Bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism in a street-level
bureaucracy context: a frontline perspective
Paper prepared for panel 44, ‘Street-level policy research: expanding the boundaries’, first
ICPP conference, June 2013, Grenoble, France.
Draft; please do not quote without permission from the authors
Rik van Berkel ([email protected]) and Eva Knies
Utrecht University, Utrecht School of Governance, The Netherlands
1
Abstract
This paper elaborates on the debate about professionalism, bureaucracy and managerialism in
public service organizations. The issue of professionals under pressure of managerial reforms
in the public sector is a core theme in this debate. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate
by taking a different starting point. It focuses on street-level bureaucrats under pressure of
professionalism and studies frontline workers in Dutch local welfare agencies that are
professionalizing against the background of the introduction of welfare-to-work services for
unemployed people. It analyses articulations of bureaucracy and professionalism in this type
of work and the impact of managerialism; workers’ preferences regarding professional,
bureaucratic and managerial work characteristics; and how these preferences are related to
workers’ professional training. In a nutshell, the findings show that workers strongly prefer
autonomy in their work, but seem less concerned with how they use their autonomy; that
managerialism
seems
to
strengthen
bureaucratic
and
weaken professional
work
characteristics; and that workers with a social work training most strongly support
professionalism compared to workers with an educational background in social administration
and personnel and labour.
2
Introduction
Bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism are key concepts in analyses of the work of
professionals working in public organizations. During the last decades the emphasis in these
analyses has been on the impact of managerialism (or New Public Management) in the public
sector. A dominant question in debates about managerialism is how it has affected the
traditional bureau-professional regime (Clarke and Newman 1997) in the provision of social
services. Some authors emphasized that managerialism has had detrimental effects for
professionals and professions, and resulted in processes of de-professionalization and
bureaucratization (see Diefenbach 2009, Taylor and Kelly 2006). Other authors adopted a
more nuanced position, pointing at the diversity of managerialist reforms and of the contexts
in which it is introduced, making generalized statements about its impact on bureauprofessionalism premature. According to them, firstly, managerialism is far from a clear and
unequivocal reform project (Clarke and Newman 1997) so that, technically speaking, the
‘independent variable’ needs serious attention when estimating the impact of managerialism.
Secondly, new public management is embraced more enthusiastically in some countries than
in others (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000) and takes different forms in different national contexts.
Thirdly, managerialism means different things in different policy and professional sectors
related, among others, to the professionalization of work and the strength of professional
associations in specific sectors (e.g., Kirkpatrick et al. 2005). This also points at the role of
agency in determining how managerialism is adopted, adjusted or resisted in public
organizations: agency of workers and professionals, as well as agency of their supervisors and
managers (Thomas and Davies 2005). Finally, professionalism and bureaucracy are not fixed,
static categories but develop over time. For example, managerialism may jeopardize
traditional forms of professionalism while at the same time opening up opportunities for
forms of ‘new’ professionalism (Noordegraaf and Steijn 2013). Therefore, it seems most
fruitful to study what Newman (2005) called ‘articulations’ of bureaucracy, professionalism
and managerialism in concrete and specific contexts.
Most studies of managerialism, professionalism and bureaucracy look at workers in public
organizations where established professions deliver professional services and where
professionalism is institutionalized, among others, in formal professional training and
professional associations: doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and the like. The
overarching theme in these studies is professionals under pressure of managerialism
(Noordegraaf and Steijn 2013). This paper contributes to the debate of managerialism,
3
professionalism and bureaucracy by focusing on workers working in another context. It looks
at organizations that traditionally are bureaucratic rather than professional and where the
overarching theme is street-level bureaucrats under pressure of professionalism: local welfare
agencies. Traditionally, these agencies’ ‘core business’ was the administration of income
benefits, but this changed with the introduction of welfare-to-work or activation policies and
programmes (1). Since then, frontline workers in these agencies are responsible for promoting
the employability and labour-market participation of unemployed people by using a
combination of ‘sticks and carrots’: sanctioning unemployed people who do not comply with
the obligations related to social assistance dependence, and offering support and services in
removing employment barriers and promoting employment opportunities. As will be
elaborated below in more detail, this created opportunities for a stronger professional profile
of local welfare agencies, their workers and the provision of welfare-to-work services. Here
again, national contexts matter: whereas in some countries (Australia, Belgium, Denmark) the
delivery of welfare-to-work is dominated by social workers, in others – such as the
Netherlands, where we conducted our study – no specific professional group dominates this
type of work and instead, frontline workers are diverse in terms of the professional training
they received.
Thus, this paper will analyse articulations of professionalism, bureaucracy and
managerialism in a professionalizing street-level bureaucracy where no dominant professional
group exists. Adopting a frontline perspective, the following research topics will be
addressed. Firstly, the paper will investigate what mix of bureaucratic and professional
elements characterizes the work of frontline workers in Dutch local welfare agencies involved
in
delivering
welfare-to-work
programmes
and
policies.
In
addition,
the
de-
professionalization and bureaucratization theses will be explored by analysing how
managerialism is related to bureaucratic and professional work characteristics; although it
would be more accurate, given the bureaucratic tradition of local welfare agencies, to talk
about ‘hampering professionalization’ rather than de-professionalization. Secondly, we will
look at workers’ preferences regarding managerial, bureaucratic and professional work
characteristics. And finally, we will investigate whether these preferences are related to the
type of professional training workers received. Given the diversity of local welfare agency
workers in terms of professional education, these agencies provide a unique opportunity to
explore this issue.
4
This paper is structured as follows. In the next section, the research topics presented above
will be elaborated theoretically. Section three describes the research project. The context in
which the research took place will be presented and the research methods are discussed. The
fourth section presents the findings of our study that are discussed in the fifth section. The
final section concludes.
Theoretical background
The bureau-professional regime
The organizational settlement (Clarke and Newman 1997) of the ‘traditional’, post-war
welfare state has been characterized as a bureau-professional regime. Public service
organizations represented various combinations of the distinct principles underlying
bureaucratic and professional modes of co-ordination. Bureaucracy emphasizes the
application of laws, rules and regulations in individual cases (Du Gay 2005). Frontline
workers in bureaucratic organizations are supervised hierarchically and co-ordination takes
the form of standardization of work processes (Mintzberg 1983). The principles of
bureaucracy aim to ensure that public service organizations safeguard public values such as
impartiality, neutrality and objectivity in dealing with citizens, equal treatment of equal cases,
and predictability of outcomes (Du Gay 2005, Clarke and Newman 1997, Terpstra and
Havinga 2001). Professionalism is based on the use of professional skills, expertise and
knowledge, acquired through professional training and experience, in analysing and solving
problems (Duyvendak et al. 2006, Freidson 2001). Professionalism requires autonomy at
frontline level in order to enable professional judgment and supervision takes place by peers
and colleagues rather than by officials higher up in the organizational hierarchy. In this case,
standardization of skills is the dominant form of co-ordination (Mintzberg 1983). Core public
values of professionalism are the responsiveness to clients’ needs and situations and the
delivery of personalized services, as well as the ‘professional variety’ of neutrality and
objectivity, namely the disinterested provision of services (Clarke and Newman 1997).
Although public professionals, as Terpstra and Havinga (2001) argued, often act within a
legal framework, they deal with rules and regulations in a different way compared to workers
in a bureaucracy: not the formal application of rules but the achievement of goals and results
is their main focus.
5
How bureaucracy and professionalism become articulated in specific welfare state sectors and
specific public policy fields is in itself an interesting research question. One of the anchor
points in determining the bureaucracy-professionalism mix concerns the social technology
that is required in concrete service delivery settings. Hasenfeld’s (1983) distinction between
people processing and people changing technologies, for example, is relevant in this context.
When the delivery of welfare services requires people processing technologies, a bureaucratic
organization of service delivery is most likely. People changing technologies aim at changing
people’s physical, psychological or social characteristics and ask for close and frequent
contact with clients and the provision of personalized counselling and support which require
professional service delivery settings (cf. Hasenfeld 1999). Brodkin (2007) made a similar
point when she argued that the provision of welfare services may require more or less
discretion. As examples she mentioned the provision of social security pensions which is
mainly an administrative task, and medical services that require expert judgments in
diagnosing, deciding on treatment and implementing treatment.
However, articulations of bureaucracy and professionalism in specific service delivery
contexts are often not as ‘self-evident’ as in these more proto-typical examples of income
benefits administration and health care. In a wide range of welfare services, the mode of coordination for providing these services is contested. Clarke and Newman’s (1997: 8)
characterization of the bureau-professional regime as ‘limited and conditional reconciliations
of different interests’ applies to more specific contexts of welfare service delivery as well:
they are the more or less sustainable results of struggles between relevant interest groups such
as policy makers, public sector managers, workers and citizen groups. In many welfare state
service sectors, workers did not acquire the status of ‘hard-core’ or ‘full’ professionals: they
are not working in ‘an occupation whose members have had success in defining ‘the
conditions and methods of their work’ and in establishing ‘a cognitive base and legitimation
for their occupational autonomy’’ (Hupe and Van der Krogt 2013: 56). Duyvendak et al.
(2006) therefore characterized occupational groups such as social workers, home care workers
and nurses as semi-professionals.
Policy changes are one of the factors that may put existing articulations of bureaucracy
and professionalism under pressure. The type of services analysed in our own study provides
a clear illustration of this. As Hasenfeld (2010: 153-4) pointed out in a discussion of the
introduction of welfare-to-work in the US, welfare agencies now need to combine two goals:
determining and monitoring welfare eligibility, which require a people processing or
bureaucratic technology; and supporting people in becoming self-supporting, which calls for a
6
people changing or professional technology. This confronts welfare agencies with a dilemma
in choosing an organizational form (Hasenfeld 2010). But although the introduction of
welfare-to-work services may boost professionalism, the same policy reforms may also
strengthen bureaucracy: for welfare-to-work reforms often emphasize the conditionality of
benefit entitlements which intensifies processes of monitoring eligibility. In more general
terms one could argue that the increasing selectivity and conditionality of access and
entitlement to welfare services – which does not remain limited to income benefits but may
for example also involve care services (Newman and Tonkens 2011) – is likely to strengthen
bureaucratic elements in the bureaucracy-professionalism mix.
Bureau-professionalism and managerialism
Managerialism and new public management (which in this paper are treated as synonymous)
have had a significant impact on the traditional organizational settlement, i.e. bureauprofessionalism. Although managerialism has been presented as a solution to what were
considered weaknesses of both bureaucracy and professionalism, the debate has mainly
focused on the impact of managerialism on professionalism and professionals, which many
authors characterized as profound. Managerialism implied a shift of orientation in public
professional organizations from public towards business values (Denhardt and Denhardt
2000); it reduced professionals’ autonomy by weakening their position vis-à-vis managers and
service users and by strengthening the role of government in setting goals and methods of
professional practice (Kirkpatrick et al. 2005); accountability procedures have increased
bureaucratization and performance management has narrowed the focus of professional work
to quantifiable and measurable outcomes (Diefenbach 2009), etcetera. But apart from risks of
de-professionalization and bureaucratization in professional work, several authors also point
at opportunities and forms of ‘new’ professionalism, in which a more outward looking (Adler
et al. 2008), relational (Noordegraaf 2007) or reflexive (Newman and Tonkens 2011) concept
of professionalism focusing on professionals’ connections with their environment is a
recurring theme. For example, traditional forms of accountability of professionals to their
peers make way for more diverse accountability regimes (Hupe and Hill 2007), including
accountability towards clients, managers and policy makers. New professionalism may
strengthen managerial tasks of professionals who increasingly operate in complex governance
contexts involving a variety of agents, agencies and interests in service provision processes
(Evetts 2011). New professionalism also requires collaboration that spans professional
communities (Guile 2012). This includes forms of co-operating with other professions. In this
7
context, Lindsay and Dutton (2012) used the concept of ‘boundary spanners’ which refers to
bridging the gaps between various professional and organizational groupings in service
provision processes.
Thus, the impact of managerialism on the bureau-professional regime in general and
professionalism specifically is complex and far from univocal. Against this background,
Clarke and Newman (1997: 82) concluded that the rise of managerialism should not be
interpreted as a regime shift: ‘(…) this is not a simple matter of dissolving the old regime of
bureau-professional and replacing it with managerialism but a process of realigning bureauprofessionalism into a more subordinated place in the new order’. Studies of articulations of
bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism in service delivery contexts should therefore
not a priori exclude processes of either de-professionalization or the development of forms of
new professionalism.
Professional training, bureau-professionalism and managerialism
For workers, re-articulations of bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism challenge
their professionalism – that is, what it means to be a professional and to act professionally –
and their profession may be at stake as well, for example because reforms of welfare services
or new welfare services may ask for new types of social interventions which may give rise to
new professions or to transformations of established professions. Workers’ attitudes,
preferences and agency matter in determining how disputes concerning the articulation of
bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism in their work as well as conflicts concerning
the nature of their profession emerge and are resolved. Various studies have shown, for
example, that workers respond differently, individually or as a professional group, to the rise
of managerialism (Berg 2006, Healy and Meagher 2004, Wallace and Peace 2011).
Kirkpatrick et al.’s (2005) comparative study of various public service professions showed
that one of the factors explaining different attitudes towards managerialism is the professional
group to which workers belong as well as the strength of their profession.
Because public service sectors are often dominated by one profession, it is difficult to find
studies comparing attitudes and preferences of various professional groups working in a
single public service sector. In as far as comparative studies of professional groups of workers
within one single sector exist, they mainly compare workers with a specific professional
training and workers without that type of professional training. For example, in the context of
8
welfare-to-work services, several studies investigated differences between social workers and
workers without social work training in using discretion, perceptions of clients, etcetera (e.g.
Austin et al. 2009, Blomberg et al. 2013). A similar comparative approach was used by Scott
(1965) who studied a research topic more closely related to ours. His article analysed, among
others, workers’ preferences concerning professional and bureaucratic styles of supervision,
and found that workers with social work training more strongly prefer professional
supervision and more strongly prefer their supervisor to have a social work degree than their
colleagues without social work training. All in all, the studies discussed in this section
indicate that frontline workers’ professional training may be related to their attitudes towards
and preferences regarding professional, bureaucratic and managerial characteristics of their
work.
Research context and methods
As was mentioned in the introduction, the frontline workers in our study are employed at
Dutch local welfare agencies. These municipal agencies are responsible for the administration
of social assistance benefits as well as for providing welfare-to-work services for assistance
benefit recipients. Decentralization and deregulation of these services aimed to increase the
room of local welfare agencies to provide personalized and tailor-made services. Deregulation
also affected service provision models: although the agencies are allowed to outsource the
provision of services to external public or private providers, during the last decade the
emphasis in service provision gradually shifted from outsourcing to in-house service
production. As a consequence, the role of workers in local welfare agencies in providing
welfare-to-work increased, and so did the urgency to provide them with the skills,
competences and knowledge to do so (see Van Berkel et al. 2010). This resulted in efforts to
professionalize welfare-to-work service provision in Dutch local welfare agencies which were
initiated by the association of managers of local welfare agencies under the heading of
‘Effectiveness and Craftsmanship’ and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and
Employment.
Against the background of our discussion in the theoretical section, the provision of welfareto-work services in local welfare agencies provides an interesting case for analysing
articulations of bureaucracy, professionalism and managerialism. Firstly, the agencies are
confronted with a similar dilemma as Hasenfeld (2010) described for the US case. On the one
hand, they provide a clear case of street-level bureaucracies under pressure of professionalism
9
as a consequence of the introduction of welfare-to-work, the increasing importance of people
changing technologies, the increasing emphasis on in-house production of welfare-to-work
services and the current professionalization efforts in local welfare agencies. On the other, the
increasing emphasis in Dutch welfare-to-work policies on benefit conditionality reinforces
pressures to enforce rules and regulations, especially concerning sanctioning ‘un-willing’,
‘unmotivated’ and ‘un-cooperative’ benefit recipients. Besides, the agencies remain
responsible for benefit administration. Secondly, although managerialism in the form of
performance management is rather common in local welfare agencies nowadays, it is not
introduced as an ‘attack’ on professionalism but rather as an element of professionalization in
the sense that it intends to make workers result rather than rule oriented. Although this does
not mean that managerialism and professionalization reinforce each other – we will come
back to this – the professionalization efforts show that policy makers as well as local welfare
agency managers recognize the importance of investing in professionalism in order to
improve the quality and – most importantly – effectiveness of welfare-to-work. Finally,
although most agency workers are professionally trained (most of them received higher
vocational training; see below), professional associations played no role whatsoever in
initiating the professionalization efforts, which explains why the initiative for these efforts
came from the association of managers. Only recently (November 2012) a ‘professional
association
for
client
managers’
was
established
(www.beroepsverenigingvoorklantmanagers.nl). Furthermore, the professional training that
workers acquired was not specifically focused on the provision of welfare-to-work services as
no specific professional training currently exists for this type of work – as is the case in most
European countries (Sultana and Watts 2005).
Sample
In our study – which is part of a larger research project into the professionalization of work in
Dutch local welfare agencies – workers involved in providing welfare-to-work services
(‘activation workers’) in 14 local welfare agencies were investigated. All activation workers
in these agencies were asked to participate in the study by completing a web-based survey.
The study aimed to gain insight into the current mix of bureaucratic, professional and
managerial characteristics in activation work as well as in workers’ preferences concerning
the mix of these characteristics. The response was 52% (n=163) which is high given the
length of the survey (it took respondents 40 minutes on average to complete the survey). Of
the respondents, 30% were male, 70% female; their average age was 44 years. On average,
10
respondents have been involved in providing welfare-to-work services for 11 years, though
not necessarily in the context of their current organization only.
One of the research questions presented in the introduction addresses the relationships
between workers’ professional training and preferences regarding bureaucratic, professional
and managerial work characteristics. Diversity in workers’ professional training is
considerable (see Table 1).
Table 1. Respondents’ professional training (percentages)
Professional training
Intermediate vocational education
Higher Vocational Education: Social Work
Higher Vocational Education: HRM
Higher Vocational Education: Social
Administration/Social-legal Services
Higher Vocational Education: other
University
Other
Percentage
12
24
17
13
17
7
9
Three professional training profiles turned out to be most common in the agencies involved in
our study: higher vocational training in Social Work (24 per cent), higher vocational training
in social administration (in Dutch: social-legal services) (13 per cent), and higher vocational
training in Personnel & Labour (Human Resource Management) (17 per cent). It can be
argued that each of these profiles represents specific skills and knowledge considered
necessary for providing services in local welfare agencies. Social work skills and knowledge
can be considered of importance in assessing people’s needs in the context of welfare-to-work
policies and in changing their attitudes and behaviour vis-à-vis their personal situations on the
one hand, and paid work on the other. Social administration used to be the dominant
professional profile in the pre-welfare-to-work period when benefit administration was the
core business of local welfare agencies. Even though the emphasis in service provision shifted
towards welfare-to-work, benefit administration and enforcing rules and regulations are core
tasks of local welfare agencies. Thus, the skills and knowledge of social administrators remain
important for local welfare agencies. Personnel & Labour is a professional training profile
most clearly reflecting the shift towards welfare-to-work. More specifically, it reveals a shift
in welfare-to-work towards demand-led approaches in welfare-to-work services and a
stronger emphasis in these services on employer-oriented services. In recent years Dutch local
welfare agencies have started to approach employers more actively (rather than merely
11
collecting vacancies and sending the unemployed to employers to apply for these vacancies)
and to try to intervene more directly in employers’ HRM policies and practices in attempts to
stimulate employers to provide job opportunities for social assistance recipients.
Measures
To study bureaucracy and professionalism, respondents were presented two series of
statements: one about their current work and one about preferred work characteristics.
Respondents were asked – on a 5 point Likert scale – to indicate whether they (strongly) agree
or disagree with each of the statements. The professional and bureaucratic work
characteristics were measured independently, i.e. through distinct statements. This means that
a high score on an item representing professionalism was not interpreted as a low score on
bureaucracy. The wording of the statements aimed to be contextually relevant and, thus, fit
the specific nature of the work of activation workers. The statements therefore combined
theoretical insights into characteristics of professional and bureaucratic work (see the
theoretical section) with empirical research into activation work. For the latter, we used a
study of activation work in the three largest cities in the Netherlands (Van der Aa 2012) as
well as interviews with 19 activation workers in three of the 14 agencies involved in the
survey which were carried out by ourselves. In the statements, bureaucracy and
professionalism were operationalized using the items in Appendix 1. For example, statements
measuring bureaucracy included ‘The careful implementation of rules is considered more
important than results’, ‘Equal treatment of equal cases is a core value’ and ‘Supervisors are
consulted when workers are confronted with difficult cases’; statements measuring
professionalism included ‘Results are more important than carefully implementing rules’ and
‘In making decisions, workers use knowledge about the effectiveness of services’. In the
context of ‘new’ professionalism, some statements were included relating to respondents’
relationships with external service providers.
Managerialism in workers’ current work was operationalized in terms of performance
management and a managerialism variable was composed which included three items: do
workers have performance targets; if they do, are the results they achieved discussed with
supervisors; and if they are, can achieved results have consequences for workers? For
investigating workers’ preferences, we included the statement that agreements with
supervisors concerning performance targets are desirable.
12
Results
Bureaucracy and professionalism in current work
The professional characteristics that, according to workers, are most clearly present in their
work are sufficient room for decision making, the consultation of colleagues when workers
are confronted with difficult cases, and providing tailor-made services as a core value.
Average scores on these items range from 4.3 to 4.6 on a scale from 1-5 (1=strongly disagree,
5=strongly agree). Several other professional characteristics score somewhat lower (4.0 to
4.2): the active monitoring of clients referred to external service providers; regular
consultations with external service providers; and taking into consideration the impact on
activation processes when deciding about sanctioning clients. At the same time, using
research results on the effectiveness of services in decision making, which was included as a
characteristic of professionalism, scores rather low although still on the positive half of the
scale: 3.4
As far as bureaucratic elements are concerned, workers do not experience that policy
and organizational rules hamper service provision (2.8) and do not consider the careful
implementation of rules more important than realizing results with their clients (2.7). They do
feel somewhat hampered by their administrative tasks (3.4). The bureaucratic characteristics
experienced most strongly are organizational rules guiding what groups of clients should and
should not be prioritized (3.9) and treating equal cases equally as a core value in workers’
service provision (3.9).
Overall, respondents’ characterization of their current work shows that they perceive it
as a mix of bureaucratic and professional characteristics but that professional characteristics
dominate. Combining all professional items and all bureaucratic items in the survey into two
composite variables, the average score on professionalism amounts to 4, and on bureaucracy
to 3.1.
The impact of managerialism
As mentioned before, managerialism in our study was operationalized in terms of
performance management. Of the respondents in our study, 76% was confronted with
performance agreements with supervisors. In practically all cases, results are evaluated with
supervisors. According to about half of the workers with performance agreements, not
realizing the results they agreed with their supervisors may have individual consequences.
13
Our study found some evidence corroborating the de-professionalization argument in debates
about managerialism: the correlation between professionalism and managerialism turned out
to be (modestly) negative (r= -.145, p<.05). Looking at individual aspects of professionalism,
managerialism is lightly negatively correlated with ‘having sufficient room for decision
making’ (r=-.134, p<.05), ‘actively monitoring clients referred to external service providers’
(r=-.142, p<.05), ‘regular consultations with external service providers’ (r=-.135, p<.05) and
‘providing tailor-made services is a core value’ (r=-.159, p<.05).
As far as the bureaucratization thesis in studies of managerialism is concerned, we found no
significant correlation between managerialism and bureaucracy overall. However, at the level
of individual bureaucratic characteristics, two significant positive correlations were found:
‘Individual action plans provide insight into clients’ rights and obligations’ (r=+.151, p<.05)
and ‘Monitoring clients mainly focuses on their compliance with obligations’ (r=+.178,
p<0.5). Managerialism was not related to the result versus rule orientation of workers which is
surprising as a stronger focus on results rather than rules is what managerialism aims to
accomplish.
Workers’ preferences
When looking at how workers would like their work to be we see, compared to the
characteristics of their current work, the strongest shifts are witnessed concerning
bureaucratic work characteristics. Thus, the desirable mix of professional and bureaucratic
characteristics looks different than the current mix, mainly because they prefer ‘less
bureaucracy’. Compared to how they characterize their current work, they more strongly
reject that the focus in their work should be on correctly implementing rules rather than
results (2.7 in current situation, 2.2 in preferred situation); they prefer less organizational rules
concerning what clients should and should not be prioritized (3.9 in current situation, 3.2
preferred) and less rules prescribing what type of client should be offered what kind of
services (3.0 in current situation, 2.4 preferred); and they prefer individual activation plans to
be less focused on formal rights and obligations (3.0 in current situation, 2.4 preferred).
As far as the professional characteristics of their work are concerned, workers support
the importance of evidence-based working not very strongly, indicating that most workers do
not advocate major changes in this respect compared to how they work currently (3.4 in
current situation, 3.5 preferred). They also tend to be in favour – though again: not very
strongly – to monitor external providers through regular dialogue rather than obligatory
14
progress reports (3.5; regarding the current situation, respondents scored 3.6 on the statement
that obligatory progress report contribute to service quality), and to determine the content of
services in collaboration with external providers (3.6; no comparable data for the current
situation is available).
Workers are slightly (though not strongly: 3.5) positive about the use of performance
targets.
Workers’ preferences and their professional training
Is the nature of workers’ professional training related to their preferences regarding
bureaucratic, professional and managerial characteristics of their work? To answer this
question, we compared workers with a higher vocational training in social work, HRM and
social administration. All significant differences that were found involved social workers,
who differ from the other groups in a straightforward way: social workers more strongly
support professional characteristics and more strongly reject bureaucratic characteristics.
Social workers especially differ from workers with a social administration training. Table 2
provides an overview of the significant differences that were found.
Table 2. Workers’ professional training and their preferences concerning work
characteristics
Work characteristics
Professional training
SW
SA
The careful implementation of rules is more important than results
1.9
2.4
Client contacts have priority over administrative tasks
4.1
3.5
Client contacts have priority over accountability
3.7
3.2
Monitoring of external service providers through regular consultations
3.7
3.0
Less policy and organizational rules preferred
3.8
2.9
Clients referred to external providers should be monitored actively
4.3
HRM
rather than obligatory periodical progress reports
3.2
3.7
SW=social work; SA=social administration; HRM=Personnel & Labour. Figures represent
scores on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree)
The three professional training groups do not differ concerning their preferences on some core
characteristics of professional work: sufficient room for decision making, and consulting
colleagues rather than supervisors when confronted with difficult cases. They also do not
15
differ with respect to their (hesitant) attitude towards evidence-based work. We also found no
differences between the three groups’ preferences concerning the use of performance targets.
Discussion
When we look at how workers characterize their current work, professional work
characteristics are emphasized. At the same time, it is noteworthy that some aspects of
professionalism are more clearly present than others. Workers do think that they have
sufficient autonomy, they do engage into peer consultation when confronted with difficult
cases, and they do consider providing personalized services an important value. At the same
time, using knowledge about the effectiveness of services in decision making is weak. This
could be interpreted as a somewhat worrying result. Apparently, workers have – in their own
perceptions – sufficient autonomy in providing services but the use of this autonomy largely
depends on their own (or their colleagues’) knowledge, experience and insights, not on
evidence-based practices. This is all the more worrying since, as we saw, workers did not
receive specific professional training in how unemployed people can be effectively supported
in integrating into the labour market. One explanation for the limited use of evidence-based
insights in their current work could be that these insights are simply not available for workers.
Against this background, the emphasis in the efforts to professionalize local welfare agencies
on developing and disseminating professional guidelines in order to strengthen evidencebased working and the use of interventions that ‘proved to work’ makes sense. However, the
fact that also when asked for work preferences workers do not embrace evidence-based
working strongly, might point at another possible explanation, namely that evidence-based
guidelines are experienced as a potential threat to workers’ autonomy. If that is indeed the
case, then the current professionalization strategy runs serious risks.
The ways in which workers characterize current work and their preferences also tell us
something about ‘new professionalism’, especially in terms of relations with external service
providers (in the context of quasi-markets or service networks). On average, workers try (and
prefer) to actively monitor clients that are referred to external providers (rather than merely
acting as ‘referral agents’) and have regular consultations with workers working for external
providers. They also tend to prefer (though not very strongly) monitoring external providers
through dialogues with these providers rather than through the more formal and bureaucratic
form of obligatory progress reports, as well as to determine the content of services in dialogue
with external providers.
16
Another noteworthy finding concerns the values that activation workers consider important
for their work. Whereas one might expect that workers somehow need to choose whether to
emphasize the professional value of providing personalized services or the bureaucratic value
of treating equal cases equally, workers combine both values in their work. We even found a
modest positive correlation between scores on both scales (r= +.233, p<0.5).
Our findings concerning the correlations between performance management – the
operationalization of managerialism that was used in the study – on the one hand and
professionalism and bureaucracy on the other provide some support for the deprofessionalization and bureaucratization theses. Managerialism seems to be positively related
to a more formal, regulation-oriented approach to clients as well as to other service providers.
Although the correlations that we found were not very strong, one could argue that this may
change when performance management in local welfare agencies becomes stricter in the
future, for example, because results are forced up or because consequences of not realizing
targets become more serious. Anyhow, our results show that the performance management
regime and attempts to promote professionalism through the professionalization efforts
produce tensions and may even conflict.
The differences that were found regarding preferences of the various professional training
groups and especially between social workers and social administrators are in itself not
surprising and reflect that social workers are trained to work in a professional setting whereas
the training of social administrators is more strongly focused on work in an administrative,
rule-guided role. Nevertheless, it is not unlikely to expect that diversity in workers’
preferences, related to their professional socialization, will have consequences for how they
provide activation services to their clients and for how they operate in relation to other service
providers. At the same time, one could also interpret the differences between the professional
training groups as being rather modest. This may point out that the nature of work and of the
services workers provide are more important than workers’ professional training in
influencing their preferences regarding the desired mix of bureaucratic, professional and
managerial work characteristics.
Of course, even though professional training may be only modestly important in terms
of determining workers’ preferences for professionalism, bureaucracy and managerialism,
workers’ professional training may still be an important factor influencing workers’ opinions
regarding what professional service provision stands for; in other words, in may influence
17
how they use their professional autonomy. The finding that social workers find it more
important than HRM workers to monitor clients referred to external providers, points in that
direction. Another example was found in data not reported in this paper which focused on
workers’ recommendations to improve welfare-to-work services. Half of the workers with an
HRM training background recommended a more active approach of employers in welfare-towork, compared to only 15% of social workers. Thus, preferring to work professionally still
tells us little about what ‘professional activation work’ means.
Conclusion
This paper aimed to contribute to the debate on bureaucracy, managerialism and
professionalism in the provision of public services by focusing on street-level bureaucrats
under pressure of professionalism rather than adopting the more common perspective of
professionals under pressure of managerialism. Our study took place in Dutch local welfare
agencies, where the introduction of welfare-to-work implied a shift from a mainly
administrative type of frontline work towards a stronger emphasis on professional types of
service provision. As we saw, respondents strongly emphasize the importance of professional
autonomy and of the ‘liberation’ from rules and regulations guiding their work. At the same
time, they showed less concern with the use of professional autonomy in terms of applying
knowledge about the effectiveness of services. These findings raise questions for further
research, especially concerning the meaning workers attach to professionalism. Our results
indicate that for workers who used to work in a highly bureaucratic context, the prospect of
professionalization is to be freed from the rules and regulations that traditionally guided their
work. Professional guidelines might be experienced by workers as simply a new attempt to
bureaucratize their work. Nevertheless, professional autonomy is not an end in itself but a
precondition to use professional skills, experience and knowledge in decision making. In the
context of our study, the issues of the use of professional autonomy and the role of
standardization through professional guidelines are even more important given the diversity of
professional training profiles of workers, and the absence of professional training in welfareto-work and activation.
Welfare-to-work services are an example of social services introduced in the context of what
Bonoli and Natali (2012: 5) called ‘the assignment of a new set of functions to the welfare
state’. As we saw before, welfare state reforms may simultaneously stimulate professionalism
(providing new services) and bureaucracy (increasing conditionality and selectivity of
18
entitlements). On the one hand, one could argue that this turns conflicts about the articulation
of professionalism and bureaucracy into conflicts about the articulation of policy objectives
and priorities in implementing policies: should service provision processes be focused on
enforcing clients’ obligations and responsibilities or on realizing results with clients? On the
other hand, this raises an issue that is highly contested in the social professions: are
supporting and disciplining people irreconcilable in professional service provision processes,
or can professional repertoires be developed that reconcile ‘good cop’ and ‘bad cop’ roles?
(e.g. Hasenfeld 1999, Marston et al. 2005)
The street-level bureaucrats in our study were not only under pressure of professionalism but
also, in the form of performance management, under pressure of managerialism. On the basis
of the de-professionalization and bureaucratization theses it could be expected that
professionalization and performance management are conflicting strategies. And indeed, we
found that performance management may jeopardize professionalism and strengthen
bureaucratic work characteristics. At the same time, respondents in our study did not reject
performance management. Maybe workers experience performance management as a
‘sacrifice’ they need to make in return for more autonomy. Anyway, professionalization
efforts need to be aware of the potential negative impacts of performance management in
order to be successful.
Finally, internationally comparative research of workers in local welfare agencies involved in
providing welfare-to-work offers interesting opportunities. National contexts differ in several
respects which may considered to be very relevant in how articulations of professionalism,
bureaucracy and managerialism develop and the type of conflicts that emerge. For example,
not in all countries do local welfare agencies have a bureaucratic tradition: in several
countries these agencies were responsible for benefit administration and the provision of
social services in the period before welfare-to-work was introduced. Another important
difference that we already mentioned and that is related to the former concerns the dominance
of social workers in local welfare agencies. From a path-dependency point of view it could be
argued that whether the ‘professionals under pressure’ or the ‘street-level bureaucrats under
pressure’ perspective turns out to be dominant in how the introduction of welfare-to-work
evolves in local welfare agencies, is therefore likely to depend on the tradition of bureaucracy
and professionalism as well as the dominance of social workers in these agencies (cf.
Jørgensen et al. 2010 for the Danish case).
19
Notes
(1) Activation policies are the continental European equivalent of what in Anglo-Saxon
countries is usually referred to as welfare-to-work policies.
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Appendix 1. Operationalization of bureaucracy and professionalism
Professionalism
Bureaucracy
Results more important than carefully implementing
The careful implementation of rules is considered
rules
more important than results
Providing personalized services is a core value
Equal treatment of equal cases is a core value
Clients’ individual activation plans provide insight
Clients’ individual activation plans focus on formal
into the aim and content of services
rights and obligations
Colleagues are consulted when workers are confronted
Supervisors
with difficult cases
confronted with difficult cases
are
consulted
when
workers
are
Client monitoring focuses on compliance with
obligations
In deciding about sanctions the impact on the progress
Non-compliance always results in sanctioning clients
of activation services is being considered
Monitoring of external service providers through
Monitoring of external service providers takes place
regular consultations
through obligatory, periodic progress reports
Workers have sufficient room for decision making
Policy and organizational rules hamper service
provision
The
agency
provides
rules
concerning
the
prioritization of groups of clients
Decisions concerning services are determined by
policy rules
Client contacts have priority over administrative tasks
Administrative tasks hamper service provision
and accountability
In making decisions, workers use knowledge about the
effectiveness of services
Monitoring clients referred to external providers
actively
23