Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. An international group of scholars contribute organizational studies that shed new light on old debates about policies of workfare and activation. Peeling back the political rhetoric and technical policy jargon, these studies investigate what really goes on in the name of workfare and activation policies and what that means for the poor, unemployed, and marginalized populations subject to these policies. By adopting a street-level approach to welfare state research, Work and the Welfare State reveals the critical, yet largely hidden, role of governance and management reforms in the evolution of the global workfare project. It shows how these reforms have altered organizational arrangements and practices to emphasize workfare's harsher regulatory features and undermine its potentially enabling ones. As a major contribution to expanding the conceptualization of how organizations matter to policy and political transformation, this book will be of special interest to all public management and public policy scholars and students.

Preface Part I: Introduction 1. Work and the Welfare State 2. Street-Level Organizations and the Welfare State Part II: What's at Issue: Politics, Policies, and Jobs 3. The American Welfare State: Two Narratives 4. The Policies of Workfare: At the Boundaries between Work and the Welfare State 5. Double Jeopardy: The Misfit between Welfare-to-Work Requirements and Job Realities Part III: Governance and Management: Workfare's "Second Track" 6. Triple Activation: Introducing Welfare-to-Work into Dutch Social Assistance 7. Active Labor Market Reform in Denmark: The Role of Governance in Policy Change 8. Performance Management as a Disciplinary Regime: Street-Level Organizations in a Neoliberal Era of Poverty Governance Part IV: Street-Level Organizations and the Practices of Workfare 9. Commodification, Inclusion, or What? Workfare in Everyday Organizational Life 10. Race, Respect, and Red Tape: Inside the Black Box of Racially Representative Bureaucracies 11. Good Intentions and Institutional Blindness: Migrant Populations and the Implementation of German Activation Policy 12. Front-line Workers as Intermediaries: The Changing Landscape of Disability and Employment Services in Australia Part V: Administrative Justice: Challenging Workfare Practices 13. Challenging Workfare Practices: Conditionality, Sanctions, and the Weakness of Redress Mechanisms in the British "New Deal" 14. Redress and Accountability in US Welfare Agencies Part VI: Conclusion 15. Work and the Welfare State Reconsidered: Street-Level Organizations and the Global Workfare Project References Contributors