Beyond job search theory: evaluating conditionality in employment services?

The use of sanctions in employment services is a divisive subject. and it is an area of social policy where more ethical approaches could be developed. It would be timely to do so since this area of social policy has recently been scrutinised in a government inquiry which will lead to reforms to the conditionality framework.  This blog explains why more research is needed to advance the cause of more ethical policy about sanctions in employment srevices.

Given that the views about employment services I have published previously have generally aligned with rights-based ethics it was with trepidation that I ventured into attempting an analytic exercise that might be regarded as an attempt to water down the urgency of the need for more ethical policy. But as the academic article on which the blog is based argues, there simply is not enough research evidence to advance debate about more ethically robust policy. 

Social policy is - as Hartley Dean noted - a tool to compensate the poor for the diswelfare of capitalism. But what it does, at least in the case of employment services, it uses economic models of commodification as indicators of the success of the policy, and sanctions are used as threats, or to inflict, even greater diswelfare, on those who don’t appear to be trying hard enought to get a job.

Despite the fact that financial sanctions have been used in Australian employment services for over 30 years, even when evaluated from an economic perspective, their direct impact is contested. Evaluation that draws on job search theory justifies the use of sanctions because they have been demonstrated to increase the speed of transitions into employment. In contrast, research from sociological and psychological disciplines shows sanctions concentrate on people who have the most difficulty obtaining employment, and this compounds labour market disadvantages and poverty.

I tackled this problem by simulating the value plural approach proposed by welfare conditionality scholars Watts-Cobbes and Fitzpatrick. Value pluralsm is supposed to hold potential as an approach by which to reach consensus on shared goals for policy.  They argue the value plural approach has the potential to resolve the ‘unproductive debate’ that divides social policy analysis, because it provides tools for the development of robust policies that are ethically permissible from multiple normative perspectives.

Australia’s employment services conditionality is one such social policy location where value pluralism might be adopted to reach agreement on shared goals for social policy. It would be timely to do so since this area of social policy has recently been scrutinised in a government inquiry which will lead to reforms to the conditionality framework.

In the article I explain how I engaged in an analytic exercise to identify the research and evaluation that would be needed to reach a value plural consensus on conditionality in employment services.  A hypothetical set of value plural criteria were used to assess the availability of research and evaluation that would be needed to satisfy parties to a plural consensus should one be developed.

Figure 1 shows the results of the analysis.

In essence I concluded that the current evidence-base is insufficient to advance value pluralism. This is because there is a shortage of research and evaluation evidence that would satisfy rights scholars of the justifiability of sanctions, while labour economists would find the findings from other disciplines limited due to scale and generalisability. It is also the case that research evidence is limited because the research has not been designed to explore policy questions such as how to change settings to cause less harm or to assess the impact of the policy on employment outcomes.

Although the government inquiry into Workforce Australia has opened the opportunity for more experimental evaluation and recommended trials of incentive-based models of conditionality, the government has so far committed only to investment in research in the form of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) through the Andrew Leigh’s Australian Evaluation Institute.  It would be a shame if these trials proceeded without consideration of the diverse perspectives that might contribute to a more robustly ethical approach to government evaluation. This might help to insure policy makers from ongoing the criticism over the legitimacy of their evaluation, and their privileged access to large administrative datasets that most welfare conditionality scholars are unable to access.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an academic piece, the article outlines where more research is needed so that the dominance of job search theory in evaluation can be tempered by approaches that are more sympathetic to the forms of suffering caused by punitive and coercive social policy. Such analysis may be helpful to guide how conditionality is used in employment services in the future and to challenge the dominance of job search theory.

As readers of this blog know, academic publication can be a thankless task that erodes confidence and resilience, but which also enables one to benefit from the feedback of reviewers along the road. The effort of reaching publication is this case was directed stimulate interest in exploring the potential of the value plural approach to reach consensus on the ethical use of conditionality in employment services. Lest anyone be confused, the exercise was not intended to legitimate the use of sanctions, it was intended to explore the foundations of the division between perspectives, and to look at ways that such division might be bridged by filling some of the existing gaps in research evidence and evaluation.

For as I conclude in the article, without more evidence, the conflict between disciplines about the impact of sanctions will continue, and it likely that economic models of evaluation like job search theory will continue to dominate policy development.

This post was written and moderated by @simonecasey, and reflects her personal and academic views rather than those of her employer.

References

Casey, S. (2022a). " Job seeker" experiences of punitive activation in Job Services Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 847-860.

Casey, S. (2022b). Back to the future: coercive conditionality in the jobactive era. Australian Journal of Labour Economics, 25(1), 1-24.

 Casey, S. (2024). Beyond job‐search theory: A value pluralist approach to conditionality in Australian employment services. Australian Journal of Social Issues.

Watts-Cobbe, B., & Fitzpatrick, S. (2023). Advancing Value Pluralist Approaches to Social Policy Controversies: A Case Study of Welfare Conditionality. Journal of Social Policy, 1-16. doi:10.1017/S0047279423000065