Year: 2025
Type: editorial
Abstract: Employment services have been subject to repeated reform for thirty years, particularly in Australia. The country has been at the forefront of welfare-to-work reform trends internationally, pioneering several of the public management reform agendas that have reshaped the governance of activation since the 1990s (van Berkel and Borghi, 2008). These include the contracting-out of case management of the long-term unemployed in the early 1990s, the move to full marketisation in the late 1990s, followed by full privatisation in the early 2000s and an ever-increasing emphasis on results-based payment models (O’Sullivan et al., 2021). Broadly reflecting a governance approach anchored in the ‘New Public Management of activation’ (Weishaupt, 2024), these reform dynamics—dubbed a project of ‘double activation’ (Considine et al., 2015)—have unfolded hand-in-glove with substantial changes in social policy designed to ‘activate’ both claimants and providers. On the one hand, jobseekers are ‘activated’ into work, principally through ‘demanding’ (Raffass, 2017) behavioural instruments like onerous job-search requirements, Work-for-the-Dole and other mutual obligations. On the other, successive waves of administrative reform have also involved subjecting providers to many of the same behavioural policy instruments (targets, performance monitoring, financial incentives) as claimants, so as to motivate them to activate jobseekers ‘in the right way’ (Andersen and Larsen, 2024: 8). An important contribution of the analytic lens of double activation is that it directs enquiry towards the political effects of seemingly technical reforms. This is through examining the distributional consequences of administrative reforms for claimants’ access to social rights and surfacing the ways in which adjustments to how policies are delivered reconfigures what policies are enacted (Brodkin, 2013). This is an underlying theme of this special issue, which focuses on the latest developments in the governance of welfare-to-work amidst a period of unprecedented ‘digitalisation’ in welfare administration (Alston, 2019; Busemeyer et al., 2022; Henman, 2022, 2025).
DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.70002
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408320885