Accounting for what and to whom? Accountability tensions in collaborations addressing long‐term unemployment

Abstract

Across Europe, public employment services are experimenting with more holistic and cross-sector collaborations to tackle the wicked problem of long-term unemployment. These collaborations operate in a context characterised by tensions produced by multiple demands for accountability. Based on case studies of the accountability relations and challenges in five such collaborations in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), Estonia, Scotland and Denmark, we found that: rigorous use of quantifiable measurement regimes made it difficult to attribute salience to important aspects of the progress made by the unemployed citizen; standardised accounts come with the risk of reductionist understandings of the citizen's social circumstances and resources; superficial participation by local politicians resulted in rather weak political accountability and a marked ambiguity of the role of the client as both accountee and accountholder.

Conflicting demands and emotional labour: Balancing and swapping at the front line of the welfare state

“…Thus, numerous studies depict front-line workers who navigate conflicting demands -often depicted as demands for being both caring and enforcing (Gjersøe, 2022) and for delivering standardized and specialized services (Røhnebaek & Breit, 2022) -and document how a range of quite different street-level workers manage to do so. This article emphasizes the demanding emotional dimensions inherent in such practices: front-line workers are required to establish norms of emotional closeness with service users to realize current demands for co-created services but work in ambiguous contexts that might make the establishment of such emotional closeness very challenging (Hansen, M. P. et al, 2022b;Mortensen & Needham, 2022). The article demonstrates that demands facing public sector employees are not 'just' difficult to navigate since they require public officials to do things that seem mutually exclusive.…”