In Work and the Welfare State, editors Evelyn Brodkin and Gregory Marston and their collaborators have put together a valuable volume on the spread of workfare initiatives in western industrialized countries. The term “workfare” has been applied to a wide range of policies in recent decades; it is defined here as the “composite of policies and practices through which countries have promoted participation in the paid labor market and reductions in income assistance to those outside the labor market” (p. 6). In many European countries, workfare has entailed training and education to help workers adapt to changes in the labor market, while in others, such as the UK, the emphasis has been on job search activities. In the United States, workfare has typically entailed welfare-to-work policies aimed at welfare recipients, including work requirements backed by sanctions. Compounding the extensive and often confusing array of policies under the workfare label is an equally broad-ranging debate over the consequences of these initiatives. Some scholars argue that workfare has improved lives by increasing the participation of the poor in paid employment and decreasing reliance on welfare; others suggest that its effect has been to trap the poor in an insecure low-wage labor market while diminishing the social safety net.
Brodkin and Marston’s work makes a bold and important intervention in this discussion. Through a close analysis of workfare practices adopted in six countries, the book’s authors search out the deeper patterns behind workfare’s expansion. They look beyond the obvious bases for crossnational comparison (policy components, spending levels, numbers served), to focus on the agencies and organizations that implement workfare and their impact on those served. At the street-level, they find, organizations have adapted to new governance structures (including devolution, decentralization, and privatization), and adopted new managerial strategies (including subcontracting, client assessment and sorting, and performance measures). They conclude that in recent decades, these strategies have “tended to move in a common direction, quietly pushing back the welfare state’s boundaries and enlarging the zone in which market principles prevail” (p. 272). The argument is persuasive, and the volume makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of workfare by doing three things particularly well.
To begin with, the analysis of these cases is effective in demonstrating that workfare is indeed shaped by the practices of “street-level organizations” (SLOs), in significant and under-recognized respects. Drawing on research in half a dozen countries, the authors contend that to understand what workfare is (and what it does to and for clients) requires careful study not only of formal policies, but of governance structures, managerial decisions, and practices among frontline workers in the agencies and organizations that carry out policies. For example, workfare policies often include ill-defined or even competing objectives, under tight budget constraints. This leaves the task of interpreting the policy and prioritizing among objectives—in short, “operationalizing” workfare—to frontline agencies. The practices they adopt determine to a large degree how workfare is experienced on the ground: Will program recipients receive adequate support and training or be compelled to go it alone as they are steered into an uncertain labor market? The organizations, in short, do not simply deliver policy, but also create it and determine its effects (both intended and unintended) on those who rely on their services. The role and impact of organizational practices cannot be fully captured by standard measures of formal policy outcomes, such as the numbers of clients offered job training or moved off the public assistance rolls. Though the call to focus on street-level operations in policy analysis is not new, it has received relatively little attention in assessments of workfare policies. This volume is a welcome contribution in this respect.
A second notable contribution is the breadth and depth of the comparative analysis provided by the fifteen authors and ten cases. The volume takes on one of the most significant developments in social policy in the past four decades—the shift toward work-based approaches to social assistance—and submits it to a comprehensive and crossnational analysis.
The case studies address initiatives in the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The selection of cases runs across familiar typologies of western welfare states, to include countries with both more- and less-generous social welfare programs. Although the authors address different questions (from how immigrants are integrated to policies regarding disabilities), the case studies cover important shared territory. Each provides 1) a brief introduction to the character and trajectory of formal workfare policies; 2) an overview of key managerial reforms and strategies introduced in recent years; and 3) an analysis of the impact of these changes, not only in transforming the focus and practices of SLOs, but also on recipients (including their access to benefits or services, and their political and social standing). The volume is occasionally bogged down by the number of discrete analytical frameworks introduced in various chapters. But on the whole, the book avoids the fragmentation of many edited volumes, achieving a striking coherence. Taken together, the case studies illustrate the value of crossnational comparisons in social policy, by exposing and examining a critical trend in policy and practice across nations with differing institutional arrangements and political histories.
Third and finally, the authors convincingly show that despite national policy differences, street-level organizations increasingly “share a familiar programmatic toolkit” (p. 7) for processing participants, one that reflects heightened regulatory (and often punitive) approaches toward the poor and decreased social safety net protections. The effect, the editors point out, is to undercut what Gosta Esping-Andersen and other welfare state scholars have called the positive “decommodifying” effects of post-World War II welfare states.
Several of the case studies are highly effective in rendering visible the deeper logic of various managerial strategies in this toolkit and their sometimes pernicious effects. Performance management—billed as a neutral management tool to assess and increase efficiency and staff accountability—is a case in point. In the workfare context, many performance management strategies are hardly neutral: two U.S. cases described here illustrate how they provide incentives for cutting caseloads or sanctioning clients, rather than addressing their complex needs. Such managerial strategies are deeply consequential, the authors point out, because they “provide an avenue for changing the boundaries of the welfare state while simultaneously limiting the visibility of these changes and, thus, the prospects for political mobilization and resistance” (p. 277).
This insight, into how a shared set of governance and managerial procedures has driven the political project of workfare, is one of the volume’s most trenchant contributions. It also points to one area in which readers may be left wanting more—namely, the level of attention to the politics of workfare. It is a mark of the analytic depth of the work that the editors and many contributors see the daily procedures and practices of workfare as profoundly political in their origins, their impact, or both. Several chapters address how and why workfare or managerial reform initiatives have been pursued by certain actors (such as conservative parties) and opposed by others (such as European trade unions). Yet the volume as a whole poses other fascinating questions without fully addressing them. Why has workfare been embraced by so many political parties and leaders across the spectrum? What explains the widespread political support for the governance and managerial reforms used to implement workfare? In what ways are the “tensions and contradictions” inherent in the workfare project (p. 278) driving the turn to these regulatory practices at the street level? As scholars continue to grapple with these issues, Work and the Welfare State will serve as an indispensable guide to the questions that need to be answered, and a powerful reminder of why they are so consequential.
