Local welfare agencies and their workers

Over the past decades, developed welfare states have gone through major reform processes. In the field of employment benefits, one of the main objectives of these reforms was to ‘activate’ social security arrangements for unemployed people who are able to work and, thus, to promote labour- market participation and reduce welfare dependency (Gilbert 2002). These reforms affected substantive and operational characteristics of welfare states (Borghi & Van Berkel 2007). Not only the entitlements and obligations of unemployed people have changed, but also the ways in which social security arrangements are administered and social services are provided. Many countries introduced forms of marketization in the provision of activation services, changed traditional ways of balancing central regulation and decentralized room for policy-making and policy implementation decisions, established so-called ‘one-stop agencies’ for the unemployed, and started to make use of New Public Management strategies in managing benefit and public employment services agencies (Kazepov 2010; Van Berkel 2010; Van Berkel et al. 2011).

For benefit and local welfare agencies these reforms have had important consequences: it changed their ‘core business’ from administering income protection schemes to activation, even though their traditional tasks did not disappear (Van Berkel et al. 2011). The exact nature of these consequences strongly depends on national contexts. The urgency to transform organizations, services and tasks of front-line work in countries with a long tradition in providing employment services to unemployed people, such as the Scandinavian tradition of active labour-market policies (Hvinden & Johansson 2007), will differ from the urgency experienced in countries without such a tradition. Countries where the administration of social insurance and the provision of employment services used to be integrated will experience other problems with coordinating social security and labour-market policy than countries where these tasks were carried out by different agencies. But despite path-dependent reform trajectories and urgencies in individual coun tries, the transformation of passive into active welfare states affects the core business of benefit and local welfare agencies in all developed welfare states.

From the perspective of organizational and public management studies, the transformation of welfare states and their impact on the tasks and responsibilities of public agencies and their front-line workers raise some interesting issues.