Deborah Jackwerth-Rice

• Professor at University of Applied Labour Studies of the Federal Employment Agency

As agents of strategic institutional change, institutional entrepreneurs (IEs) draw resources from their structural environment to alter the structural context in which they are embedded. In this article, we explore which resources IEs mobilize in different structural settings. We distinguish between (positional or free) field resources and persona...

Mixed methods study on the causes of the non-take-up of child supplement in Germany

Since the inception of the European Employment Strategy in 1997, individualized employment support has been a key priority of the European Union and its Member States. Nevertheless, empirical research on the delivery of individualized services for the unemployed is still underdeveloped. In this article, we explore how local employment agencies in t...

Service individualization is high on the agenda of active welfare states. Especially for the long-term unemployed and other people with complex problems, individualized employment and social services are seen as a crucial precondition for social and labour market integration. To achieve tailor-made service delivery, welfare states have introduced n...

Mark Considine , Jenny M. Lewis , Siobhan O'Sullivan and Els Sol (2015), Getting Welfare to Work: Street-Level Governance in Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands. £55.00, pp. 224, Oxford: Oxford University Press, hbk. - DEBORAH RICE

A central goal of European activation policies is to provide coherent and actively inclusive employment and social services. This book offers new insights on the effective governance and implementation of such policies. Utilizing empirical studies from six European welfare states, expert contributors explore how different institutional contexts in...

In Chapter 8 on Germany, Katharina Zimmermann and Deborah Rice address the question in how far the one-stop-shop design of the German Jobcenters for the non-insured unemployed fosters the provision of coordinated and individualized activation services. Based on interview findings from three German cities, the authors argue that service delivery is...

The main focus point of Chapter 2, which lays the analytical groundwork for the empirical chapters in the book, lies on the organizational challenges associated with the integrated delivery of employment and social services at the local level. The chapter discusses how the fragmentation of services between the local, regional, national and European...

Introduction Twenty-five years of welfare state research after the publication of Esping-Andersen's seminal The three worlds of welfare capitalism (1990) have shown that the welfare regime approach is here to stay, in spite of the manifold criticism that has been raised against Esping-Andersen's regime typology, not only on methodological but also...

Social Policy Review draws together international scholarship at the forefront in addressing concerns that emphasise both the breadth of social policy analysis, and the expanse of issues with which it is engaged. Contributions to this edition focus on the effects of financialisation on services and care provision in adult social care, residential c...

This paper is concerned with advancing the theorization of social investment. To this end, we introduce three theoretical arguments. Firstly, we expand on Nolan’s (2013) proposition that one must distinguish between social investment as a policy paradigm and social investment as a policy approach. Secondly, we argue that the policy approach of soci...

In the era of activation, which is characterized by the decentralization and individualization of social services, welfare caseworkers play an increasingly important role in shaping the policy outcomes of the welfare state. In this article, it is argued that to theoretically accommodate the complex institutional and systemic environments in which t...

The welfare regime concept introduced by Gøsta Esping-Andersen in 1990 is still widely used in comparative political research, although it has been challenged extensively both on empirical and analytical grounds. Besides the fact that many empirical welfare states seem to be hybrid cases of the established welfare regime categories, the argument th...