Rik van Berkel - Frontline Delivery of Welfare-To-Work Policies in Europe: Activating the Unemployed

First published 2017

by Routledge

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ISBN: 978-1-138-90837-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-31-569447-4 (ebk)

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The idea to write a book focusing on the frontline delivery of welfare-to-work policies in European countries came up during the first International Conference on Public Policy that took place in 2013 in Grenoble, France. During that conference, Evelyn Brodkin (Chicago University), Peter Hupe (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Aurlien Buffat (University of Lausanne) organized a session on Street-Level Policy Research: Expanding the Boundaries. At that conference, two strands of street-level research met. Peter Hupe and Aurlien Buffat had been organizing (and have been organizing since) sessions on street-level research in a broad sense at various conferences, resulting in a book edited by Peter Hupe, Michael Hill and Aurlien Buffat: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy (Policy Press, 2015). Besides, some of us had been working together for several years with colleagues from Europe, the US and Australia on street-level research specifically focused on the context of welfare-to-work and activation policies, and published in a volume edited by Evelyn Z. Brodkin and Greg Marston, Work and the Welfare State . Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics (Georgetown University Press, 2013). Inspired by these two strands of research, we concluded that we should elaborate on them by publishing a book on the street-level delivery of welfare-to-work in Europe. For while scholars from the US and, to a certain extent, Australia have been doing research in this area for quite some time, in Europe this area of research was still in its infancywhich, we believed, constituted a gap in the increasing academic knowledge about active welfare states in Europe. Fortunately enough, we found Routledge to be interested in publishing a book on this research topic. And, fortunately enough as well, we managed to find a group of European scholars who had been engaged in research of the frontline delivery of welfare-to-work and who were willing to contribute to this book.