‘Working Together?’: The Salvation Army and the Job Network

Abstract

This article explores the changing relationship between government and The Salvation Army, as manifested in the development and implementation of employment policy in Australia between 1998 and 2007. This exploration focuses on the introduction of market discourse throughout the contracting process, in particular how this discourse seeks to reconstruct service users as ‘consumers’, and the Salvation Army’s response to this. By studying the ways in which this religiously and socially motivated non-profit organization sought to mediate neo-liberal discourses of competition and consumerism, we seek to shed light on the processes and pressures affecting faith-based and other non-profit organizations that increasingly find themselves acting as agents of government policy under the principles of New Public Management (NPM).