Paper for the RESQ conference, Copenhagen, June 2010
Employment policy restructuring and the “de-professionalization” question -
Do recent Danish developments give an answer?
Henning Jørgensen, Iben Nørup and Kelvin Baadsgaard
Aalborg, June 2010
CARMA
Institut for Økonomi, Politik og Forvaltning
Fibigerstræde 1
9220 Aalborg Øst,
Denmark
E-mail:
Policy developments, jobcentres and semi-professionals
A growing discrepancy is to be witnessed between what is said and what is done in the public sector. A general discourse is emphasising knowledge and competence in organisations and among professionals and semi-professionals (Evetts 2003, 2009, Svensson 2003). Yet, diminishing discretion by the side of employees and a general tendency of de-professionalization is reported again and again in the public welfare state sectors.
The EU has for ten years had “the knowledge-based society” as a guiding principle for its Lisbon strategy from the year 2000. And on national scenes, the same discourse has been mushrooming during recent years. Knowledge, learning, professionalism and human capital approaches have been stressed again and again. The professionalism stipulated calls for self-regulated development of competent employees working together in small teams or organisations which have to perform in a competitive way vis-à-vis other service producers. Strategic recruitment, socialisation and management by values, and professional performance are interrelated, we are told. And yet, it is central control, output measurement, strong management practices and external disciplining exercises that count (Dalsgaard and Jørgensen 2010). New Public Management (NPM) has an emphasis on both internal and external control of professionals and semi-professionals. The internal management and evaluation practices are supplemented by external ones in the form of tendering, audits, benchmarking exercises, and privatisations. This also goes for the governance of employment policy in almost all European countries (Larsen and Van Berkel 2009, Serrano Pascual and Magnusson 2007, Considine 2001, Finn 2000).
Professional work has been defined only as service production during recent decades – and it has to be (quasi-)marketed, price-tagged, and evaluated – e.g. commodified. NPM is operating with public employees more as enemies than as loyal and trustful “professionals”. The discourses on the knowledge-based society and the NPM programmes glorifying marketisation and managerialism call for stronger professional competences. Enterprising service organisations implies more professionalism in dealing with citizen´s wishes and demands – but also increasing demand for explicit accounting of professional competences (quality control, auditing, and other forms of performance management). However, the experiences of many of the well-educated employees involved are that less weight is actually given to competence development, discretion is shrinking instead of being improved, and outsourcing of tasks and jobs paves the way for uncontrolled private staffing decisions. Recruitment practices might have been changed as well in the public sector, given less weight to educational background and more to certain loyal values and attitudes supporting the NPM doctrines and organisational cultures.
This seems to be true also in regard to the labour market policy field. Different kinds of information tell us that professional competence tends to be less formally explicit, is being de-contextualised, and looked upon in a different way from the side of both central authorities and local management. Then you could ask the question of the consequences as to professional methods and qualifications? De-professionalization has been a common name of the consequences of such developments towards market-bureaucracy, service transposing, and accountability. The international literature looks very pessimistic as to the developments in regard to professionalization. Perhaps the opinion of one-dimensional developments needs to be challenged?
We will address this important question in our paper, drawing on the first results from an ongoing project dealing with professional practice and qualification processes in Danish labour market policy – or “employment policy” as the official name is now. Especially the efforts done in order to try to bring so-called “weaker” unemployed persons back into the open labour market have been scrutinised, and the perceptions, reactions, and educational wishes of the employees in Danish job centres are being analysed.
Labour market policies have grown in importance in Western societies due to the rise of “active” policy approaches. Activation has become a general European trend during the last 10-15 years. A shift has taken place from passive income protection to the promotion of labour market participation for all groups and efforts to enhance the employability of each individual wage earner. Individualisation of risks has been a general tendency following or preceding these developments. And social protection schemes have been altered accordingly. It is the whole system of social protection that has been “activated” (Barbier 2005). Central steering efforts have been seen in most systems at the same time; and it is to these coordination actions that limitations as to discretion and to de-professionalization have been attributed. But standardisation and central steering has its limits.
But to our understanding, activation policy goals actually increase the ambiguity of claims of service delivery. Discretion is a choice among possible courses of action and non-action. Discretionary decision making is taking place at both an organisational and at the front-line level and materialises in everyday practice in local jobcentres. There is a chain of decisions at work within the labour market policy system; and at the decentral level room of manoeuvre for the jobcentres to judge and to decide exists (Mosley 2009). Both management of the system and co-production with the citizens is at stake. Or to put it differently: The coordination and steering efforts between organisations are of great importance for the policy formation and for the actions taking place within the individual organisation, which have consequences for the micro-management and for the discretion of front-line workers. Organisational systems cannot totally configurate the behavior of the front-line worker. The ambiguity, however, is creating diversity as to organisational choices and as to discretion and professionalization/de-professionalization.
Our thesis is that incompatible claims and control mechanisms are at work: individual autonomy and discretion for the (semi-)professionals versus organisational control, individual competence needs versus NPM steering arrangements. This implies a change from collective politics and professional collegiality based on knowledge and ethics to organisational efficiency and accountability based on bureaucratic rules, measurement and customer´s satisfaction. The dominant tendency might be a replacement of professional responsibility by organisational accountability. Consequently, the importance of collegial decision-making and qualification for the work as well as ethical considerations has been diminishing strongly. But no uniform pattern is to be expected. Professionalism is perhaps no longer a self-defined “third” logic as supposed by Friedson (2001). Even though, it is worth investigating the de-professionalization question by combining more kinds of literature; of public administration and governance with social policy literature and the sociology of professions. This is the analytical perspective. But more importantly: The labour market policy implementation will have to rely on less well-educated and less qualified people with a limited degree of discretion. The result, presumably, will be a less responsive, less targeted, and less effective policy. This is the practical and political perspective.
More kinds of educational backgrounds and quite different practical experiences are represented in the Danish public sector, including the Danish employment system. But it is not difficult to identify the tensions and contradictions between collegiality and market-supporting bureaucracy, or between occupational professionalism and organisational professionalism during recent years. The following pages will give a record of this. But no quick answer can be given as there are more aspects to take into account. Employees are not powerless victims of NPM developments and practices and strategies are not the same in all parts of the country. More institutional aspects and consequences are to be included in an assessment. Counter-implementation from below has also been seen. Central intentions and ways of trying to steer the actors and institutions involved are not always followed at the decentralised level. Institutions are “arbitrating” and creating new possibility structures at the same time. As to our understanding, both regulative and facilitating aspects are to be accounted for in a multi-dimensional analysis.
Professionals constitute almost 1/5 of the total labour force in most European countries (ILO 2009). And with the welfare state arrangements, people-processing occupations have been developed. We call them semi-professions (Macdonald 1999). In a way they constitute the backbone of the welfare state apparatuses. Without these well-educated people the central functions of the welfare state could not be performed.
Semi-professionals are unlike the traditional professional groups (lawyers, doctors, scientists, and engineers) subordinated other professions in relation to knowledge and authority, and there is no fundamental, basic, and unchallenged model of performance to be judged by. The systematised behavior of the public employees can easily be questioned by politicians, the press, and the citizens, including clients and customers. Their education, typically, is not specialised either, but build on interdisciplinary knowledge and practices. Even if the numbers of semi-professionals have grown considerably during the last 40 years, they have not been seen with increasing exclusivity and trust. On the contrary. Perhaps also because of their big numbers – and because of the fact that there is a strong preponderance of women, which gives lower prestige and, relatively, lower wages.
The Danish policy context is changing
During recent years, the Danish labour market system has been subject to strong institutional and organisational change (Bredgaard and Larsen 2005; Jørgensen 2002, 2006/2007, 2010; Larsen 2009). The two most recent changes are the structural reform from 2007 that re-organised the institutional set-up of the labour market system along with a new monitoring and controlling system and – of utmost importance - a transfer of all responsibility for labour market policy to the municipalities from 1.8.2009. The official goal was first to bring more “learning” into the system and, secondly, to handle over decision-making authority to local jobcentres and local politicians. The decision authority by the side of the municipalities now also includes insured unemployed people, not only people on social assistance. The municipalities, formally, have been put in pivotal positions within the Danish labour market policy system.
But in reality the state has improved its control and steering arrangements in order to benchmark and correct the municipalities. This might look contradictory, but the reality is that responsibility for activities have been decentralised while at the same time control and steering has been centralised.
Governance structures have been strongly altered. New Public Management guided reforms have been implemented and they have repercussions as to the development of the policy area. Control measures have been strengthened from the centre, e.g. the state authorities. The institutional changes within the labour market system have introduced a strong focus on hard, quantitative output measures and performance metrics - while omitting other important aspects as accessibility, adequacy, quality, etc. (Jørgensen and Baadsgaard 2009; Jørgensen, Nørup and Baadsgaard 2009).
Concurrently, new methods and tools needed in order to describe and assess the unemployed and the sick have been introduced. These include; the work ability assessment method (“arbejdsevnemetoden”), the resource profile (“ressourceprofil”) and the visitation toolbox with the dialog guide (“visitationsværkstøjskassen” with “dialog-guiden”). The use of these methods and tools are compulsory and mandatory to the jobcentres. Will the result be a de-professionalization and creation of a machine-bureaucracy in Danish labour market policy? How close can we get to an answer? We will take the first steps here.
New steering arrangements – and new social worker practices?
These institutional changes have been introduced and presented merely as technical or organisational changes without political significance. But in reality they also influence and change the content of labour market policy. In brief, the labour market policy in Denmark has become exclusively supply side oriented, short term focused, more standardised, and more strongly based on economic incentives. A reduced role of qualitative activation offers in favour of immediate job placement has been documented (Larsen 2009, Jørgensen 2010). Activation measures now are offered more as discouraging to the individual unemployed person instead of a positive and motivating offer which was previously the case.
During the last 7-8 years, Denmark has witnessed a change in policy, polity and administrative practice. Labour market policies and social policies have changed to become “employment policies”, and the state employment offices and the municipal employment offices have been merged and transformed to local jobcentres. And the administrative arrangements under which they are implemented have changed to new institutional set-ups increasingly constructed around New Public Management strategies of devolution, contracting, and performance measurement. In this connection central wishes of outsourcing of employment policy operations must be mentioned too. This has taken the form of introducing so-called ”other actors”, and these private firms have taken over responsibility for concrete actions in relation to activation and regular contact with the unemployed persons. Different ways and worlds of justifications have been seen.
A major part of the institutional changes should be seen as an attempt by the national authorities to manage the municipalities in their labour market operations and to ensure stronger consistency between the intended policy and the adopted one, meaning the results of the local implementation of the centrally formulated policy. This could also be called stronger implementation control.
A great part of these changes are aimed at management and control of the municipalities in general. These measures include the introduction of a yearly policy programme, the Employment Plan (“Beskæftigelsesplanen”), the establishment of the nationwide system of measurement (“målesystemet Jobindsats.dk”) and the use of incentive schemes. Contracts are made both within the public sector and with “other actors”.
These changes might only indirectly have influence on the professional practice of social workers but, actually, they change the working conditions and the orientations within the system. How much impact they have on the professional practice depends on the extent and ways of reflecting the various control mechanisms in the organisation of work and in the consciousness and actions of the employees. We will discuss this in dept later. Other kinds of changes are, however, directly addressing the operational level and have a more direct impact on social work practice.
This undoubtedly has repercussions as to the situation and practice of front-line workers, primarily social workers. These include the requirement to apply the method of work ability assessment (“arbejdsevne-metoden”), compose the resource profiling (“ressourceprofilen”), and make use of the visitation toolbox (“visitations-værktøjskassen”). This implies standardisation of methodology and hence the reduction of discretion in the choice of methods by the side of the employees. Further initiatives also have a direct impact on the professional practice of social workers, amongst these procedural requirements for deadlines and punctuality in particular implementation of the conversations with the unemployed people, activation and visitation. The result is standardisation of workflow and reduction of discretion in relation to planning and needs assessment.