Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance

Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance is an edited collection focused on the design and re-design of welfare-to-work systems around the world. The welfare state has undergone a radical change over the past 30 years. Nowhere have the changes been more fundamental, and the results more pronounced, than in relation to welfare-to-work, employment services privatization, and jobseeker activation.

This book represents a new standard in the field of employment services scholarship; authors from around the world, all experts in the field, draw on a much longer intellectual legacy, in particular New Public Management; social policy; public policy; activation; the welfare state; the third sector; ‘flexsecurity’; mission drift; and quasi-markets. This book confirms employment services delivery as a discrete field of research, and uses employment services as a case study to advance understanding in relation to a host of broader principles and concepts. 

Each of the papers included in this book utilises a national/program case study, and each considers employment services policy in general, and activation practices in particular; essays stand as unique and standalone contributions to the literature, and combined, present a significant contribution to scholarship, and practice, in this important field.