D. Rice, MSc

PhD Project

“The activation of unemployed citizens in The Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom: a micro-institutionalist perspective”

The focal point of my research is the local implementation of activating labour market policies (ALMPs). These policies were implemented on a large scale in Europe and elsewhere from about the mid-1980s onwards, implying that unemployed citizens are offered strong incentives to get off the welfare payroll as quickly as possible, either in the form of ‘carrots’ (reintegration measures) or ‘sticks’ (stricter eligibility rules, benefit cuts, etc.). Much debate in the academic literature in recent years has circled around the question whether ALMPs mark a caesura in the social protection systems of the Western countries because they shift responsibility for employment and sustenance away from the welfare state and on to the individual citizen, or whether ALMPs are adapted in such multiform fashions in different welfare states due to different cultural and institutional legacies that one cannot speak of a general trend in this regard.

Although such a macro-level discussion of ALMPs has its merits because it directs our attention to cataclysmic societal shifts and/or cross-country similarities and differences, I have some doubts whether many of the theoretical arguments made in this discussion really hold once one moves from the level of national policy-making to the local implementation level where ALMPs are given their final shape in the interaction between caseworkers and citizens. After all, how and whether an unemployed client is ‘activated’ may depend as much on the local labour market situation, the policy preferences of local policy makers and managers, the professional identity of the responsible caseworker, or the personal preferences of the client as on the broader policy directives of the national government. The aim of my research is thus to understand and explain how national ALMPs are adapted in local policy implementation contexts, whether similar or different implementation patterns emerge across countries, regions, municipalities and/or personality types of caseworkers and clients, and what can be learned from these findings about how different types of citizens are activated in different types of structural settings.

 

Publications