legitimated as having value its value reflects it value relative to that
context. The context (or field) provides the variable for the value of
capital as prescribed by the rules governing the context; and that the value
of capital is mediated through the subjective values of workers. Workers make
decisions which reflect their values to the extent they perceive the rules
governing their conduct permit this.
The rules employment services workers enforce are based on assumptions of work
avoidance which reinforce the low symbolic value of job seeker social
position. The ways in which this weighting is played out in the dynamic
inter-subjective relations between workers and clients illustrates how the
conflict between interests between agents and authorities is constructed in a
two-way exchange of views between workers and clients.
This conclusion leads to a discussion on the way rule surveillance is enforced
in employment services and the impact this has on welfare exchanges in this
context.
Part 2 Surveillance and workers
The need to be successful as an employment services agency drives highly
competitive cultures s where targets are set for workers. Agencies compete
with each other for star ratings, and at an agency level adopt strategies to
shed “unviable” caseload. Strategies noted by the workers to shift dead weight
case load, to cherry pick and park clients have all been noted by researchers
elsewhere. Neville (Neville
and Lohan 2011) for
example identified an inevitable tendency towards gaming behaviour, strategies
that are pursued at the agency level to improve competitiveness.
In fact terms like “deadweight” caseload are quoted by both workers and DEEWR
shows the symbolic complicity between
contracting and contracted agency. This complicity speaks of the
contradictions inherent in the system which is supposed to respond to the
needs of individuals, but which in reality the priority is a race to get as
many people into jobs regardless of the individual’s preferences and the long
term viability of the job.
A feature of neoliberalism has been the drive towards new punitiveness (Garrett
2013; Pratt,
Brown et al. 2013) as
phenomenon that is most evident in the increasing levels of incarceration in
the West, especially North America. New punitiveness is also characterised by
new forms of incarceration or punishment, reversing the shift in welfare
state/penal modernity (p.xv) towards practices that are less commensurate with
the nature of the offence.
The deprivation of welfare to stretches of 8 week non-payment periods is one
form of these practices in relation to job seekers. Although the penalty is
only imposed in conditions of persistent non-compliance (or for leaving a job
without a reasonable excuse), it jeopardises welfare through the withdrawal of
payment for periods which result in homelessness and the escalation of debt.
Some have already argued that neoliberal governmentalisation is enacted
through prescribing the actions of agents (eg (McDonald
and Marston 2005; Dean
2009) .
Agents in the form of workers at the front line are the delivery of the
responsibilising project, where their activities are as much subject to
surveillance as those of their clients (Peck
and Theodore 2000; Peck
and Theodore 2000; Peck
2001).
The requirement for employment services to “service” individuals from these
new categories is subject to surveillance through departmental monitoring of
KPIs and “quality”. The surveillance burden is onerous, and providers who fail
to perform at the right levels lose their contracts. Contract compliance in
its various forms including star rating performance has become such a
significant driver of provider behaviour it has overtaken service standards as
the single most preoccupation of the sector.
The behaviour of employment services workers is also subject to hard rules
they must follow, and reinforced through monitoring and surveillance which
leaves them challenged to exercise discretion in most contexts. The primary
form of surveillance to which employment service workers are subject is KPIs
and target based rewards systems. Through these mechanism employers are able
to check their staffs’ performance and drive them towards targets in a
relentless drive to push performance ever upwards.
The surveillance of compliance is felt keenly by workers as requirements to
lift standards and achieve which outcomes, dominates their exchanges with job
seekers. The impact of this phenomenon has been reported in forms relating to
indicators in the capacity to exercise discretion, stress, morale and the
quality of the working alliance (refs).
Recognition; misrecognition and symbolic violence
Workers experienced the impact of changes to employment services system rules
that eventually effected change to the workplace culture. In some cases
workers from old Job Network providers were brought in to actively change the
ethos of the workplace, a feat which they eventually achieved.
For Sarah this meant she experienced change in external conditions that
imposed changes in the way she her practice could be tolerated. As the shift
in classifications resulted in these changes Sarah found herself becoming more
misrecognised as time passed.
Sarah herself experienced the erosion of recognition of her professional
background, and how this put her out sync with the demands of her employers
and colleagues. She describes her experiences of this transitional phase with
great sadness as if she found it difficult to accept the redundancy of her
professional skills and insight. She continued with the employer making a
stand against the new culture with shows
of resistance involving not buying into a new rewards system, for example.
It was not an explicit conflict with her employer but as she spoke on this
subject she became more hesitant and troubled, as if she had experienced
personal pain as the professional qualities she had practised came to be less
valued and validated in the workplace context. It is possible here to see how
misrecognition affects workers in practice in workplaces in which the
qualifications and skills required to perform the job are phased out.
The workers also observed that workers from agencies which failed to win the
new JSA contract were dogged by an air of dejection because the failure of
their employers to win the contracts was internalised as internal failure.
The workers who had colleagues who joined their teams from “failed” agencies;
one who Jo emphathised with because she could see how she had internalised
“failure”.
Even workers who are new to the system do not always agree with what they are
required to do, especially in the case of clients with complex needs. Mel for
example, who did not wanted some of the PRs she had to submit to be
overturned, but which weren’t.
Workers become conflicted about their roles. They need to be loyal to their
employer and the culture and standards of the place the work for, reflecting
the need to belong and have justification for their actions. It creates
ambivalence however, for example for Mel who reports having how completely
unrealistic her KPIs are, how unreasonable it is for them to be set that high,
and how bad it feels to be an employee who misses out on the bonus of the
reward system because on this. Her way of opting out was to look for another
job, until she found out by chance her work is actually quite appreciated.
Sarah, a qualified psychologist, also noticed a tendency to vilify some job
seekers that involves an interesting form of disassociation worth exploring in
detail. The disassociation relates to their need for professional recognition
and validation of what workers are doing, therefore their inability to help
some job seekers is transferred back on to clients in the form of blame.
It’s a horrible name, but I have to say, a lot of workers are experiencing a
very difficult situation which they didn’t have the skill to deal with, it
could be a quite traumatic situation, of course the defence mechanism, so this
way of being critical, of looking down at job seekers, is a way to manage
their stress I think, I’m not justifying their behaviour but I can see where
there horribleness is coming from
Basically they’re protecting themselves too, from being hurt, being
traumatized or affected by, I think they externalise it in a way that they
don’t get hurt, they put it down
Is that because they feel inadequate to the task
Yes I think so, they have given up on them, but they don’t say that their not
allowed to, they make clients the problem, I am not the one who can’t deal
with them, it’s the clients problems, so that shift somehow helps them to cope
better.
Because for workers, I am here to help this client get this job, it’s a kind
of hope or kind of desire or motivation, it takes effect, it takes your
energy,
Sounds like you have to be in a positive energy space to do it
Yes to hold it, but when you’ve lost that power or motivation or ability to
carry, then you need to have some sort of justification, which becomes the
clients because of their difficulty, not your inability (Sarah)
This phenomenon is salient because it indicates a great tension in the ways in
which workers (quasi or fully professional) need to subjectively validate and
reinforce recognition for the work they are doing. It is not only job seekers
who need recognition, it is workers, who find it difficult to cope if they do
not feel empowered in their roles; and have terms in which they can justify
their practice. This domination plays out for workers as the symbolic violence
of misrecognition, in the frustrations they feel at having to impose rules,
order and performance they are powerless to change.
In the view of these workers the construction of unemployment which informs
employment services is wrong. It is not only damaging because it involves the
misrecognition of individual clients, it is wrong because it denotes a mindset
that is adopted by workers which provides them with typecast perspectives on
their clients which they lack the professional insight to critique.
Misrecognition is being generated through the reproduction of the stereotype
of laziness or indolence, a view the current employment services system
reproduces through its emphasis on compliance and high volume outcomes.
Par 3 Centrelink tensions
The conflict between hassle and help can be expressed as a conflict over
contradictory classifications which produce different system rules, a conflict
that is most readily identifiable when illustrated through the contrast in ES
and Centrelink practice. The construction of welfare recipients as errant
informs employment services rules, while a rights-based view of social
security inform Centrelink rules.
The orthodoxy regarding street level bureaucrats and discretion is that it is
mediated by the cultural situatedness of workers, and their perceptions and
attitudes towards the deservingness of their clients (see for example {} . (Maynard-Moody
and Musheno 2003)
Research into the employment service street level workers has shown that this
discretion has been progressively eroded as system rules have become more and
more detailed and proscriptive, to the extent this is now a major concern
within the employment services sector (see for example (Ziguras,
Considine et al. 2003; Ziguras
2004; McDonald
and Marston 2005; Nevile
2008; Considine,
Lewis et al. 2011).
However employment service workers continue have some discretion over some
areas of their work. They have the option of lodging a contact report instead
of a participation report and it is up to the judgement of the worker whether
they believe the job seeker has a reasonable excuse. This permits a
significant degree of discretion to operate in this exchange which has been
left deliberately open for the workers to exercise judgement about “validity”
of excuses, and to assess avoidance type behaviour.
The perception of service users that discretion in relation to participation
failures is inappropriate suggests they hold concerns that individual bias
enters into the equation, a view mentioned by Kelly in particular.
Well I was on the phone for an hour and a half, thinking my payment’s
suspended, I’ve got no money to pay rent, or feed my daughter, this
is all through one decision from this one lady who quite honestly does not
like me. How can one person have so much power? I was really stressed. I
was shaking in my body, for a moment
For Kelly there was a clear difference between the way in which workers were
required to administer system rules by following scripts at Centrelink to the
experience with her employment service consultant. The view from the
participants can be explained by the shift in control from the safety of a
knowable and documented system, to decisions based on worker assessment of the
validity of activity or excuses. If as was this case in Kelly’s experience,
the worker gets it wrong, there is an immediate loss of trust and feeling of
being unsafe.
This situation is not helped about the high level of contestability over the
definition of “reasonable excuse” regarding a participation failure where the
research participants believed the subjective interpretations of their workers
were also weighted towards the assumption of work avoidance which because, in
many cases, this is what is required by their employers. The participants
gained this view about the assumption because of the ways in which they
observe themselves having become to be constituted as job seekers and welfare
dependents.
Participation failures are subject to investigations by Centrelink personnel
who pursue a script to evaluate whether the job seeker had an excuse for
non-participation which consists of a long list of possible variables relating
to the individual’s personal circumstances. During this process job seekers
disclose information to Centrelink staff they may not have to their employment
service agency, or which they did disclose but found it was dismissed as
unsatisfactory.
Centrelink impose a high rate of overturn of employment services decisions
based on this information which indicates a more “disinterested” process of
investigation that is not weighted so highly on the assumption of work
avoidance, but of social security law and entitlement.
Workers report rule playing by
job seekers who go back and forth between their employment service and
Centrelink, playing the system to get the most out of it. All workers
identified a small minority of job seekers who are expert at deceiving
Centrelink, and who also use the fact there is a weak labour market to get
away with being unemployed.
Querying the rules has the effect of creating conflict in service encounters,
a problem widely reported by the participants who have found a high level of
defensiveness in both Centrelink and Employment service provider behaviour as
a result. This defensiveness is a result of the requirement for these workers
to implement rules according to strict guidelines and therefore to guard the
interests of the authorities they represent. As their application of the
rules was under scrutiny it is understandable they should occupy a position in
which their actions stand up to external examination.
There is an inherent tension here between whose interests workers serve which
reflects the way in which employment service design is weighted towards
assuming there are high levels of work avoidance amongst job seekers, as
opposed to being weighted towards being there to support their needs.
This area of discrepant interpretations of the two agencies is the area of
ongoing negotiation and investigation by the agency authorities because of the
ways in which conflict is escalated from the employment services agencies to
Centrelink causing the latter to shoulder a high workload of investigations.
Based on this analysis however, it is unlikely they will resolve these
discrepancies until their workers are basing their judgements from rules
informed by the same interests.
The idea that employment services and Centrelink interest are misaligned
explains a good deal of the system noise in transactions that occur between
the agencies. This system noise is based on a mutual incomprehension of the
respective parties’ roles. It is reflected in institutional rules, cultures
and the behaviour of workers who are literally singing from a different hymn
sheet because of the different welfare constructions informing their
institutional practices.
This area of discrepant interpretations of the two agencies is the area of
ongoing negotiation and investigation by the agency authorities because of the
ways in which conflict is escalated from the employment services agencies to
Centrelink causing the latter to shoulder a high workload of investigations.
Based on this analysis however, it is unlikely they will resolve these
discrepancies until their workers are basing their judgements from rules
informed by the same interests.
Jo’s case study illustrates the critical differences between the interests of
employment services and Centrelink respectively represent. Jo had the
opportunity to observe this from the perspective of a Centrelink worker
undertaking Comprehensive Compliance reviews of the clients. Their priority
was to restore their clients on the system and investigate the complex reasons
for non-compliance. Jo says more often than not they could find reasons, “to
get them back on the system”.
She notes her work on the compliance team involved “getting people back on to
the system” in contrast to employment services whose interests are
disciplinary and involving activities that have been designed purely as forms
of punishments.
An interesting attribute of her clients here is their emotional “flatness”. It
is that mood of weariness and resignation, of their being nothing much the
client can do about the situation, of disempowerment, as they are subject to
yet another process, that although in this case involves the restoration of
withheld payments, does not “re-engage” them with the system. In fact, the
routines of compliance and punishment, have created the disengagement that
once they are back at the employment services who reported them, is expressed
in antagonistic terms and in conflict with workers.
While at Centrelink they submit to a process that is necessary to restore
their payments, the process does not help them to address the complex issues
that contribute to their welfare dependence. Receipt of payment is a necessity
for subsistence, not something that is immediately acknowledged as demanding
reciprocity or mutual obligation. Job seekers know they have obligations and
articulate these as mandated norms to which they in most part agree; they
articulate them as obligations that are reciprocal in terms of their need for
recognition of their interests.
All workers emphasised the complexity of the needs of the clients who were in
the most trouble with the system. For job seekers in crisis, the capacity to
identify these interests is overwhelmed by the need to stabilise their
personal circumstances, stabilisation that can take many years of effort to
achieve. Without this stabilisation, there cannot be any progress towards
building on their strengths, a professional approach which helps clients
identify and articulate interests.
Despite the best efforts of workers who
bend the rules and go to
extraordinary lengths to assist their clients, some of whom lack awareness of
their own mental health conditions, the “merry go round” as some call it, to
go around and knock them off and force them back on in relentless and
counterproductive cycles that serve only to entrench their disengagement and
lost self-efficacy.
Misrecognition of the problem
The sense that things have become so much harder during JSA was reinforced by
Barbara who in her eleven years of experience in the system, has never seen it
so bad.
The conclusion of this analysis is the same as that for the analysis of job
seeker stories. That is that policy settings for employment services
misrecognise the needs clients and obliges workers to administer treatments
which are counterproductive to engagement. They also leave workers frustrated
and with a conflicted sense of identity about their roles. Hassle and help do
not work well together, except in a very small number of cases where enforced
social contact is a catalyst to behavioural change for those who are socially
isolated.
Similarly to the clients interviewed for this research, worker indignation is
strongest for those who have they most highly articulated sense of
professional and personal interests. Sarah experienced domination in the
workplace that left her personally upset. Jo describes hating what she was in
employment services, because it was so at odds with her professional standards
as a social worker.
The theoretical conclusion of this analysis is that resistance is a relational
property of the way capital
is “recognised” and mediated institutionally (according to rules) or
symbolically (according to values). Workers are more likely to resist
requirements imposed on them if their values do not align with the rules of
their service or the values of their employers, and there is capacity within
the rules for them to do so.
References
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