Research
Activating States project
Frontline changes to the delivery of employment services in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands.
Contact: Dr. Siobhan O'Sullivan
Prof. Mark Considine and Dr. Siobhan O'Sullivan have been working on public policy and employment services related research for the last four years. In conjunction with A/Prof. Jenny Lewis, The Activating States project has been examining frontline changes to the delivery of employment services in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands. Using benchmark data collected ten years ago, the Activating States project has been analysing whether and how the activation of welfare clients has changed these services. This analysis provides a means to assess the components of the new target and market-driven systems in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands and to compare different tools for managing both clients and frontline staff.
Increasing Innovation and Flexibility in Social Service Delivery
Contact: Dr. Siobhan O'Sullivan
Mark Considine and Siobhan O'Sullivan are working on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project called Increasing Innovation and Flexibility in Social Service Delivery. The new project will develop a new model of the way regulation and innovation interact in the employment system, including how they create 'mission drift' for both the program and some contracted agencies. With the aid of comparison with other systems using similar instruments, the project is assisting agencies and government regulators to better understand how service deliver innovation can be achieved without excessive gaming and opportunism by private agencies or the loss of their distinctive mission.
Ministers and Mandarins: The Role of Expertise, Cognitive Style, and Emotion in Shaping Approaches to Policy-Making.
Project team: Mark Considine, Jenny Lewis and Damon Alexander
Contact: Dr Damon Alexander
Most mainstream accounts of the public policy making process pay very little attention to the role played by factors such as experience, expertise, creativity or emotion in shaping how individual policy actors read and respond to policy problems and opportunities. Indeed, when it comes to exploring policy decisions, such attributes are in most cases either completely ignored or cast as pollutants or barriers to the 'rational' policy-making process. This project takes a different tack. Drawing on an experimental approach informed by critical decision analysis and scenario-based problem solving methods, the project explores the decision making styles, cognitive frameworks, skills, values and strategies employed by novice and elite-level policy actors in framing and responding to complex policy problems. In-depth interviews (n=120) with early career public servants, newly elected politicians, senior bureaucrats, and former cabinet ministers will be used to:
- identify the key drivers which motivate and shape how policy problems and solutions are defined and articulated by individual policy actors;
- to explore the strategies and approaches employed by individual actors in response to a range of complex policy problems; and
- to examine how these strategies and approaches might vary according to function, experience and expertise.
The project is being funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and runs from July 2010-2014. For further information please contact Dr Damon Alexander.