Frontline managers' perceptions and justifications of behavioural conditionality

Talieh Sadeghi,Lars Inge Terum

doi:10.1111/spol.12574

Talieh Sadeghi, Lars Inge Terum

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12574

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Abstract

AbstractThe debate on behavioural conditionality is characterised by abundant controversies. Frontline managers have a particularly important role in implementing these policies because their interpretation of the welfare policies regulates the frameworks of street‐level bureaucrat's discretionary powers. A nationwide survey among frontline managers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration revealed that 86% of the managers expressed strong normative support towards welfare conditionality. With this as a backdrop, this paper develops a better understanding of managers' perceptions and justifications of the Norwegian type of behavioural conditionality. Analysis of focus group interview data showed that the managers adopted a broad definition of conditionality, meaning promotion of an overall (re)integration of the client into the society as opposed to the narrow definition focusing solely on labour market integration. Furthermore, the implementation of welfare conditionality primarily was perceived as mild and client sensitive. The managers mainly justified welfare conditionality in terms of care and paternalistic defences, arguing that requirement of work and activities are in the client's best interest, understood in terms of social democratic values.

Highlights

Throughout Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, activation policies, understood as a set of measures designed to integrate jobless people into the labour market (Dingeldey, 2007; Eichhorst, Kaufmann, Konle-Seidl, & Reinhard, 2008), have become increasingly widespread and applicable to a growing number of target groups and benefit areas
A nationwide survey among frontline managers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NLWA) showed that 86% of the respondents expressed strong normative support towards behavioural conditionality
The broad frontline managers' endorsement (86%) of the ethically controversial conditionality in a street-level organisation staffed with a large number of professional social workers seemed to be a counter-intuitive finding

Summary

Introduction

Throughout Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, activation policies, understood as a set of measures designed to integrate jobless people into the labour market (Dingeldey, 2007; Eichhorst, Kaufmann, Konle-Seidl, & Reinhard, 2008), have become increasingly widespread and applicable to a growing number of target groups and benefit areas. Behavioural conditionality, being one such measure, is the requirements of ongoing behavioural compliance for welfare benefit receipt. Despite gross cross-national variations in the global north, conditionality has sparked ample research and debate characterised by abundant controversies. The justificatory and moral foundations of conditionality have been subject to heated debate. It has been argued that given the coercive quality of conditionality and, challenges posed to notions of liberty, it requires thorough and robust justification (Kane & Köhler-Olsen, 2015; Watts & Fitzpatrick, 2018)

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