The Marketization of Employment Services

Abstract

This book examines the marketization of employment services and its consequences in Denmark, Great Britain, and Germany. What concretely does marketization mean in practice? What are its effects on the services and their governance? How does marketization and its effects map against the main ‘regime types’ found in comparative social science? These questions are answered using more than 100 qualitative interviews with policymakers, managers, and front-line workers. The qualitative material in the book shows how transactions are structured by the public authorities that fund the services and how managers respond both collectively as a sector and individually in organizing services. The book does so within a framework that allows both within- and between-country comparisons. Employment services are used as a window into the much larger phenomenon of intensified economic competition across Europe. These three countries have marketized their employment services in different ways, and the distinct trajectories are discussed. We define employment services as government-funded services to move jobless people into, or closer to, paid work, with a public employment service as the responsible ‘public authority’. Marketization in this book is conceptualized in terms of the features of transactions that produce competition between providers. Providers of employment services are deeply affected by marketization, because it shapes the uncertainty and resource scarcity that they face. Marketization can lead to the disorganization of employment relations and the intensification of managerial control, and the quality of services is part of these organization-level effects. Marketization creates four dilemmas that lead to change in governance—price versus quality, payment-by-results versus equal access to services, user choice versus user compulsion, and transparency/openness vs transaction costs. Failures of the work-first welfare state are due in large part to the failures of marketization.