The job network and underemployment

The paper notes how long-term unemployment has been replaced with long-term underemployment and examines the role of the Job Network in this new environment. The paper discusses how the structure of unemployment has changed, how the Job Network has evolved and comments on its performance. It is noted that the Job Network has become more and more driven by tightly specified processes and services supported by an ever tighter compliance regime. This business model has much in common with franchising and this analogy is used to interpret the observed outcomes and the concerns expressed by providers and other interested parties. The paper concludes that there are some inherent problems with the franchising model and suggests that less prescriptive arrangements may be preferable

Unemployed citizen or ‘at risk’ client? Classification systems and employment services in Denmark and Australia

The paper explores recent developments in Australian and Danish unemployment policies with a special focus on the technologies used to classify and categorize unemployed people on government benefits. Using governmentality as our theoretical framework, we consider the implications of reducing complex social problems to statistical scores and differentiated categories – forms of knowledge that diminish the capacity to think about unemployment as a collective problem requiring collective solutions. What we argue is that classification systems, which are part and parcel of welfare state administration, are becoming more technocratic in the way in which they divide the population into different categories of risk. © The Author(s), 2010