Institutionalisation as an under-explored aspect of active labour market programmes

The last 20 years have seen governments in a number of mature welfare states attempting to reintegrate people out of work into employment, principally through changes to the value and conditions of benefits and the provision of Active Labour Market Policies. Whilst the academic interest in the latter has been considerable, academic studies have hitherto have been satisfied to categorise these emerging regimes according to a familiar Work-First v Human Capital Development activation typology (for example, Peck & Theodore, 2001), or a variation upon that, according to, largely, the presence or absence of different activation services. They do not apply the insights that the broader activation literature has provided in recent years, particularly those on the governance of activation.

Instead, this paper proposes that it is better to examine recent changes through the
lens of institutionalisation: how well-embedded employment-related support for non-employed benefit claimants has become in the structure and functioning of welfare-to-work regimes.

The papers argues that the ease with which appropriate ALMP services can be accessed depends to a significant extent on a range of interacting factors, including, whether a right to ALMP services exists and how it is enforced; how well services are funded and how funds are disbursed (whether, for example, services operate on a payment-by-results basis), the extent to which services are focused on the 'easier-to-help', resulting in the 'parking' in poor quality services of claimants with greater barriers to work; and how well service providers are steered by the relevant level of government to provide an appropriate level of support.

A discussion of the UK and Denmark is provided to illustrate the benefits of such an approach. In the UK, the problem of ALMP stems from not only poor quality support focused on a narrow range of labour market participation barriers, but services which are poorly institutionalised and therefore essentially discretionary and easily withdrawn. In Denmark, a broader array of higher quality services is available and more on a secure, rights-basis, but similar problems exists around ensuring that ALMP services are incentivised to provide appropriate support to all non-employment benefits claimants required to seek work.

Thus, the paper contends that the extent to which ALMPs are institutionalised is at least as important as the content of the services themselves for determining the character of ALMP regimes, and therefore an underexplored dimension of ALMP.