1

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Draft; please do not quote without permission from the authors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 (r.vanberkel@uu.nl) and Eva Knies

Utrecht University, Utrecht School of Governance, The Netherlands

2

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.

3

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 bureau-

professionalism 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,

4

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.

5

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.

6

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 co-

ordination 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

7

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. bureau-

professionalism. 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

8

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 bureau-

professionalism 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

9

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 welfare-

to-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

10

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,

11

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 Percentage

Intermediate vocational education 12

Higher Vocational Education: Social Work 24

Higher Vocational Education: HRM 17

Higher Vocational Education: Social

Administration/Social-legal Services

13

Higher Vocational Education: other 17

University 7

Other 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

12

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.

13

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.

14

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

15

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 HRM

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

rather than obligatory periodical progress reports

3.7 3.0

Less policy and organizational rules preferred 3.8 2.9 3.2

Clients referred to external providers should be monitored actively 4.3 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

16

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 evidence-

based 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.

17

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 de-

professionalization 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

18

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-to-

work, 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 welfare-

to-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

19

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).

20

Notes

(1) Activation policies are the continental European equivalent of what in Anglo-Saxon

countries is usually referred to as welfare-to-work policies.

References

Adler, P., Kwon, S. and Heckscher, C. (2008), Professional work: the emergence of

collaborative community, Organization science, 19(2): 359–376.

Austin, M., Johnson, M., Chow, J., De Marco A. and Ketch, V. (2009), Delivering welfare-to-

work services in county social service organizations: An exploratory study of staff

perspectives, Administration in social work, 33(1): 105-26.

Berg., A.M. (2006), Transforming public services – transforming the public servant?

International journal of public sector management, 19(6): 556-68.

Blomberg, H., Kroll, C., Kallio, J. and Erola, J. (2013), Social workers' perceptions of the

causes of poverty in the Nordic countries, Journal of European social policy, 23(1): 68-82.

Bonoli, G. and Natali, D. (2012), The politics of the new welfare state, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Brodkin, E. (2007), Bureaucracy redux: management reformism and the welfare state, Journal

of public administration theory and research, 17(1): 1-17.

Clarke. J. and Newman, J. (1997), The managerial state, London: Sage.

Diefenbach, T. (2009), New public management in public sector organizations: the dark sides

of managerialistic ‘enlightenment’, Public administration, 87(4): 982-909.

Du Gay, P. (ed.) (2005), The values of bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duyvendak, J.W., Knijn, T. and Kremer, M. (2006), Policy, people, and the new professional.

De-professionalisation and re-professionalisation in care and welfare, Amsterdam:

Amsterdam University Press.

Evetts, J. (2011), A new professionalism? Challenges and opportunities, Current sociology,

59(4): 406-22.

Freidson, E. (2001), Professionalism. The third logic, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Guile, D. (2012), Inter-professional working and learning: ‘recontextualising’ lessons from

‘project work’ for programmes of initial professional formation, Journal of education and

work, 25(1): 79-99.

Hasenfeld, Y. (2010), Organizational responses to social policy: The case of welfare reform,

Administration in social work, 34(2): 148-67.

21

Hasenfeld, Y. (1999), Social services and welfare to work: prospects for the social work

profession, Administration in social work, 23(3): 185-99.

Hasenfeld, Y. (1983), Human service organizations, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Healy, K. and Meagher, G. (2004), The reprofessionalization of social work: collaborative

approaches for achieving professional recognition, British journal of social work, 34(2): 243-

60.

Hupe, P. and Van der Krogt, T. (2013), Professionals dealing with pressures, in M.

Noordegraaf and B. Steijn (eds) (2013), Professionals under pressure, Amsterdam:

Amsterdam University Press, pp. 55-73.

Jørgensen, H., Nørup, I. and Baadsgaard, K. (2010), Employment policy restructuring and the

“de-professionalization” question - Do recent Danish developments give an answer?, Paper

presented at the RESQ conference, June 2010, Copenhagen.

Kirkpatrick, I., Ackroyd, S. and Walker, R. (2005), The new managerialism and public

service professions, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Lindsay, C. and Dutton, M. (2012), Promoting healthy routes back to work? Boundary

spanning health professionals and employability programmes in Great Britain, Social policy

& administration, 46(5): 509-25.

Marston, G., Larsen, J. and McDonald, C. (2005), The active subjects of welfare reform: a

street-level comparison of employment services in Australia and Denmark, Social work &

society, 3(2): 141-58.

Mintzberg, H. (1983), Structures in fives. Designing effective organizations, Englewood

Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Newman, J. (2005), Bending bureaucracy: leadership and multi-level governance, in P. Du

Gay (ed.) (2005), The values of bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 191-211.

Noordegraaf, M. (2007), From ‘pure’ to ‘hybrid’ professionalism: present-day

professionalism in ambiguous public domains, Administration & society, 39(6): 761-85.

Scott, W. (1965), Reactions to supervision in a heteronomous professional organization,

Administrative science quarterly, 10(1): 65-81.

Pollitt, C. and Bouckaert, G. (2000), Public management reform. A comparative analysis,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sultana, R. and Watts, A. (2005) Career guidance in Europe’s Public Employment Services,

Brussels: European Commission.

Taylor, I. and Kelly, J. (2006), Professionals, discretion and public sector reform in the UK:

re-visiting Lipsky, International journal of public sector management, 19(7): 629-42.

22

Terpstra, J. and Havinga, T. (2001), Implementation between tradition and management:

structuration and styles of implementation, Law & policy, 23(1): 95-117.

Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005), Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: New public

management and managerial identities in the UK public services, Organization studies, 26(5):

683-706.

Van Berkel, R., Van der Aa, P., Van Gestel, N. (2010), Professionals without a profession?

Redesigning case management in Dutch local welfare agencies, European journal of social

work, 13(4): 447-63.

Van der Aa, P. (2012), Activeringswerk in uitvoering. Bureaucratische en professionele

dienstverlening in drie sociale diensten, Utrecht: Utrecht University (PhD thesis).

Wallace, J. and Pease, B. (2011), Neoliberalism and Australian social work: Accommodation

or resistance?, Journal of social work, 11(2), 132-42.

23

Appendix 1. Operationalization of bureaucracy and professionalism

Professionalism Bureaucracy

Results more important than carefully implementing

rules

The careful implementation of rules is considered

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

into the aim and content of services

Clients’ individual activation plans focus on formal

rights and obligations

Colleagues are consulted when workers are confronted

with difficult cases

Supervisors are consulted when workers are

confronted with difficult cases

Client monitoring focuses on compliance with

obligations

In deciding about sanctions the impact on the progress

of activation services is being considered

Non-compliance always results in sanctioning clients

Monitoring of external service providers through

regular consultations

Monitoring of external service providers takes place

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

and accountability

Administrative tasks hamper service provision

In making decisions, workers use knowledge about the

effectiveness of services

Monitoring clients referred to external providers

actively