Greg Marston
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 255213 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Greg Marston |
| PRENOMES | Greg |
| SOBRENOME | Marston |
| ASSINATURA | MARSTON G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0263-140X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 76 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 597 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 74 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2000 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Testing Universality and Inclusivity
An enduring debate in UBI literatures concerns whether cash transfers should be limited to citizens of a nation state or extended to non‐citizens. This debate reflects broader discussions on citizenship and its role in granting or restricting political, social, economic and cultural rights. We engage with this here, drawing on the findings of a recent representative survey of Australian public attitudes towards UBI. The findings indicate stronger…
Digital platforms and hybridized social sector accountability
Jobs aren't enough
The transition to a low carbon economy is underway in Australia and many other advanced economies with significant social, economic and employment challenges. For a just transition to succeed it must reduce emissions while ensuring that the benefits and burdens of any transition are fairly shared at the local and global level. A social justice framework is crucial to ensure regional communities are not made worse off by transition strategies. Our…
What is a Good Job and Who Gets It? A Typological Analysis of Job Quality in a Global Sample of Countries
Job quality is a topic that has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, what defines a good or a bad job remains an object of debate. Moreover, most of the evidence available is limited to waged workers in high income countries. In this work, we adopt a typological approach to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of jobs exist based on the different patterns or configurations of job characteristics? (2) Do these e…
Reframing tourism labour
Extant literature recognises that knowledge and conceptualisations of tourism labour vis-a-vis the Global South are deficient and inappropriately theoretically framed by hegemonic and incommensurate Western ontologies and epistemes. This article aims to generate a decolonial, authentic and indigenous theoretical basis to liberate tourism labour knowledge of the Global South from this epistemic subordination through a contemporary review and refle…
An intersectional feminist analysis of compulsory income management in Australia
Globally, women experience poverty at disproportionate rates to men, with the situation being worse for Indigenous women and women of colour. Social security systems are one avenue for income redistribution that can alleviate poverty. However, such systems are themselves embedded within and produced by unequal social relations, meaning they can also serve to perpetuate and exacerbate social inequalities. This is exemplified under neoliberal welfa…
Responsibilising young benefit recipients
New Zealand recipients of the Youth Payment and Young Parent Payment, who are disproportionally Indigenous Māori and sole mothers, must participate in ‘Money Management’. This form of income management restricts spending, monitors financial transactions and requires compulsory budgeting education. Drawing on interviews with Money Management participants, Youth Service mentors and policymakers, this article argues that Money Management aims to res…
Checking Activation at the Door
Public health measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted welfare regimes around the world. The Australian government suspended activation requirements for millions of social security clients and substantially increased payment levels. Both measures go against the dominant policy logic over the past several decades in Australian social policy. When these changes were made, many advocates and academics called for a permanent increase …
The complexity of convergence
New Zealand and Australia have both adopted compulsory income management and an actuarially-based “social investment” approach since 2012, suggesting the two countries engaged in “policy transfer” and that their policy settings have converged over the past decade. Focusing on four of the six types of policy convergence identified by Hay [Hay, C. 2004. “Common Trajectories, Variable Paces, Divergent Outcomes? Models of European Capitalism Under Co…
The trope of the vulnerable child in conditional welfare discourses
Conditional welfare policies are frequently underpinned by pejorative representations of those they target. Vulnerable children, under physical or moral threat from their welfare-dependent parents, are a mainstay of these constructions, yet the nuances of this trope have received little focused attention. Through a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates at the introduction of compulsory income management (CIM) to Australia, this article expl…
Business or Pleasure? A Comparison of Migrant and Non-Migrant Uber Drivers in Australia
Despite evidence of sub-standard working conditions and low rates of pay, drivers working on the Uber platform report varying levels of job-satisfaction. In order to better understand driver experience most research conducted to date differentiates driver experience by driver investment (time) on the platform. While this approach offers insight into driver motivations, it obfuscates key socio-political aspects of the globalised labour market; nam…
Examining the Consequences of Welfare Conditionality
Welfare conditionality, whereby eligibility for income support payments is linked to prescribed forms of behaviour or values, is intended to encourage responsible behaviour in marginalised populations. However in practice, it may have consequences that worsen rather than improve their life chances. One of the most invasive forms of conditional welfare is income management (IM), involving the quarantining of up to 90 per cent of income that cannot…
The energy‐extractives nexus and the just transition
The concept of a ‘just transition’ to a low‐carbon economy is firmly embedded in mainstream global discourses about mitigating climate change. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's political economy elaborated in The Great Transformation , we interrogate the idea of a just transition and place it within its historical context. We address a major contradiction at the core of global energy transition debates: the rapid shift to low‐carbon energy‐systems will r…
How effective is conditional welfare support for enhancing child wellbeing? An examination of compulsory income management (welfare payment quarantining) in Australia
Big data and poverty governance under Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand's “social investment” policies
Surveillance and governance of the poor have been key foci for the critical social policy literature for some time, although scholarship regarding the role of big data in social policy – and how this might differ from previous forms of surveillance – is continuing to emerge. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the use of big data under Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand's social investment approaches. Both seek to replace soc…
Is conditional welfare an effective means for reducing alcohol and drug abuse? An exploration of compulsory income management across four Australian trial sites
Conditional welfare has become a prominent policy tool in recent years. One of the harshest forms of conditional welfare in Australia is arguably compulsory income management (CIM) which involves the quarantining of between 50 and 90 per cent of a participant’s benefit payment for spending on food, rent and other essential items. A leading aim of all Australian income management (IM) programs since 2007 has been the reduction of alcohol and other…
Governing Poverty
Discretion and Empowerment
The Social Harms Outweigh the Benefits
Welfare conditionality, where income support payments are tied to prescribed activities or alternatively good behaviour, has intensified in recent years. The toughest form of conditional welfare is arguably compulsory income management (IM), which involves the quarantining of between 50 and 90 per cent of a participant’s benefit payment for spending on food, rent, and other essential items in order to reduce substance abuse, and enhance socially …
Compulsory income management
Compulsory Income Management ( CIM ) is a form of conditional welfare that involves the mandatory quarantining of a portion of welfare recipients’ social security payments. Quarantined funds are accessible via a government‐issued debit card, with restrictions surrounding where and on what funds can be spent. Official justifications of CIM have framed these policies as attempts to combat substance abuse and gambling problems, and to thus secure be…
Networks, case managers, and the job‐search experiences of unemployed people
Employment services are commonly provided in network settings, but it is rare to find social policy analyses of how unemployed people search for jobs through networks. In a germinal analysis of social networks and employment, Mark Granovetter argued that “weak ties” (less familiar contacts) are more important to finding employment than are “strong ties” (family and friends). This is because weak ties provide more novel job‐relevant information. S…
Navigating employability from the bottom up
Research focusing on young people’s career trajectories has emphasised ‘graduate employability’ with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored percepti…
The active subjects of welfare reform
This paper explores the similarities and differences between Denmark and Australia in adopting welfare reform activation measures in the field of employment services. In Australia and Denmark the discourse of welfare reform centres the 'activation' of citizens through 'mutual obligation' type requirements. Through various forms of case management, unemployed individuals are encouraged to act upon themselves in creating the right set of ethical di…
Analysing Social Policy
Contents:1. Introduction: Reframing Social Policy AnalysisGreg Marston and Catherine McDonald PART I: GOVERNING SPACES AND PLACES2. Governmentality and Powers of Life and DeathMitchell Dean3. Global Governance and Local Policy PartnershipsWendy Larner4. Governing the Spaces on the Margin of SocietyJA rgen Elm-LarsenPART II: GOVERNING OTHERS AND GOVERNING SELVES5. Consumerism and the Remaking of State-Citzen Relations in the UKJohn Clarke6. The Po…
Fixing the niche? Rhetorics of the community sector in the neo-liberal welfare regime
Workfare as welfare
Case management has become a key technology in governing the problem of unemployment in western countries such as Britain, the United States and Australia. In this paper we argue that case management represents a radical localization of governance wherein the rights and responsibilities between unemployed people and the state are articulated primarily in the relationship between the case manager and his or her client. This paper reports on a stud…
The energy‐extractives nexus and the just transition
The concept of a ‘just transition’ to a low‐carbon economy is firmly embedded in mainstream global discourses about mitigating climate change. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's political economy elaborated in The Great Transformation , we interrogate the idea of a just transition and place it within its historical context. We address a major contradiction at the core of global energy transition debates: the rapid shift to low‐carbon energy‐systems will r…
Emotional Compliance and Emotion as Resistance
Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to 'activate' the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the unemployed to become 'productive' members of society. While Foucault's governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, 'job-seeker' resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emoti…
Getting beyond 'Heroic Agency' in Conceptualising Social Workers as Policy Actors in the Twenty-First Century
The professional project of social work assumes a particular orientation to human agency on the part of social workers. Specifically, the social work educational literature focusing on the nature of the profession suggests that social workers exert considerable control over the means and ends of their practice. In this paper, we ask whether this assumption is warranted. While we conceptualise this issue as relevant to the entire spectrum of profe…
Business or Pleasure? A Comparison of Migrant and Non-Migrant Uber Drivers in Australia
Despite evidence of sub-standard working conditions and low rates of pay, drivers working on the Uber platform report varying levels of job-satisfaction. In order to better understand driver experience most research conducted to date differentiates driver experience by driver investment (time) on the platform. While this approach offers insight into driver motivations, it obfuscates key socio-political aspects of the globalised labour market; nam…
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…
Motivating the Unemployed? Attitudes at the Front Line
Underlying employment services policy in many countries is the assumption that the unemployed exhibit a range of deficits. The goal of employment activation programs is to develop self-efficacy. Noting the determinants of self-efficacy, we illustrate how case managers and social workers think about the unemployed and suggest that negative attitudes held by case managers are not conducive to the promotion of self-efficacy, unlike the orientation d…
Critical Discourse Analysis and Policy-Orientated Housing Research
Positivism continues to exert a powerful influence on housing research. To a limited extent, this began to change in the mid to late 1990s with a number of researchers in Europe and Australia employing critical and poststructural theories to investigate contemporary housing issues. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), in particular, started to be seen as a tool that could be used to analyse and critique policy debates about urban regeneration, hous…
Metaphor, morality and myth
This article presents illustrative findings from case study research investigating the function and effects of competing discourses in the policy change process. The specific field of research is the development and implementation of public housing policy in Queensland, Australia. Critical discourse analysis is used to explore discursive constructions of the policy problem and power relations within the policy community. It is argued that positiv…
Beyond the ‘At Risk’ Individual
A prevention framework represents one of the fundamental means of the Australian Government's contemporary drive to achieve permanent reductions in homelessness. Consistent with prevailing policies in the UK and US, Australia has approached homelessness prevention through identification and early intervention of individuals ‘at risk’ of homelessness. In this article we suggest that prevention strategies focused on the risk factors that individual…
Welfare-to-work Policies and the Experience of Employed Single Mothers on Income Support in Australia
In July 2006, “welfare-to-work” policies were introduced for single parents in Australia. These policies require most single parents with school-aged children to be employed or seeking employment of 15 to 25 hours per week in return for their income support payment. The changes represented a sharp increase in the obligations applying to single parents on income support. This paper is concerned with how the wellbeing of single mothers who are comb…
Feeling motivated yet? Long‐term unemployed people's perspectives on the implementation of workfare in Australia
A key thrust of labour market policy in Australia and many other western countries is that long‐term unemployed people lack the personal motivation to engage proactively and successfully in the search for paid employment. In this paper we argue that the implementation of what are experienced as paternal workfare programs are counter‐productive to achieving the official policy goal of improving self‐efficacy and gaining paid employment. The empiri…
Social Isolation as Stigma-Management
Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed 'job-seekers' rarely engage in 'networking' behaviours. Previous explanations of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in th…
Supportive Housing
Scholars have long draw on neoliberalism and paternalism as theoretical frameworks to argue that states have become less generous in providing welfare and housing resources. These theories similarly demonstrate that the resources that are provided are characterized by conditional exchanges, whereby welfare recipients and social housing tenants are required to comply with behavioural conditions. Theoretical critiques of state intervention influenc…
The Relationship between Governance Networks and Social Networks
A governance networks literature that uses social network analysis has emerged, but research tends to be more technical than conceptual. This restricts its accessibility and usefulness for non-quantitative scholars and practitioners alike. Furthermore, the literature has not adequately appreciated the importance of informal networking for the effective operation of governance networks. This can hinder inter-disciplinary analysis. Through a critic…
A war on the poor
This paper examines how the discourse of workfare, which has swept a number of Western countries over the past two decades, perpetuates social divisions and facilitates the intensification of Western capitalism. The social politics of workfare in Western countries is underpinned by dubious notions about the flawed behaviour and morality of welfare recipients on the one hand and the virtue of paid work on the other, often expressed as a ‘work-firs…
Room to move? Professional discretion at the frontline of welfare‐to‐work
Outcomes of social policies have always been mediated by the discretionary agency of front‐line staff, processes which nevertheless have received insufficient attention in policy evaluation and in the social policy literature more broadly. This article takes the case example of the policy reforms associated with the Australian government's welfare‐to‐work agenda. Drawing on two discreet research projects undertaken at different points in the poli…
The Role of Non‐profit Organizations in the Mixed Economy of Welfare‐to‐Work in the UK and Australia
This article charts the development of welfare‐to‐work policies and compares and contrasts the traditions of delivery in the UK and Australia. We find that in the UK, employment services and social security benefit administration have been dominated by the central state, traditionally affording a key role to civil servants as direct delivery agents. However, in federal Australia, mixed economies of welfare‐to‐work operate in the different states,…
The Social Division of Welfare Surveillance
Electronic surveillance has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite this, surveillance practices and their social products are yet to receive serious attention in the academic field of social policy. Extending Titmuss' classical articulation of the social division of welfare, this article develops the notion of the social division of welfare surveillance to point to the way in which surveillance, compliance burdens and risk management unevenly ope…
Patterns of Governance
“Community” has taken on a new significance in Australian social policy discourse. Seemingly sound and morally justifiable, in the context of neo‐liberalism the language of community positions non‐profit delivery of services as superior to state‐provided services. As a consequence, non‐profit community services are being centrally positioned to mediate the relationship between the state and citizen subjects. In the first part of this paper we tra…
Risk Technology in Australia
Promoted as the key policy response to unemployment, the Job Network constitutes an array of interlocking processes that position unemployed people as `problems' in need of remediation. Unemployment is presented as a primary risk threatening society, and unemployed people are presented as displaying various degrees of riskiness. The Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI) is a `technology' employed by Centrelink to assess `risk' and to determ…
Field Placement and the Impact of Financial Stress on Social Work and Human Service Students
While significant research has been undertaken exploring the pedagogical benefits of undertaking lengthy social work and human services field placements, there has been very little consideration regarding the potential financial stress involved for students. This study has addressed this knowledge gap. Research was conducted in 2014 using quantitative and qualitative methods with students, academic and professional staff from six Queensland Unive…
The social inclusion policy agenda in Australia
The election of an Australian Labor Government in Australia in 2007 saw ‘social inclusion’ emerge as the official and overarching social policy agenda. Being ‘included’ was subsequently defined by the ALP Government as being able to ‘have the resources, opportunities and capabilities needed to learn, work, engage and have a voice‘. Various researchers in Australia demonstrated an interest in social inclusion, as it enabled them to construct a mul…
In the Shadow of the Welfare State
A defining characteristic of contemporary welfare governance in many western countries has been a reduced role for governments in direct provision of welfare, including housing, education, health and income support. One of the unintended consequences of devolutionary trends in social welfare is the development of a 'shadow welfare state' (Fairbanks, 2009; Gottschalk, 2000), which is a term used to describe the complex partnerships between state-b…
Policy, citizenship and governance
Current discussions regarding the relationship between welfare governance systems and employment promotion in disability policy appeal to a rejuvenated neo-liberal and paternalistic understanding of welfare governance. At the core of this rationality is the argument that people with disabilities not only have rights, but also duties, in relation to the State. In the Australia welfare system, policy tools are deployed to produce a form of self-dis…
Metaphor, morality and myth
This article presents illustrative findings from case study research investigating the function and effects of competing discourses in the policy change process. The specific field of research is the development and implementation of public housing policy in Queensland, Australia. Critical discourse analysis is used to explore discursive constructions of the policy problem and power relations within the policy community. It is argued that positiv…
Critical Discourse Analysis and Policy-Orientated Housing Research
Positivism continues to exert a powerful influence on housing research. To a limited extent, this began to change in the mid to late 1990s with a number of researchers in Europe and Australia employing critical and poststructural theories to investigate contemporary housing issues. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), in particular, started to be seen as a tool that could be used to analyse and critique policy debates about urban regeneration, hous…
Patterns of Governance
“Community” has taken on a new significance in Australian social policy discourse. Seemingly sound and morally justifiable, in the context of neo‐liberalism the language of community positions non‐profit delivery of services as superior to state‐provided services. As a consequence, non‐profit community services are being centrally positioned to mediate the relationship between the state and citizen subjects. In the first part of this paper we tra…
Risk Technology in Australia
Promoted as the key policy response to unemployment, the Job Network constitutes an array of interlocking processes that position unemployed people as `problems' in need of remediation. Unemployment is presented as a primary risk threatening society, and unemployed people are presented as displaying various degrees of riskiness. The Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI) is a `technology' employed by Centrelink to assess `risk' and to determ…
Managerialism and public housing reform
This paper discusses market inspired changes to the delivery of public housing in Queensland, Australia during the late 1990s. These policy changes were implemented in an organisational environment dominated by managerialism. The theory and method of critical discourse analysis is used to examine how managerial subject positions were assimilated and/or creatively resisted by different actors within the public housing policy community. These theme…
Workfare as welfare
Case management has become a key technology in governing the problem of unemployment in western countries such as Britain, the United States and Australia. In this paper we argue that case management represents a radical localization of governance wherein the rights and responsibilities between unemployed people and the state are articulated primarily in the relationship between the case manager and his or her client. This paper reports on a stud…
Contested Belonging
This paper utilizes an analytical distinction between three modes of social belonging to explain the ambiguous resettlement experiences of refugees granted a temporary protection visa (TPV) in Australia. Findings from two qualitative studies indicate that the dominance of a public discourse that depicts asylum seekers as “illegals” inhibits their sense of belonging at the national level. Yet belonging has been facilitated locally through relation…
Employment services in an age of e-government
The increasing use of information and communications technologies among government departments and non-government agencies has fundamentally changed the implementation of employment services policy in Australia. The administrative arrangements for governing unemployment and unemployed people are now constituted by a complex contractual interplay between government departments as ‘purchasers’ and a range of small and large private organizations as…
Room to move? Professional discretion at the frontline of welfare‐to‐work
Outcomes of social policies have always been mediated by the discretionary agency of front‐line staff, processes which nevertheless have received insufficient attention in policy evaluation and in the social policy literature more broadly. This article takes the case example of the policy reforms associated with the Australian government's welfare‐to‐work agenda. Drawing on two discreet research projects undertaken at different points in the poli…
Assessing the policy trajectory of welfare reform in Australia
Although its roots reach back into the 1980s, the Australian version of welfare reform has intensified over the last decade under the direction of the conservative Howard government. In this article we chart the path to welfare-to-work policies, noting both the discontinuities as well as a degree of continuity with Australia’s traditional approach to social protection. As such, welfare reform in Australia is both revolutionary and evolutionary. F…
A Case of Misrepresentation
In this article we examine the extent of social security fraud in Australia and the sentencing outcomes for a sample of social security recipients prosecuted in two magistrates’ courts in Queensland. What the empirical study illustrates is that the characteristics of those prosecuted for social security fraud challenge the media driven stereotype of the organised criminal willingly defrauding the government for large sums of money. In terms of se…
A war on the poor
This paper examines how the discourse of workfare, which has swept a number of Western countries over the past two decades, perpetuates social divisions and facilitates the intensification of Western capitalism. The social politics of workfare in Western countries is underpinned by dubious notions about the flawed behaviour and morality of welfare recipients on the one hand and the virtue of paid work on the other, often expressed as a ‘work-firs…
Technocrats or Intellectuals? Reflections on the Role of Housing Researchers as Social Scientists
Like all social scientists, housing researchers must consider their role as knowledge producers in a changing social world. Questions about the appropriate means and ends of social research raise important considerations about policy impact, research quality and the public value of social inquiry. Answering these questions is not helped by the binary between the natural and the social sciences, which has created hierarchies of knowledge in which …
Motivating the Unemployed? Attitudes at the Front Line
Underlying employment services policy in many countries is the assumption that the unemployed exhibit a range of deficits. The goal of employment activation programs is to develop self-efficacy. Noting the determinants of self-efficacy, we illustrate how case managers and social workers think about the unemployed and suggest that negative attitudes held by case managers are not conducive to the promotion of self-efficacy, unlike the orientation d…
Feeling motivated yet? Long‐term unemployed people's perspectives on the implementation of workfare in Australia
A key thrust of labour market policy in Australia and many other western countries is that long‐term unemployed people lack the personal motivation to engage proactively and successfully in the search for paid employment. In this paper we argue that the implementation of what are experienced as paternal workfare programs are counter‐productive to achieving the official policy goal of improving self‐efficacy and gaining paid employment. The empiri…
The Social Division of Welfare Surveillance
Electronic surveillance has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite this, surveillance practices and their social products are yet to receive serious attention in the academic field of social policy. Extending Titmuss' classical articulation of the social division of welfare, this article develops the notion of the social division of welfare surveillance to point to the way in which surveillance, compliance burdens and risk management unevenly ope…
Who to Serve? The Ethical Dilemma of Employment Consultants in Nonprofit Disability Employment Network Organisations
The Welfare‐to‐work policy, implemented in July 2006 by the Federal Government, imposed a new work and activity obligation on people applying for the Disability Support Pension. This requirement not only created a new obligation for people with disability but also for employment consultants working in nonprofit Disability Employment Network organisations to monitor the conduct of this new cohort on behalf of Centrelink. For many employment consul…
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…
Welfare-to-work Policies and the Experience of Employed Single Mothers on Income Support in Australia
In July 2006, “welfare-to-work” policies were introduced for single parents in Australia. These policies require most single parents with school-aged children to be employed or seeking employment of 15 to 25 hours per week in return for their income support payment. The changes represented a sharp increase in the obligations applying to single parents on income support. This paper is concerned with how the wellbeing of single mothers who are comb…
Exploring the role of fringe lenders in the lives of Queenslanders
The fringe lending sector in Australia has experienced considerable growth over the last decade. However, very little is known about the profile of the typical borrower or the typical lender – though much is assumed about the morality and motivation of both. Drawing upon findings from a pilot study conducted in Queensland during 2008–2009, we discuss the changing landscape of fringe lending in Australia before exploring how borrowers and lenders …
The Role of Non‐profit Organizations in the Mixed Economy of Welfare‐to‐Work in the UK and Australia
This article charts the development of welfare‐to‐work policies and compares and contrasts the traditions of delivery in the UK and Australia. We find that in the UK, employment services and social security benefit administration have been dominated by the central state, traditionally affording a key role to civil servants as direct delivery agents. However, in federal Australia, mixed economies of welfare‐to‐work operate in the different states,…
Welfare Reform in East Asia
Chak Kwan Chan and Kinglun Ngok, London, Routledge, 2011, 178 pp., AUD$188.50 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-41-559026-6 Workfare is a conditional form of welfare or income support that requires unemploye
Policy, citizenship and governance
Current discussions regarding the relationship between welfare governance systems and employment promotion in disability policy appeal to a rejuvenated neo-liberal and paternalistic understanding of welfare governance. At the core of this rationality is the argument that people with disabilities not only have rights, but also duties, in relation to the State. In the Australia welfare system, policy tools are deployed to produce a form of self-dis…
Beyond the ‘At Risk’ Individual
A prevention framework represents one of the fundamental means of the Australian Government's contemporary drive to achieve permanent reductions in homelessness. Consistent with prevailing policies in the UK and US, Australia has approached homelessness prevention through identification and early intervention of individuals ‘at risk’ of homelessness. In this article we suggest that prevention strategies focused on the risk factors that individual…
Getting beyond 'Heroic Agency' in Conceptualising Social Workers as Policy Actors in the Twenty-First Century
The professional project of social work assumes a particular orientation to human agency on the part of social workers. Specifically, the social work educational literature focusing on the nature of the profession suggests that social workers exert considerable control over the means and ends of their practice. In this paper, we ask whether this assumption is warranted. While we conceptualise this issue as relevant to the entire spectrum of profe…
Political science (69 obras) · Economics (58 obras) · Sociology (47 obras) · Law (45 obras) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (37 obras) · Economic growth (35 obras) · Law (35 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (31 obras) · Welfare (30 obras) · Business (28 obras)