Considine, Mark and O'Sullivan, Siobhan and McGann, Michael and Nguyen, Phuc (2019) Locked-in or Locked-out: Can a Public Services Market Really Change? Journal of Social Policy, 2019. pp. 1-22. ISSN 1469-7823

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Abstract

Australia’s welfare-to-work system has been subject to ongoing political contestation and policy reform since the 1990s. In this paper we take a big picture look at the Australian system over time, re-visiting our earlier analysis of the impact of marketisation on flexibility at the frontline over the first ten years of the Australian market in employment services. That analysis demonstrated that marketisation had failed to deliver the service flexibility intended through contracting-out, and had instead produced market herding around a common set of standardised frontline practices. In the interim, there have been two further major redesigns of the Australian system at considerable expense to taxpayers. Re-introducing greater flexibility and service tailoring into the market has been a key aim of these reforms. Calling on evidence from an original, longitudinal survey of frontline employment service staff run in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this paper considers how the Australian market has evolved over its second decade. We find remarkable consistency over time and, indeed, evidence of deepening organisational convergence. We conclude that, once in motion, isomorphic pressures towards standardisation quickly get locked into quasi-market regimes; at least when these pressures occur in low-trust contracting environments.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cite as: CONSIDINE, M., O’SULLIVAN, S., MCGANN, M., & NGUYEN, P. (2019). Locked-in or Locked-out: Can a Public Services Market Really Change? Journal of Social Policy, 1-22. doi:10.1017/S0047279419000941
Keywords:	quasi-markets; isomorphism; contracting-out; marketisation; welfare-to-work tailoring;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, MUSSI Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Item ID:	12832
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279419000941
Depositing User:	Michael McGann
Date Deposited:	27 Apr 2020 14:49
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Social Policy
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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