Bureaucratic Manoeuvres: The Contested Administration of the Unemployed 9781487530242

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Acronyms
1. Introduction
2. Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy
3. “More Than a Placement Service”: The Transient High Modernism of “Manpower” Planning, 1965–1976
4. Making and Unmaking Front-Line Professionalism, 1977–1990
5. Within Reach of the “What Works Best Solution”: Evidence-Based Activation, 1994–2000
6. Towards a Culture of Results, 1996–2000
Conclusions
References
Index

Citation preview

BUREAUCRATIC MANOEUVRES The Contested Administration of the Unemployed

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PUBLIC POLICY Editors: MICHAEL HOWLETT, DAVID LAYCOCK (Simon Fraser University), and STEPHEN MCBRIDE (McMaster University)

Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy is designed to showcase innovative approaches to political economy and public policy from a comparative perspective. While originating in Canada, the series will provide attractive offerings to a wide international audience, featuring studies with local, subnational, cross-national, and international empirical bases and theoretical frameworks. Editorial Advisory Board Jeffrey Ayres, St Michael’s College, Vermont Neil Bradford, Western University Janine Brodie, University of Alberta William Carroll, University of Victoria William Coleman, University of Waterloo Rodney Haddow, University of Toronto Jane Jenson, Université de Montréal Laura Macdonald, Carleton University Rianne Mahon, Wilfrid Laurier University Michael Mintrom, Monash University Grace Skogstad, University of Toronto Leah Vosko, York University Kent Weaver, Georgetown University Linda White, University of Toronto For a list of books published in the series, see page 165.

Bureaucratic Manoeuvres The Contested Administration of the Unemployed

JOHN GRUNDY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0447-2 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grundy, John, 1976−, author Bureaucratic manoeuvres : the contested administration of the unemployed/John Grundy. (Studies in comparative political economy and public policy ; 56) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0447-2 (hardcover) 1. Manpower policy – Canada. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in comparative political economy and public policy ; 56 HD5728.G78 2019

331.110971

C2018-906242-8

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an error or omission, please notify the publisher. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments vii List of Acronyms

ix

1 Introduction

3

2 Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

19

3 “More Than a Placement Service”: The Transient High Modernism of “Manpower” Planning, 1965–1976 30 4 Making and Unmaking Front-Line Professionalism, 1977–1990 54 5 Within Reach of the “What Works Best Solution”: Evidence-Based Activation, 1994–2000 75 6 Towards a Culture of Results, 1996–2000 95 Conclusions 124 References Index

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Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me undertake and complete this book. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Leah Vosko for her generous mentorship and unwavering commitment to this project. I also wish to thank William Walters, Barbara Cameron, and Stephen McBride for their supportive engagement during its initial stages. The opportunities I had to pursue postdoctoral research at several universities undoubtedly enriched this book. During my time at Wilfrid Laurier University, I benefited greatly from the feedback of Rianne Mahon on two draft chapters, and from many stimulating discussions about governance with Melissa Finn, Rhys Machold, and Kim Rygiel. I am very grateful to Debbie Laliberte Rudman for providing the opportunity to spend a year at Western University researching street-level employment service delivery with an inspiring team of critical researchers including Suzanne Huot, Rebecca Aldrich, Melanie Stone, and Awish Aslam. I am also thankful for the encouragement I received from friends and colleagues at York University, including Rebecca Casey, Kim McIntyre, Guliz Akkaymak, Parvinder Hira-Friesen, Adam Perry, Pamela Persaud, Min-Jung Kwok, Andrea Noack, Mark Thomas, Eric Tucker, Wendy McKeen, Alice Hoe, Heather Steel, Angran Li, Tobin LeBlanc Haley, Azar Masoumi, Alix Holtby, Jennifer Mussell, and Alice Romo. I am grateful to Mariana Valverde for offering insightful comments on chapter 5. I am fortunate to have had the support of a number of close friends while completing this project. I wish to thank Kym Bird, Frances Latchford, Elio Iannacci, Lucy Bojcic, Paul Halferty, and Catherine Fitzpatrick for their encouragement and for often providing much-needed distractions. I am deeply indebted to Miriam Smith for her guidance and friendship over the past two decades. I am especially grateful to Ali

viii Acknowledgments

Howell, as the insights I gained from our countless conversations run throughout the pages that follow. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Research for this book was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship. I am grateful to Daniel Quinlan at University of Toronto Press for guiding the manuscript through the peer review process, to the anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful interventions enhanced the book, and to Ian MacKenzie for his careful review of the text. Sections of chapter 5 appear as “Statistical Profiling of the Unemployed,” Studies in Political Economy 96 (1): 47–68, and sections of chapter 6 appear as “Performance Measurement in Employment Service Delivery, 1996–2000,” Canadian Public Administration 58 (1): 161–82. Finally, I want to thank my family for the many ways they have supported me on this journey. For their continual encouragement, I thank my father and stepmother, Arthur and Karon Grundy. I am very grateful to my sister, Jane Brown, for her limitless generosity and her confidence in this project. My deepest thanks is owed to my partner, Alejandro Cuza, for supporting this endeavour more than anyone and for providing a home in every sense of the word. I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Marie Evelyn Grundy.

Acronyms

AOTA CAP CEC CEIC CEIU CMS DMI EBSM ECC EI EIC GATB HRCC HRDC HRIB JSCI LLFF LMDA NHQ NPM MBO OAG OECD OPC

Adult Occupational Training Act Canada Assistance Plan Canada Employment Centre Canada Employment and Immigration Commission Canada Employment and Immigration Union Client Monitoring System Department of Manpower and Immigration Employment Benefit and Support Measures Economic Council of Canada Employment Insurance Employment and Immigration Canada General Aptitude Test Battery Human Resources Canada Centre Human Resources Development Canada Human Resources Investment Branch Job Seeker Classification Instrument Longitudinal Labour Force File Labour Market Development Agreement National Headquarters New Public Management Management by Objectives Office of the Auditor General of Canada Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

x Acronyms

RBAF SOMS UI UIC WGMTS

Results-Based Accountability Framework Service Outcome Measurement System Unemployment Insurance Unemployment Insurance Commission Working Group on Medium-Term Savings

BUREAUCRATIC MANOEUVRES The Contested Administration of the Unemployed

Chapter One

Introduction

In 2008 much of the world entered into a deep economic recession caused by the near collapse of the U.S. financial sector. The worldwide economic downturn gave rise to unemployment levels in Canada not seen in a generation. The hardship many displaced workers faced during this time was exacerbated by previous reforms to Employment Insurance (EI), Canada’s primary income security program for workers. These reforms put income security benefits out of reach for a majority of the unemployed, especially the growing proportion of workers in precarious employment. In this context, an unexpected chorus of workers’ advocates, think tanks, and business groups called for changes to EI that would restore access to benefits for the unemployed. In 2012 the government of Canada made clear its intended reforms to EI. The Budget Implementation Act included new measures that imposed stricter job-search obligations on EI claimants. The Act provided the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada with new powers to clarify what constitutes claimant “availability for work,” a key criterion of entitlement to EI. Specifically, the Act authorized the minister to establish new regulations that define the suitable employment that different categories of claimants are required to accept. It also allowed the minister to further specify the efforts claimants must demonstrate in their job searches in order to maintain access to benefits. The following year, the federal government conducted 1,200 home visits by so-called integrity officers. Documents leaked to the media indicated that administrators set targets for the identification of fraudulent EI claims and that financial bonuses were proposed for reaching targets (Hall 2013). The leaked documents also detailed the methods integrity officers were to use to scrutinize EI claimants, including impromptu

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doorstep interviews and verifying with prospective employers that claimants had indeed submitted job applications. These measures are the most recent in a long history of so-called activating labour market policy reforms that are premised on an individualized approach to unemployment and rely on monitoring individual behaviour. Yet the official manual on EI entitlement used by Service Canada staff, the Digest of Benefit Entitlement Principles, points to a persistent ambiguity at the heart of active job-search monitoring efforts that is overlooked in critical studies of activation. The digest notes that “availability for work” remains “probably the most difficult question to decide” of all EI eligibility criteria, as it hinges on whether a claimant “sincerely wishes to put an end to the period of unemployment, as quickly as possible, and that the labour market situation is unfavourable, despite one’s willingness to work, ability and skills” (Service Canada 2015, emphasis added). It calls on staff to decipher claimant availability for work in light of a number of considerations, including whether the claimant demonstrates a “sincere desire to work” or the attributes of someone “not really looking for work” (Service Canada 2014a, emphasis added). The digest asserts that in deciphering claimant availability for work, claimant credibility is critical in determining “where the truth lies” (Service Canada 2014b). The federal government’s reforms to EI exemplify a dilemma of contemporary labour market policy that is the focus of this book. During the post-war period unemployment was approached largely as a social and economic problem to be addressed through macroeconomic and social insurance policies. Over the past several decades it has been increasingly recast as a result of deficiencies of unemployed individuals themselves. Unemployment is now often governed as a problem of individual work ethic, attitude, skills, and unrealistic work expectations. The central claim of this book is that governing unemployment as an individual problem has posed much more difficulty for employment service administrators and front-line staff than scholars typically acknowledge. While the activation framework casts the unemployed individual as the proper locus of policy intervention, attempts to decipher and act on individual deficiencies have been far from straightforward in practice. Focusing on the years between 1965 and 2000, I trace the elusiveness of coherent techniques of activation in employment service delivery, and the strange resourcefulness officials have demonstrated in their efforts to surmount this challenge. I do so to illuminate the limits and costs of the activation paradigm in new ways.

Introduction

5

Activation and the Governance of the Unemployed The way unemployment is conceived and governed has undergone profound shifts. Until the late nineteenth century it was not possible to think of unemployment as a measurable socioeconomic condition distinct from unemployed individuals. Unemployment was strictly “a problem of the unemployed,” and ways of governing it were oriented towards classifying and adjudicating unemployed individuals according to their character and worthiness (Walters 2000). Over the course of the twentieth century, in countries such as Britain, Canada, and the United States, other ways of governing unemployment less concerned with the attributes of the unemployed took shape. The rise of Keynesian policy in the post–Second World War era entailed the most complete detachment of unemployment from individual characteristics of workers, as unemployment was configured primarily as a national economic problem to be resolved through macroeconomic policies promoting high levels of employment (Walters 2000). In Canada this logic was progressively displaced by federal policymakers’ brief adoption of so-called active “manpower” policy in the 1960s, which attributed significant unemployment to inadequacies in the mobility and skills of labour. The subsequent ascendance of neoclassical economic theory in the 1970s and 1980s provided another explanation of unemployment. Informed by the work of Milton Friedman and others, and popularized by neoliberal figureheads such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, neoclassical economics attributes unemployment to labour market rigidities generated by factors such as the collective bargaining power of trade unions, protective employment regulations, income security programs that de-commodify labour, and the attitudinal or behavioural deficits of the unemployed themselves (McBride 1992; Albo 1993; Boland and Griffin 2015). Activation policy is now the dominant paradigm of labour market and social policy in most advanced welfare states, and it reinvigorates concerns about the attributes of unemployed individuals. The central tenet of activation is that so-called passive income security programs implemented during the twentieth century produce harmful work disincentives among individuals and rigidities in the broader labour market. Two policy prescriptions flow from this logic. First, activation involves retrenchment of income security programs to limit one’s ability to refrain from participating in the labour force. This is most clearly expressed in a widespread trend towards limiting the availability, amount, and

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duration of income security benefits. Second, the activation paradigm calls for measures that are intended to reform the personal attributes of the unemployed, including their behaviour, attitudes, and skills (van Berkel and Borgi 2008, 334). The governance of unemployment is now increasingly a matter of assessing and enhancing employability, and its sub-themes of motivation, self-esteem, flexibility, willingness to work, and entrepreneurialism of the self, among others. Across jurisdictions the unemployed are subject to stringent job-search requirements as well as employability enhancement programs, including often-mandatory counselling, motivational exercises, and other measures. Those unable or unwilling to comply with such behavioural requirements are increasingly subject to punitive or disciplinary measures, including benefits sanction and disentitlement (Dwyer 1998; Dufour, Boismenu, and Nöel 2003; Grundy and Rudman 2016). Conceptual Approach and Arguments This book develops a critical approach to the study of activation. I build much of my analysis on the insights of critical political economy. This literature has long pointed to the fundamental deficiencies and contradictions1 of the activation paradigm. Scholars working in the tradition of critical political economy point to the flawed assumptions of activation’s neoclassical theoretical underpinnings. A key claim of this work is that activation measures that aim to modify the attitudes and behaviours of the unemployed are fundamentally deficient because they do nothing to resolve a lack of jobs in the labour market and do not address broader causes of unemployment such as economic restructuring or structural inequalities (McBride 1992; Albo 1994; Peck 2001; Galabuzi 2006; MacKinnon 2015). Feminist researchers further underscore the specifically gendered contradictions of activation policy (Vosko 1996; Porter 2003; Gazso 2009). Activation policies often posit a gender-neutral model of the citizen-worker that tends to position men and women as similarly situated and unencumbered with caregiving responsibilities that may impede their participation in the labour market. Women

1 As a critic’s term, the concept of contradiction is laden with theoretical implications. My use of the word draws on a straightforward definition of contradiction as a “logical incongruity” or “a situation in which inherent factors, actions, or propositions are inconsistent or contrary to one another” (Merriam-Webster 2012).

Introduction

7

are thus enjoined to secure their welfare on the market through paid work and are often subject to reintegration schemes, regardless of the unequal division of caregiving responsibilities between women and men. From the perspective of political economy, the lynchpin concept of employability is equally paradoxical. The idea of employability signifies intensified obligations for individuals to engage in continual re-skilling and lifelong learning as a strategy for coping with precarious employment and unemployment (Peck and Theodore 2000a; Garsten and Jacobsson 2003). Yet workers in precarious forms of employment to whom employability rhetoric is often directed tend to lack access to formal training as well as the control over the labour process or working time necessary to realize learning opportunities (Cohen 2003; Vosko 2006). A key conclusion of this literature is that activation entails a contradictory form of disciplinary individualization, which Janine Brodie defines as “a disciplinary and dividing practice that places steeply rising demands on people to find personal causes and responses to what are, in effect, collective social problems” (Brodie 2007, 103–4). I take these critical insights into the contradictions and deficiencies of activation as a starting point rather than a conclusion. I ask a further set of questions: How do policymakers and employment service administrators encounter and seek to manage the contradictions inherent in individual activation measures? What work must officials undertake to sustain techniques of activation in the face of their own inadequacy? These questions are rarely taken up in critical social policy scholarship. They require careful investigation of the organizational and street-level practices whereby authorities translate formal activation policy into service delivery arrangements. Until recently, critical scholarship on labour market policy has tended to relegate questions of implementation and administration to a secondary status and view street-level organizations as merely implementing policies determined at higher levels (Brodkin 2013). Part of this oversight relates to the practical difficulties of examining behind-the-scenes organizational practices and techniques of activation. What actually happens in street-level organizations delivering activation programs cannot be grasped by formal legislative texts or many of the other sources of information on labour market policies such as expenditures data or outcome measures typically found in evaluation studies (Brodkin 2013, 10; see also McElligott 2001). The heavy reliance on such sources of data in studies of labour market policy impedes our understanding of the way administrators

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are enmeshed in the limits of activation, as well as how they seek to manage these limits. A number of scholars are generating new insights into the street-level practices of activation through organizational ethnography, an approach that involves the researcher’s immersion in spaces of activation and the observation of situated, everyday practices that often may bear little relation to formal policies on the books (Howard 2006; Brady 2011; Brodkin 2013; Garsten and Jacobsson 2013; Rudman et al. 2017). The study that follows is not a street-level ethnography based on direct observation. Yet it is premised on the idea that other important insights into practices of activation flow from analysis of the mundane administrative records related to service delivery, including training manuals for front-line staff, meeting minutes, departmental memos, staff newsletters, and correspondence between staff, among many others. In the pages that follow I put the insights of governmentality literature into dialogue with those of political economy. A governmentality lens allows us to explore how administrators encounter fundamental contradictions and deficiencies of activation and attempt to manage them as if they were technical problems amenable to administrative solution. It provides a window into administrators’ ongoing and strained efforts to forge coherent techniques of activation. In so doing, a governmentality lens illuminates in new ways the effects of activation’s deficiencies and contradictions for those given the task to implement it. Governmentality is perhaps most broadly defined by Michel Foucault as “the conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1991, 93). Scholars across many disciplines have elaborated the concept into an analytical approach that illuminates any deliberate attempt to govern people and things. Foucault’s lectures on governmentality delivered in the late 1970s provide the main inspiration for this approach. In part responding to criticism that his earlier accounts of power failed to address forms of power exercised by the state (Gordon 1991, 4), Foucault’s lectures on governmentality took up the question of state formation but in ways that cast the state as neither the source of political power nor a discrete, bounded entity. He instead proposed a genealogy of the state that emphasized how early modern states came to manage the welfare and security of populations by incorporating into formal state apparatuses techniques of government and forms of expertise such as public health, medicine, accountancy, and statistics (Johnson 1993). One important consequence of this account is that it counters the assumption that the state always held a monopoly over practices of government. It instead calls on

Introduction

9

researchers to examine how the state came to align itself with practices of government that were playing out in a variety of sites. Scholars working in the 1990s took up conceptions of governmentality to analyse transformations in governance associated with the rise of neoliberalism, including new arrangements for governing at a distance, the growing authority of auditing and accountancy over bureau professionalism, the valorization of entrepreneurialism as a general mode of subjectivity, as well as a new emphasis on replacing passive with active welfare systems. For researchers fleshing out a governmental approach, these transformations associated with neoliberal governance were not explicable by the conventional dichotomies of critical social theory such as freedom/domination, structure/agency, public/private, and state/ civil society, among others (Brady 2014, 18). A central insight of this work remains that government operates at a distance through freedom, choice, and even practices of self-actualization. A few common threads tend to run through the large and diverse body of governmentality scholarship. First, studies of governmentality attend to the way governance is a “problematizing” practice. A governmental approach does not bestow a pre-given ontological status on the problems that come to concern authorities – crime, unemployment, deficient economic growth, and so on. Instead, it probes how these problems become specified as thinkable and governable entities, always through certain forms of expertise (Gottweis 2003). Governmentality scholars pay close attention to the specific times and places of problematizations, because they represent moments at which authorities have posed questions about what and how to govern, as well as how to govern themselves. Problematizations are shaped by, and express, broader rationalities of government, which encompass representations of the object to be governed, who should be governing, the appropriate programs and techniques, and the objectives of government (Dean 1999, 211). From this perspective, problematizations are not an inevitable outcome of historical circumstances or structural forces. Rather, they emerge from particular circumstances that are by no means necessary (Bacchi 2012, 2). A key consequence of this approach is that it foregrounds how problems that come to concern authorities, such as unemployment, which are often understood as having a self-evident or taken-for-granted meaning, actually have a history more contingent than is commonly assumed. Second, studies of governmentality are concerned with how governance is instantiated through seemingly mundane mechanisms (Rose

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and Miller 1992; Dean 1995; Walters 2000). This approach is closely attuned to the fact that it is through everyday procedures and practices that governmental ambitions become practical interventions. Whereas other approaches to understanding governance focus on the activities of high-level legislators or powerful social forces, governmentality emphasizes how governance is enacted through “techniques of notation, computation and calculation; procedures of examination and assessment; the invention of devices such as surveys and presentational forms such as tables; the standardisation of systems for training and the inculcation of habits; the inauguration of professional specialisms and vocabularies,” among others (Rose and Miller 1992, 184; see also Walters 2000, 5). Techniques are understood as both the condition for, and a limit to, governmental ambitions. Governmental projects must work through the technologies that are available or that can be invented, and this is an important challenge often met through resourcefulness and eclecticism by authorities. New technologies are rarely wholly new but represent “a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose” (Ferguson 2010, 183). Given the limits on technical means for governing, actors with widely divergent ambitions must often rely on the same set of techniques and take them up in competing and contradictory ways (Walters 2000, 39). Finally, governmentality research enquires into how governance often presumes or seeks to cultivate certain kinds of selfhood. One primary insight of this work is that governing in a liberal way rests on the capacities of individuals to govern themselves. From this perspective, the formation of individual subjectivity is both a crucial strategy and effect of governance. As Dean (1999, 12) contends, to analyse governing through the lens of governmentality is to address “those practices that try and shape, sculpt, mobilize, enhance and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups.” This insight is the basis of a large literature exploring the way in which neoliberal governance is premised upon a re-specification of the citizensubject. Fine-grained studies of sites as varied as the employment office, the community agency, the school, and the hospital demonstrate how welfare technologies that acted upon the social-citizen as an object of welfare expertise have been displaced by neoliberal modes of governance that take the responsibilized and autonomous risk manager as their object (Rose 1999; Ilcan and Basok 2004). Within governmentality studies, services to activate the unemployed emblify the way neoliberal

Introduction

11

governmentality aims to reshape subjectivity. In these ways, then, a governmental approach provides a range of conceptual tools to interrogate the governance of the unemployed. It opens up new avenues to examine how the unemployed are problematized through forms of expertise, as well as the procedures and practices through which officials seek to act on unemployed. This book traces how the unemployed are governed in service-delivery settings. But it is equally concerned to document officials’ work to sustain and defend activation programs against their own fundamental failures and contradictions. To this end, I draw on several strands of governmentality scholarship attentive to what Murray Li (2007a, 28) describes as “the beyond of programming” – the refractory processes that precede, thwart, and invariably reshape governmental ambitions. I approach employment service delivery in ways that emphasize the imminence of contestation to governance, and how contestation and resistance are incorporated into governmental arrangements through negotiation, compromise, and mutual accommodation (O’Malley 1996; O’Malley, Weir, and Shearing 1997). Equally important, I draw on studies that foreground the “congenitally failing” nature of governmentality (Miller and Rose 1990, 10; Malpas and Wickham 1995). The account of employment service delivery developed in the following chapters attends to the way failure incites political struggle, as well as governmental innovation and renewal (see Mitchell 2002; Higgins 2004; Best 2014; Mitchell and Lizotte 2016). Finally, I examine the work of employment service administrators by drawing on the notion of assemblages. Numerous scholars stress the utility of this notion to counter overly systematized accounts of governmentality and to capture the transient and contingent ensembles of knowledges, techniques, and practices involved in governing (Rabinow 2003, 56; Brady 2016; Larner and Higgins 2017). As Larner and Walters (2000, 365) note, an assemblage is a “functioning machine whose sole defining feature is that somehow it works – but never as planned.” One value of the concept is that it “speaks to a sense of construction and combination – the building of elements into a temporary unity” (Clarke 2008, 201). Murray Li’s (2007b) analysis of specific practices of assemblage is especially pertinent to this study. She extends theorizing of assemblages in a new direction by delineating the practices through which assemblages are formed; the work undertaken that involves drawing people, discourses, techniques, objects, and objectives together and,

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moreover, the work involved in sustaining the resulting formation. Drawing on Murray Li’s (2007b) formulation of the practices of assemblage, the chapters detail the successive efforts of employment service administrators to sustain programs of activation by managing failures, minimizing the contradictions inherent to individual activation, marginalizing criticism of service-delivery arrangements, compromising and accommodating critics when necessary, and reassembling service delivery, among other practices (see Murray Li 2007b). By taking this approach I cast light on assembly work that is often elided in critical studies of activation and much governmentality scholarship more generally. I also foreground the reality that service-delivery arrangements can and do fall apart. I develop two overarching claims about activation across the chapters that follow. The first is that activation has been enormously difficult for authorities. Fashioning ways to govern unemployment as a matter of individual employability has been a labour-intensive endeavour marked by substantial incoherence and failure. While the activation framework requires that the unemployed individual be made increasingly intelligible to authorities as the locus of policy intervention, attempts to secure such intelligibility are tentative and fragile. The second claim of this study relates to the way in which administrators manage the fragility of individual activation. I argue that officials seldom attribute the failure of activation to fundamental contradictions inherent in the activation paradigm, including its individualized conception of unemployment. Instead, officials tend to manage failures of activation by rendering them technical (Murray Li 2007b); that is, by casting them as the result of deficiencies in extant service-delivery arrangements that can be rectified through the administrative innovations they are able to furnish. This study thus highlights the transience of the administrative fixes of activation in Canada; a process of perpetual reform that unfolds under the innocuous guise of service-delivery “improvement.” Following the insights of governmentality literature on the heterogeneity of authorities enlisted into practices of government, this ongoing “improvement” of service delivery involves a range of actors beyond policymakers, administrators, and front-line service workers. The pages that follow will detail the service-delivery solutions proffered by labour-market economists, management consultants, business organizations, psychologists and social workers, counsellors, program evaluators, econometricians, software engineers, service users, and many others.

Introduction

13

In developing these two central claims, this book brings to light a critical dimension of the work of activation that is often overlooked. It highlights the dilemmas and confusions that have accompanied efforts to govern unemployment as a problem of individual activation and employability, and the technical resourcefulness with which administrators have sought to resolve these dilemmas. This book also unsettles the self-evident status of notions of individual employability by highlighting dramatic shifts and ruptures in its governance. Methods One challenging aspect of research using Foucault’s notion of governmentality is that it comes with minimal guidance on methods of analysis. There is no explicit framework for “doing” governmentalitybased research (Brass 2000). Such a framework would of course run counter to Foucault’s scholarly project, which was sceptical of established methodological and theoretical approaches and characterized by a preoccupation with artefacts and details of history that many of his contemporaries regarded as unimportant. As Dean (1999, 28) has suggested, a governmental approach to activation services is open-ended in its potential foci. It entails not only attending to relevant legislation, but also to a wide range of phenomena including “the administrative structure, integration and coordination of various departments of state and other agencies; the forms of training of public servants and other professionals (counsellors, case managers) and the expertise expected of them; the means for the collection, collation, storage and retrieval of information about specific populations of clients; the design, layout and location of various offices; the procedures of reception of clients, and the methods of queuing, interviewing and assessing them; the use of forms, publicity, advertisements, etc.” All of these practical elements are analysed in the ensuing study. The book takes the form of a series of case studies of service-delivery reform. The cases are ordered chronologically and span a period from the mid1960s to the late 1990s. Each provides a window into how administrators have pursued ways of knowing and governing individual employability, and the difficulties they encountered in this process. Each also highlights the use of a specific form of knowledge or technique through which administrators sought to overcome such difficulties and pursue more efficient and effective modes of activation. Yet because activation’s limits are fundamental and cannot be resolved administratively, each

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study traces the failures and unintended effects that were generated by successive bids for service-delivery renewal over several decades. The historical orientation of the study foregrounds the iterative failure and renewal of activation services, as well as the way successive reforms layer upon each other and create new tensions in the process. This historical approach also enables me to capture dramatic shifts in the rationalities and technologies that have informed different periods of service delivery. The wide range of rationalities and technologies that have been conscripted into activation cannot be captured in a contemporary snapshot of employment service delivery. The study is based on an eclectic range of data-collection methods and materials. The bulk of the research draws on documentary analysis. I surveyed publicly available documents such as departmental annual reports, government and OECD-commissioned studies of Canadian labour market policy, parliamentary hearings and stakeholder submissions, and newspaper articles. I also engaged in extensive research in the library and archives of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. There I drew on administrative records including internal departmental reports, department newsletters, directives outlining the administrative procedures and organization of employment offices, and training material for front-line workers such as course curricula, manuals, and training videos. The study is also based on administrative records I acquired through four formal requests for information under the Federal Access to Information Act. These requests generated a very large volume of administrative records including meeting minutes, departmental memos, and correspondence between federal administrators. Access to these records allowed me to develop an account of the internal and often contested organizational dynamics of employment service delivery that would not otherwise have been possible from documents that are produced for the public. Finally, research for this study entailed in-depth, semi-structured confidential interviews with an employment counsellor, a director of an employment service agency in Toronto, and one HRSDC administrator. These interviews all focused on managerial transformations to service delivery during the 1990s, especially the turn to contracting out and performance measurement in the later part of that decade. These interviews also provided important insights into the inner workings of employment service delivery, and participants conveyed frank assessments of the successes and failures of active labour market policy.

Introduction

15

Overview of Chapters Chapter 2 outlines the conceptual framework for the empirical investigations that follow. I argue that while political economy scholarship emphasizes the deficiencies and contradictions of activation services, such scholarship remains largely incurious about their imminence for employment service administrators and staff. I then argue that the insights of governmentality studies into the role of expertise and mundane techniques of governance can illuminate the labour-intensive work of officials to sustain activation. Setting up the case studies that follow, I call for a history of activation that attends to the way authorities have been unable to make practices of individual activation cohere and to the abrupt ruptures and mutations that characterize efforts to know and govern individual employability. The empirical investigation begins in chapter 3 with a study of the establishment of the modern employment service in the 1960s. At this time the federal government dramatically ramped up its involvement in the labour market in the name of “active manpower policy.” Scholars identify this period as a critical starting point of more active forms of labour market policy, because it marks a shift from Keynesian macroeconomic policy to supply-side labour market interventions (McBride 1992; Albo 1994). This chapter draws on the tools of governmentality to afford us another complimentary perspective on this period of labour market policy. Specifically, the chapter draws our attention to the dominance in labour market policy of what James Scott (1998) calls high modernism. High modernism is a governmental rationality characterized by grandiose problematizations and a robust belief in state-led rational planning. I foreground the high modern rationalities that underpinned policymakers’ then deepening concern with the employability the nation’s manpower, as well as policymakers’ vision of a modern public employment service backed by an elaborate labour market intelligence and forecasting system known as the Manpower Information System. The chapter also traces the way in which the manpower apparatus came undone in the face of several factors; the technical infeasibility of rational manpower planning; deepening contestation over employment service delivery by equity-seeking groups excluded from the manpower services, and the ascendance of neoclassical theories of unemployment by the early 1970s, which cast doubt on the merits of state-led planning. In highlighting the rapid expansion and collapse of a distinctly high modern formula for the governance of

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employability, the chapter illuminates the presence of rationalities other than neoliberalism that have shaped active labour market policy and notions of employability, as well as the depth of incoherence and failure that characterized its earliest iterations in Canada. Chapter 4 details administrators’ subsequent encounter with, and attempts to overcome, fundamental limits and contradictions that characterized early activation measures in the mid-1970s. At a time of deepening structural economic stagnation and increasing unemployment, policymakers and administrators embraced a more disciplinary, neoliberal, and individualized approach to employment service delivery. Under a succession of initiatives, employment counsellors were given the task to rapidly re-employ UI claimants through the increased use of mandatory interviews and rapid re-employment drives – a “help-and-hassle” model of service delivery that would become a hallmark of activation. The chapter then examines how, confronted with the limited effectiveness of such activation measures, officials cast failure in technical terms and attributed it to deficiencies in service-delivery coordination rather than the inherent limitations of activation under stagnant economic conditions. Specifically the chapter explores two widely divergent bids for service delivery renewal through which authorities sought to manage failures of activation. The first bid saw a group of administrators attempt to upgrade the professionalism and competency of increasingly beleaguered front-line employment counsellors. This effort involved a large-scale training program in more advanced forms of employability assessment and psychological counselling techniques, and it aimed to bring conceptual coherence and efficacy to front-line counselling. A second bid for service-delivery improvement followed from continued criticisms of counsellor performance in job placements and UI-roll reduction. It was led by administrators more committed to New Public Management (NPM) and its modes of monitoring and measurement than to social welfare professionalism. This managerial intervention brought counsellors’ conduct under increasing scrutiny in an effort to make them accountable for measurable results. In tracing these developments, this chapter illustrates how administrators sought to manage failures of activation through recourse to technical expertise, thus highlighting the forms of governmental innovation and reform prompted by failure. It also provides a window on the eclipse of welfare professionalism by NPM in employment service delivery. Reflecting the growing influence of NPM, chapter 5 explores the attempted implementation of statistical profiling technology in the

Introduction

17

mid-1990s, known initially as the Client Monitoring System, and subsequently the Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS). Developed by evaluators in Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) along with consultants with skills in statistical modelling, SOMS represented the possibility of a new era of activation in which employability assessment would be wrested from the suspect discretionary capacities of front-line staff and grounded in formal logic of econometrics. SOMS used computerized statistical models to facilitate service-delivery decisions about individuals based on outcomes predicted to result from service options. This chapter then explores the failure of SOMS to deliver on its promise. Few counsellors shared administrators’ optimism in the capacity of SOMS to improve employability assessment and they resisted its piloting. At the same time, technical difficulties in the technology’s statistical models multiplied the possibilities for poor service decisions. Finally, the extensive personal information that the technology used began to raise fears among observers that it violated regulations around the use of personal information by the government. Indeed, privacy considerations forced its abandonment in 2000. Chapter 6 analyses a further managerial initiative to rationalize servicedelivery practices in the late 1990s – the implementation of a performance measurement system that accompanied new activating measures under the EI Act of 1996. Following the OECD’s policy prescriptions calling for results-based management of employment services, administrators and evaluators in HRDC’s National Headquarters introduced the Results-Based Accountability Framework (RBAF). Under the RBAF, public and third-party agencies administering employment services were measured in light of two primary performance indicators: the number of individuals returned to work and the savings in unpaid Employment Insurance benefits generated as a result of service interventions. In imposing the RBAF, administrators sought to harness the disciplinary power of performance measurement that is amply documented in governmentality scholarship (Miller 1994; Dean 1999; Shore and Wright 1999). Administrators claimed that the performancemeasurement system would instantiate a cultural change in the organization and reorient service delivery around the rapid re-employment of service users by imposing new pressures on service staff to meet performance targets. The chapter then explores how the efforts of administrators to impose calculability encountered a series of dilemmas. These include the mundane but significant difficulties of technical coordination, which led

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many to doubt the RBAF’s validity from the outset; contestation by organizational actors and external stakeholders invested in different terms of measurement; and finally, growing recognition that the meaning of the performance data was inherently ambiguous. In this way the RBAF gave rise to new ambiguities around the effects of service delivery and the very measurability of service outcomes. In the conclusion of the book I argue that activation cannot be understood without careful study of street-level service-delivery arrangements through which it is enacted. Moreover, by highlighting the imminence of failure to activation practices, this study challenges and complicates governmental-based studies that too often overstate the coherence and effects of activation’s disciplinary techniques, and cast individualization and responsibilization as essentially successful. As well, by charting the radical mutability of notions of employability across cycles of service-delivery failure and renewal, this study unsettles the continued ascendance of notions of employability enhancement as the seemingly self-evident solution to the deepening forms of labour market insecurity that we confront. Conclusion This book extends criticism of the policies and practices of activation. It does so by probing the costs of activation, not only for those subject to its measures, but also for those who implement it at street level. By detailing the difficulties and failures that inhere in efforts to govern unemployment as a matter of individual employability, the pages that follow render the history of activation and notions of employability much less familiar and straightforward than we may have imagined.

Chapter Two

Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

Introduction The activation paradigm profoundly individualizes policy responses to unemployment. Implicitly sceptical of the very notion of “involuntary” unemployment (Albo 1994; O’Donnell 2006), activation casts the problem of unemployment as essentially individual employability – the cluster of behavioural and attitudinal characteristics such as work ethic, motivation, expectations of employment, as well as hard and soft skills. According to this logic, the solution to unemployment lay in the retrenchment of income security benefits and through employability-enhancement measures such as increasingly stringent job-search requirements, mandatory counselling, and other job-readiness exercises. In attempting to cultivate attitudes and behaviours associated with neoliberal virtues of entrepreneurialism and individual responsibility, activation revives a long-standing emphasis on the character and conduct of the unemployed. This chapter develops a critical conceptual framework for studying the limits of activation. It starts from the insights of critical political economy into the deeply deficient and contradictory nature of activation. From the perspective of political economy, the focus of activation on individual attributes obscures the broader political economic and structural relations that shape peoples’s access to employment and mobility within the labour force. Activation is thus a profoundly inadequate response to unemployment, because employability-enhancement cannot address the lack of demand for labour. While these insights are foundational to my analysis, I argue that a key implication of this critique remains under-explored, given the limited attention in political economy

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literature to the employment service-delivery settings in which deficiencies and contradictions of activation are sharply expressed. The central claim of this chapter is that a governmental approach can shed new light on the limits of activation. Governmentality research focuses closely on street-level employment services, tracing how unemployed individuals are problematized in service delivery, as well as the procedures and technologies of their governance. Building on more recent innovations in this scholarship, I will argue that a governmental approach also captures the difficulties officials face when they attempt to govern unemployment as a matter of individual activation. Such an approach can highlight resistance to the logic of activation in service delivery settings, the failure of its techniques, and the hard work officials undertake to defend and maintain activation services. In this way a governmentality approach makes possible a history of officials’ inability to govern unemployment as a problem of the unemployed. The Limits of Activation: Political-Economic Insights Insights from the field of critical political economy are foundational to critical studies of activation policy. This literature is characterized by a rigorously contextualized approach to public policy analysis. Its account emphasizes the influence of production and social reproduction, dominant ideologies, and political struggles (Porter 2003; Graefe 2007). Accordingly, critical political economy situates the rise of the activation paradigm within the broader diffusion of neoliberalism, defined by Harvey (2005, 19) as a project of marketization and commodification that aims to restore conditions for heightened capital accumulation among capitalist elites. Political economy traces the genesis of activation in advanced industrial countries to a protracted economic crisis in the 1970s that gave rise to increasingly flexible production processes and regulatory regimes that support such processes by prioritizing “the enhancement of the structural competitiveness of open economies mainly through supply-side intervention; and the subordination of social policy to the demands of labour market flexibility and structural competitiveness” (Jessop 1993, 9). This conceptual approach thus emphasizes the flexibility-oriented regulatory function of activation policy, which strips workers of de-commodifying protections and compels their entry into work that is often precarious (Peck 1994; Peck and Theodore 2000b, 124). A political-economic approach also highlights how activation policy works with other forms of labour

Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

21

market reregulation such as the erosion of collective bargaining rights, employment and health and safety standards, and anti-discrimination regulations (Thomas 2009; Grundy et al. 2017). From the perspective of political economy scholarship, activation represents a fundamentally deficient and contradictory policy response to unemployment (McBride 1992; McElligott 2001; Krinsky 2007). The underlying neoclassical logic of activation negates the structural or systemic determinants of unemployment. The terms of activation do not address structural phenomena that give rise to high rates of unemployment, many of which flow from neoliberal policy reforms. These include economic and trade policies that facilitate inter-jurisdictional competition and the associated divestment and mobility of capital, the embrace of public sector austerity, policies promoting labour market flexibilization that fuel the type of precarious employment closely associated with frequent unemployment or underemployment, as well as the structural inequities that shape people’s access to and movement within the labour market. Moreover, as political economists demonstrate, activation’s myopic focus on individuals ensures that it is ineffective during high unemployment, because supply-side measures simply cannot augment the number of jobs in the labour market (Peck and Theodore 2000a, 733; Raffass 2017). A key conclusion of political economy is that it exacerbates a form of disciplinary individualization under neoliberalism (Brodie 2007). Political economy’s powerful criticism of activation policy remains underdeveloped in one respect. The literature seldom explores the imminence of activation’s deficiencies and contradictions for authorities who implement it in employment service delivery. There is little sustained attention to the way officials encounter the logical fallacies of activation at the service delivery level, and the work officials must undertake to buttress activation. Inattentiveness to this potentially rich source of insights into the limits of activation stems, in part, from a tendency of political economic scholarship on activation to focus on its macro effects and formal legislative policy rather than on the inner workings of bureaucracies or street-level organizations.2 The dearth of political economy scholarship on the internal organizational dynamics of activation also reflects the general opacity of how activation is

2 One important exception to this general trend is McElligott (2001).

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implemented. As scholars of street-level bureaucracy demonstrate, after formal legislation is passed, implementation entails extensive discretion of administrators that shapes how policy is enacted (Lipsky 1980). The resulting organizational practices cannot be adequately grasped through common sources of data including legislative documents, spending figures, or indicators of service delivery such as caseload or job placement figures (Brodkin 2013, 11; see also McElligott 2001; Herd, Mitchell, and Lightman 2005). The trend to managerial coordination of activation services exacerbates their opacity. Reflecting the current dominance of managerialism, a common principle of activation holds that bureaucratic processes emphasizing due process and standardization are outmoded ways of coordinating employment services. Activating the unemployed is now seen to require new managerial mechanisms that make service providers accountable for results. Activation services in most advanced welfare states are now “steered” through rigorous performance measurement, competitive tendering of service delivery contracts, and often the establishment of quasi-markets of competing service providers, among other measures (van Berkel and Borghi 2007; Considine et al. 2015). Government preference to govern at a distance through results measures rather than bureaucratic directives further black-boxes agencies. A large body of public administration research on New Public Management in social service delivery indicates that the effects of managerial techniques such as performance measurement and contracting out are far from transparent. The fabrication of service delivery success by employing quantitative benchmarks often depends on other informal and uneasily documented practices of numerical gaming with substantive distributional implications and often negative outcomes for service users (Brodkin 2011). Other studies note that service providers hesitate to disclose their organizational practices amid heightened competition between agencies for funding (Dias and Maynard-Moody 2006). By creating new pressures to obscure how policy is being produced at streetlevel, managerial reforms ironically lead to the generation of opacity often in the name of enhanced transparency (Brodkin 2011, i273). The point to stress here is that key implications of political economy scholarship probing the limits activation remain under-explored. The tendency of political economy to emphasize the macro effects of activation policy, coupled with the methodological challenges in studying how activation policy is delivered, leaves us with limited understanding of how administrators and frontline employment service staff

Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

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encounter activation’s fundamental deficiencies. The difficulties and contradictions that administrators and staff seek to manage warrant much more critical scrutiny than they have received. Their documentation can foster insights into the limits and costs of activation. To this end, I turn to the insights of governmentality literature. A governmental approach trains a powerful lens on the technical and administrative arrangements of activation, precisely where officials’ difficulties in governing unemployment as an individual problem become most evident. In what follows, I outline the key features of a governmental approach to activation, and its potential to illuminate the limits of activation. I argue that a governmentality approach can foreground the difficulties faced by authorities when they attempt to problematize and act on the unemployed, and how such difficulties are managed. In this way it can sharpen our understanding of the forms of contestation, failure, and administrative reform of activation. Unemployment and Activation in Governmental Perspective Governmentality literature opens up new ways to analyse unemployment and the current dominance of activation policy. Departing from the analytical imperatives of political economy, a governmentality approach does not aspire to a deep causal explanation of the class forces shaping state responses to unemployment. Nor does the approach attempt to trace convergence or divergence of activation policies across jurisdictions, a central concern in historical institutionalist literature on labour market policy (King 1995; Barbier 2001; Bonoli 2010). Instead, a governmental approach is concerned principally with documenting how unemployment is produced as a problem – or problematized. From this perspective, unemployment is not a pre-discursive problem that exists “out there” and to which governments respond with policy. Rather, policies (including their related discourses and techniques) actually produce unemployment in ways that change dramatically over time and are thus more contingent than is commonly assumed. Indeed, Walters’s (2000) research on unemployment demonstrates that, while there have always been people suffering from a lack of work, how the problem of “unemployment” has been specified over the past century has taken radically divergent forms: from being strictly a matter of character in the late nineteenth century; a problem of disorganized labour markets in need of decasualization via the labour exchange; an inevitable risk of modern industry warranting social insurance; a deficiency in aggregate

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demand calling for macro-economic solutions in the national economy in the post-war period; and, most recently, a problem of inactive and dependent selves and communities – reviving a Victorian preoccupation with the character of the poor (1997, 2000). These diverse problematizations of unemployment, shaped as much by administrative innovations (social insurance techniques, the labour exchange, etc.) as by broad social forces or influential statespersons, entail very different sets of “norms, objectives, values, obligations, rights, responsibilities which have been expected of, demanded by, imputed to unemployed people” (Walters 2000, 146; Harris 2001).3 The critical import of this work emanates from the way it unsettles assumptions about unemployment. Most governmentality scholarship on unemployment eschews a historical-genealogical approach to examine in greater detail how unemployment is problematized and governed as an individual deficiency in neoliberalized welfare-to-work programs. This work starts with a series of fundamental questions: How is the unemployed subject understood and governed in service delivery arrangements, and what schemes of assessment and categorization are involved? What deficiency is the unemployed subject presumed to have? What practical measures do authorities imagine are necessary to reshape the unemployed subject into an active and employable market actor appropriate to neoliberalism? Answers to these questions yield insights into ways in which the unemployed subject is problematized in activation programs. One strand of research focuses on the way psychological knowledges inform activation (Dean 1995, 1998; Lee and Curran 2003; McDonald and Marston 2005; Darmon and Perez 2011). This work traces the proliferation of psychologized explanations that position the unemployed subject as beset by psychological deficiencies such as a lack of self-esteem, decisiveness, assertiveness, and self-efficacy. Constituted in this way, unemployment becomes addressable through a therapeutic interventions including counselling, support groups emphasizing self-help and the building of self-esteem, and most recently cognitive behaviour therapy to cultivate psychological states of employability (Cromby and Willis 2014; Friedli and Stearn 2015). Scholars note that psychological discourses can promulgate neoliberal rationality by negating the structural determinants of unemployment, including market failure,

3 For an excellent study that makes use of certain governmentality-based insights to explore the shifting conceptions of unemployment in Australia, see O’Donnell (2015).

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discrimination, and precarious employment (see also McDonald and Marston 2005; Cruikshank 1999; Korteweg 2006; Darmon and Perez 2011; Dean 1995; Lee and Curran 2003; Cromby and Willis 2014; Friedli and Stearn 2015).4 They also stress how therapeutic techniques of activation reflect a more general use of psychological and self-help discourses under neoliberalism to foster hyper-responsible and resilient self-hood (on the governmental uses of psychology and self-help discourse see Rimke 2000; Binkley 2011; and McFalls and Pandolfi 2014). Other strands of governmentality research highlight alternative problematizations of the unemployed. Several studies emphasize how activation services in different jurisdictions constitute the unemployed subject in neoclassical terms as a calculating and self-maximizing agent (Henman 2006, 216; Henman and Marston 2008; Schram et al. 2010; Wright 2016). According to this view, unemployment is largely a calculated choice that individuals make in an environment of work incentives and disincentives. Effective activation is therefore seen to require altering the behaviour of the unemployed by making the choice of unemployment less attractive than that of employment, mainly through income security retrenchment coupled with “help and hassle” or workfarist service delivery measures. Still other studies highlight how technological innovations, namely statistical profiling systems increasingly common in contemporary employment service delivery, open up new ways of problematizing the unemployed subject as “at risk” (McDonald, Marston, and Buckley 2003; Henman 2004, 2010; Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010; Grundy 2015). The practice of statistical profiling casts the unemployed individual as a composite of objective risk factors that can be computed to measure the probability of their future likelihood of experiencing long-term unemployment. Those who are deemed to be at risk of long-term unemployed are typically targeted for employability interventions. Like techniques of activation that constitute unemployment as a psychological deficit or a calculated choice, the practice of profiling individualizes unemployment. It attaches degrees of risk to unemployed individuals through calculations and “diminish[es] the capacity to develop collective solutions to collective problems” (Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010, 401). In these ways, governmentality

4 Several studies pointing to the medicalization of unemployment and social assistance use make an analogous argument (see Schram 2000; Holmqvist 2009; and Garsten and Jacobsson 2013).

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studies yield insights into the knowledges and techniques of activation that have received limited attention in other theoretical approaches to labour market policy. A governmental approach illuminates the specific and diverse problematizations of the unemployed subject, as well as the related frontline practices of assessment and categorization involved in their governance. Finally, reflecting acknowledgment in governmentality studies of how difficult it can be to distinguish between who governs and who is governed in particular assemblages, a range of studies focus on the governance of service delivery staff (Schram et al. 2010; Rudman et al. 2017). As Newman (2007) argues, contemporary employment service provision now entails “double activation” whereby both clients and service staff are subject to continual assessment and monitoring, and an array of incentives and penalties. Studies of activation in the United States identify a chain of disciplinary relations that run from the federal government to states, from states to individual offices, case workers, and ultimately to the individual service user. These disciplinary relations are structured through stringent benchmarks and managerial incentives and penalties imposed on subordinate actors (Soss, Fording, and Schram, 2011a). Such managerial techniques are not simply a matter of improving efficiency and performance. They transmit “powerful norms regarding how one should act as a market subject, and it reflects a substantive (specifically, neoliberal) vision of what welfare programs and their implementers should accomplish” (Schram et al. 2010, 749). The study that follows brings governmentality-based approaches to activation together with the attentiveness of political economy to the fundamental contradictions and limits of activation. This approach requires examining administrators’ attempts to mobilize the individualizing problematizations of activation in the face of political economic realities omitted from the paradigm’s logic – the realities of market failure, regional economic disparities, and structural social relations that shape people’s mobility in labour markets. By tracing how these systemic factors erode the coherence and plausibility of activation’s individualized problematizations, and by examining the work that administrators must do to sustain and defend such problematizations, this study casts new light on the imminence of activation’s limits and contradictions for those who must implement it. This approach is distinct from the bulk of governmentality studies of activation. With a few exceptions (Howard 2006; Brady 2011; Garsten and Jacobsson 2013), such studies have foregone careful analysis of

Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

27

administrators’ encounter with the limits and contradictions of activation. Governmentality studies of activation have been far more concerned to stress ways in which activation programs can be said to “work” – the way they discipline the unemployed and thus individualize unemployment. Indeed, the literature’s emphasis on the coherence and efficacy of neoliberal activation reflects a tendency of the broader literature to make neoliberal governmentality appear seamless and allencompassing (see this critique in Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006). This book follows recent calls in governmentality studies to look beyond official problematizations, and programs of governance as represented in official plans and documents, and to develop other methods and approaches better able to capture the entanglements of problematizations and technologies of government with the people and things they target (Brady 2011, 267; see also see also O’Malley, Weir, and Shearing 1997; Clarke 2005; Murray Li 2007c; Mckee 2009; Walters 2012; Brady and Lippert 2016). Scholars advocating this approach argue that governmentality studies presenting governmental programs as they appear in the “self-referencing, systematized, sanitized world of plans and documents” (Murray Li 2007b, 279) reproduce a “top-down” perspective and cannot grasp how they are reshaped in their encounter with a refractory world that resists programming. Heeding this criticism, the chapters that follow foreground the imminence of contestation to activation. They trace how actors routinely contest how activation individualizes the problem of unemployment. These actors include service users who resist the terms of activation and often advance alternative explanations for their situation. They also include service delivery officials such as front-line staff who may use their discretion or position to resist or subvert such problematizations as well as the managerial technologies that increasingly govern their activities. Equally important, the ensuring study also examines how officials attempt to manage contestation. It addresses efforts to contain and marginalize criticism of activation, to pre-empt or close down conflict by casting decisions on the direction of service delivery as technical rather than political and invoking technical expertise (see Murray Li 2007b, 265). The study also sheds light on points where authorities encounter contestation that cannot be contained, and the resulting reshaping of service delivery. In short, the approach developed here entails treating employment service delivery as a space of politics and contestation rather than simply governance. In doing so, the study confirms how

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contestation is intrinsic to and constitutes governance and is not simply an external impediment to rule (O’Malley 1996). This study also emphasizes the imminence of failure to activation. In doing so it draws on governmentality-based insights into failure as both intrinsic to governance, and as a generative and productive force (Valverde 1998; Higgins 2004; Howell 2010; Best 2014; O’Connor, Brisson-Boivin, and Ilcan 2014; Mitchell and Lizotte 2016). As Rose and Miller (1992, 190–1) stress, “Whilst we inhabit a world of programmes, that world is not itself programmed. We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the ‘will to govern,’ fuelled by the constant registration of ‘failure,’ the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time.” Two sources of failure will be emphasized. The first is the way activation’s radically incomplete individualized problematizations of unemployment ensure a persistent gap between what these practices promise and what they can deliver. Numerous studies demonstrate how the problematizations proffered by authorities tend to be incomplete and prone to failure because they typically omit reference to political-economic phenomena that do not fit within their technical prescriptions (Murray Li 2007a, 11; see also Ferguson 1990; Mitchell 2002). The second source of failure highlighted in subsequent chapters is technical feasibility. We will see how activation can be difficult to implement and operate, or generates unintended effects. The following chapters explore how the contestation and failure of activation services generates perpetual reform and reassembly in the name of improving service delivery. As we will see, the iterative process by which activation programs are rolled out, fail, and are reassembled generates subtle but very important shifts in the way authorities problematize and act upon the unemployed in terms of their employability. By highlighting these shifts, this study reveals that the governmental practices in employment service delivery are much more complicated and indeed stranger than we have assumed. Conclusion In placing political economy and governmentality into conversation with each other, my goal is not to paper over well-documented differences in each literature’s ontological and epistemological framework (Barnett 2005). However, I take the position that neither literature should be regarded as a static or closed theoretical system. I approach both as

Conceptualizing the Limits of Activation Policy

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providing a set of conceptual tools that can be put into dialogue to raise new questions and illuminate dynamics that might otherwise not come into view. The conceptual framework for studying activation developed here starts from the limits and contradictions of this policy paradigm, recognized by critical political economy, that flow from its myopic individualist, neoclassical, and supply-side orientation (Peck and Theodore 2000a). But I have also argued that the implications of this criticism remain underdeveloped because the site where such contradictions and deficiencies have sharpest expression and pose imminent challenges to authorities – street-level organizations delivering activation services – tends to be overlooked in critical political economy scholarship on labour market policy. The actual practices of activation in these spaces are not comprehensible through many of the dominant sources of data used in studies of activation policy, and increasing recourse to managerial modes of coordination only exacerbates the black-boxing of these spaces. I turned to governmentality scholarship to further illuminate the limits and contradictions of activation. The insights of this literature have informed a growing body of scholarship on the organizational practices of activation. They have shed new light on the discourses and techniques mobilized in service delivery to produce unemployment as a personal problem rectifiable by activating interventions. Especially germane for the chapters that follow are recent developments in governmentality studies that emphasize the encounter between governmental programs and the processes that thwart and reshape governmental ambitions (Murray Li 2007c; Brady 2011). Building on these interventions, I call for a history of the activation paradigm that traces authorities’ encounter with its limits and contradictions. As the following chapters demonstrate, the fundamental deficiencies of activation produce not only deleterious outcomes for the unemployed or detrimental macroeconomic effects such as the growth of precarious employment. Such deficiencies also pose an imminent governmental challenge for officials. As we will see, the management of failure and contestation constitutes much of the actual work of authorities who implement activation. Tracing these dynamics deepens our understanding of the difficulties authorities face in attempting to govern unemployment as a problem of individual activation and employability.

Chapter Three

“More Than a Placement Service”: The Transient High Modernism of “Manpower” Planning, 1965–1976

Introduction The essential thing that has to be done for the labour market today is to give people, bewildered by the complexity of change, the best possible information about employment opportunities, about employment trends, and about the ways in which they can best prepare for the changes that lie ahead. Tom Kent, deputy minister, Department of Manpower and Immigration (1967, 5)

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, federal officials reconceived their approach to unemployment. In light of deepening concern over the inadequacy of Keynesian policy to foster “high and stable”5 levels of employment, consensus formed around the need to address unemployment through supply-side investments in the employability of workers. To this end, the federal government established a national network of employment service offices, which offered a suite of employability enhancement services including counselling, job placement, training referral, and mobility assistance. The era of manpower planning had arrived.

5 The 1945 White Paper on Employment and Income committed the federal government to the pursuit of “high and stable levels of employment and income” (Canada, Department of Reconstruction 1945) rather than full employment. The wording suggests the federal government’s passive adoption of Keynesianism (see McBride 1992).

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In detailing this early period of active labour market policy, the objective of this chapter is not simply to trace the antecedents of neoliberal activation. On the contrary, advancing an aim of this book to illuminate ruptures and discontinuities in the governance of the unemployed, the chapter delves into the distinctly non-neoliberal way authorities conceived of employability enhancement services during the manpower era. I argue that the approach of policymakers and administrators to employment service delivery under manpower policy was shaped by a high-modern governmental rationality. High modernism grew out of the expanding ambitions and responsibilities of states in the twentieth century and represented a culmination of modernity’s long-standing belief in the benefits of scientific and technological progress. It advanced a formula of governance in which visionary bureaucrats and planners assumed the vanguard in engineering social improvement through their superior technical expertise (Scott 1998, 88). As we will see, the infusion of high modernism into labour market policy registered in two ways: first, in grandiose problematizations of the national labour market as suboptimally organized and in need of large-scale government action to direct the flow of “manpower” resources, and second, in officials’ new technically elaborate and data-intensive vision of employment service delivery. Under the logic of manpower planning, front-line assessments of service users’ employability and subsequent vocational choices were to hinge on statistical determinations of labour supply and demand in local and national labour markets made possible through a new, largescale labour market intelligence apparatus known as the Manpower Information System. Examining the high-modern configuration of early employability enhancement services is critical, because it sensitizes us to their dramatic mutability. In contrast to most critical studies of activation policy, the chapter demonstrates how governmental rationalities other than neoliberalism have shaped the way individual employability is known and governed. Tracing the high-modern shaping of employment service delivery also illuminates the failure and contestation in which employment services were quickly embroiled. Manpower planning in Canada proved no exception to the tendency of grandiose, high-modern projects to run off the rails somewhere between conception and execution. Officials struggled with ways to collect and disseminate the labour market data that became the lynchpin of rationally planned employability enhancement services. As we will also see,

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feminist and anti-poverty advocates immediately punctured the technocratic, anti-political logic of manpower planning. Overall, the chapter helps redress the lack of historical perspective in the burgeoning cross-national literature on street-level employment service delivery. It also excavates a history of governmental failure and contestation out of which more neoliberal approaches to employability enhancement emerged in the 1970s. Problematizing the Nation’s Manpower Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a bold high-modern vision for labour market policy emerged, and it moved labour market policy from the margins to the centre of the policy agenda of the federal government. For more than a decade following demobilization after the Second World War, labour market policy attracted little interest from policymakers (Albo 1993). During this time, questions of employment and unemployment were considered largely the domain of Keynesian macroeconomic policy. Keynesianism cast employment and unemployment as a matter of aggregate demand in the economy, with fiscal and monetary policy seen as the appropriate levers to pursue “high and stable” levels of employment. This approach did not fundamentally unsettle the neoclassical theory of competitive labour markets that emphasized the role of wages in the allocation of labour (Dupré et al. 1973, 31). The marginal status of the National Employment Service (NES), established in 1940 as an appendage to the new Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, reflected the minor importance of labour market policy more generally. The NES was a labour exchange where employers posted vacancies, and unemployed workers registered for referral. Registration with the NES was mandatory for UI claimants. Workers who refused job referrals could be denied benefits (ILO 1950, 14). As one deputy minister explained, “The greater part of the [former] NES staff had neither the facilities nor the training to do much more than a clerical job of assigning people on unemployment benefit to the low-skilled jobs for which employers informed them of vacancies. As a manpower agency it was, to put it kindly, unsophisticated” (Kent 1988, 396). Given the prioritization of UI claimants in job referrals, it is perhaps unsurprising that few employers registered vacancies with the NES. What little vocational training did exist during the 1950s was based in high schools and funded mainly through minor

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federal-provincial cost-sharing agreements. Skilled labour was furnished primarily through immigration from Europe. By the late 1950s, however, new sweeping problematizations of the suboptimal functioning of the national labour market were emerging, and they bore the influence of high-modern rationality and its emphasis on large-scale governmental projects. These problematizations were fuelled by doctrinal breakthroughs in labour market economics. A growing number of labour economists contended that a significant portion of the unemployment witnessed in the late 1950s could not be attributed to deficient aggregate demand, as Keynesian theory held. Rather, it was caused by failings in the workings of the labour market itself – specifically, a mismatch between the location and qualifications of the available labour force, and the location and requirements of job vacancies. Labour economists claimed that solutions to this form of unemployment lay beyond the reach of Keynesian prescriptions, or at least could not be resolved without extensive inflation (Dupré et al. 1973). They also pointed to the potential for manpower planning to manipulate the Phillips Curve, a mathematical model that represented what experts understood as a necessarily inverse relationship between rates of unemployment and inflation within an economy. According to their calculations, improved organization of manpower resources across the national labour market could eschew conflict between inflation and unemployment. Indeed, ramping up of the state’s role in planning the nation’s manpower appeared to be the overarching solution to the nation’s economic challenges (McBride 1998). A series of prominent policy reports amplified these new problematizations of the national labour market. Studies by the Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment (Canada, Parliament, Senate, 1961), the Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act (Canada, Committee of Inquiry, 1962), the OECD (1964, 1966), and the Economic Council of Canada (ECC) (1964, 1965) all warned that the potential productivity of the national labour force was jeopardized by “disequilibrium” between labour supply and demand. The reports attributed this disequilibrium to factors such as rapid urbanization and industrial modernization entailing rapid changes in technology, industry structures, and shifting consumer tastes. According to the Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment, “The economy and its manpower have failed to adjust to these basic developments on a sufficient scale or with sufficient speed” (Canada, Parliament, Senate,

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1961, 2). Equally pressing was the imminent influx of baby boomers into the labour force, which gave rise to further concerns about young workers’ lack of preparedness to make vocational decisions that would maximize their lifetime productive potential (DMI 1967a). As the Senate Committee (Canada, Parliament, Senate, 1961, 2) stated, resolving the disequilibrium between supply and demand for labour would take “a general upgrading in human skills, large-scale movements between occupations, and a high degree of mobility of labour between industries and between geographical areas.” The point to stress here is that the sudden concern among officials over “disequilibrium” and the suboptimal organization of the national labour market betrays the encroachment of high-modern governmental rationalities on labour market policy. These new problematizations of the labour market reflect grandiose thinking about the scale of social problems, state administrative capacity, and benefits of state-led rational planning and bureaucratic expertise that high modernism cultivates. These problematizations gave rise to an expansive, technically elaborate approach to employment service delivery and employability enhancement – an approach that differs in important ways from contemporary neoliberal activation services. Assembling the (High) Modern Manpower Agency For federal officials, manpower planning necessitated the reassembly of the federal public employment service as “a manpower agency which would be more than a placement service” (ECC 1965, 180). New objectives were assigned to the service: increasing the speed and quality of job matching, equipping workers with the skills demanded by employers, reducing labour turnover, and moving workers out of regions where there was an overabundance of labour into areas where there was greater labour demand (Meidner 1969; Hall 1971; Newton 1973). Bringing this vision into reality entailed several steps. First, the federal government transferred the NES out of the Unemployment Insurance Commission, where it was subordinate to the UI program, and placed it under the auspices of the newly formed Department of Manpower and Immigration (DMI) (est. 1966). The federal government passed the Adult Occupational Training Act (AOTA) the following year to “further the economic growth of Canada by endeavouring to ensure that the supply of manpower matches the demand qualitatively, quantitatively and geographically” (minister of manpower and immigration cited in

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Goldman 1976, 9).6 The AOTA gave the federal government the authority to develop a comprehensive employment service system. Henceforth, counselling, training referral, mobility, and placement services were run out of a national network of employment offices rebranded as Canada Manpower Centres. A modern manpower agency also needed to be attractive to the populace. It could not be associated with its NES predecessor, which was often seen as an employment service of last resort and the site of contentious struggles over unemployed workers’ entitlement to UI benefits. Policymakers and administrators took very seriously the recommendation of one government committee “to move the local [NES] offices out of the dirty, dingy quarters where many of them are now found to clean, well-lighted and well-located premises … At present, many persons cannot but be repelled by the appearance of some local offices” (Canada, Committee of Inquiry, 1962, 172). Along similar lines, the DMI deputy minister declared that it was the task of Canada Manpower Centres to “win public confidence in a way that will make each Centre a vital point in the life of its community, a point that everyone naturally turns to for employment services” (Kent 1967, 6). The most important feature of a modern manpower agency was the greatly expanded role for labour market data in frontline counselling services. The data-intensive vision of employment service provision under manpower reflected the centrality of what Scott (1998) calls legibility to high-modern governmentality. As Scott notes, high-modern designs for social improvement are inextricably bound up in projects of legibility; that is, authorities’ efforts to “see” at a high, synoptic level their objects of government – land, populations, or labour markets – in ways that make them amenable to intervention. The more extensive the improvement envisioned, the more intensive the legibility required

6 It is important to note that the passage in 1960 of the Technical Vocational Training Act signalled growing federal recognition of the importance of training. The Act involved shared cost agreements with the provinces for the training/retraining of unemployed workers and youth, as well as workers with jobs. The federal proportion of costs expanded to 75 per cent, depending on the specific form of training. Under the Act, the federal government also began funding 75 per cent of the cost of building new technical and vocational training institutions (Paquet 1976, 7). The TVTA initiated a rapid expansion in training programs in Canada. However, under it the power to select trainees remained with the province – a key deficiency for those seeking to implement centrally coordinated manpower planning.

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Figure 1. DMI promotional pamphlet, Education. DMI (1967b)

(183). Accordingly, Manpower officials assumed that, for Canada Manpower Centres to deliver rationally planned employability enhancement services, front-line employment counselling needed to be grounded in a bird’s-eye view of labour market dynamics made possible by a largescale labour market intelligence apparatus. Only in light of statistical determinations of supply and demand in the overall labour market could officials be confident that employability interventions offered at points of service delivery were actually maximizing national and individual productivity and resolving current and future labour market disequilibria. As one DMI senior official wrote, “The first requirement in planning is knowledge. We must have facts about our economy, our labour force and the factors affecting them. We must know as much as possible about where we are going, what the coming requirements and problems will be. To this end a vast program of labour market research and analysis is under way … producing highly sophisticated and usable

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data without which a manpower planning system could do more harm than good” (Manion, director of Manpower Training, DMI, 1970, 22). The point at which labour market data could be brought to bear on the vocational choices of service users represented, in the DMI deputy minister’s words, “the point of production in the manpower process” (Kent, cited in Meltz 1969, 47). The data-intensive vision of employment service delivery thus expressed a high-modern confidence in the capacity of visionary state bureaucrats and social scientists to engineer an improved future through their superior knowledge of society, and their capacity to render it legible on a large scale. Historians of Canadian public policy provide glimpses of high-modern rationality in mid-twentieth-century policymaking, without naming it as such. French (1984), for example, describes a positivist turn in policymaking whereby officials saw methodological advancements in the social sciences as lending unprecedented certainty to policy implementation. As French (19) notes, “The analysis of public problems became a series of esoteric specialties, requiring lengthy formal training … [and] enormous optimism about the knowledge emerging from these forms of analysis and about its potential effectiveness in the solution of public problems” (see also Haddow 1993; Bradford 1999; Loo 2016). Faith in experts’ capacity to bring a predictive, quantitative visibility to policy problems is also evident in Bradford’s (1999) account of the rise of technocratic Keynesianism in Canadian economic policymaking. He describes the ascendance of a cadre of purportedly neutral experts in the federal bureaucracy who understood themselves as fostering economic growth and warding off future market failures primarily through “greatly improved data collection about the economy’s overall behaviour and timely dissemination of information about the future to private and public sector decision-makers” (28). Manpower officials were similarly emboldened in the knowledge that they were on the cusp of breakthroughs in the science of manpower forecasting. As “one of the newest areas of systematic projection into the future” (Meltz 1965, 10), manpower forecasts were to yield knowledge for front-line service providers on the future labour requirements of the economy by occupation, industry, and region. At the most basic level, manpower forecasts entailed an economic projection of productivity trends in different economic sectors to arrive at estimations of the future labour requirements of particular industries. These data were then to be set against population-level demographic projections as well as determinations of future labour supply from educational and training

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institutions. These calculations also needed to be ongoing. Given that decisions made in the present to overcome forecasted imbalances of labour supply and demand would eventually invalidate predictions, it was determined that forecasts needed continuous updating to account for the effects of service delivery (Lester 1966). A high-modern project of labour market legibility thus provided the foundation for employment service delivery during the manpower era. This feature of employment services in that era is important to stress because it shaped authorities’ conceptions of employability in ways that have all but disappeared from contemporary activation programs for the unemployed. Authorities’ emphasis on deciphering individual employability in relation to the latest labour market intelligence has given way to a narrower focus on the individual attributes of the unemployed. Contemporary employability enhancement is now largely a matter of assessing and inciting behavioural attributes associated with the job-ready subject, such as flexibility, motivation, and entrepreneurial outlook. Scholarly accounts of employment service delivery with time horizons limited to contemporary neoliberal activation cannot capture the radically divergent ways authorities have conceived of enhancing employability. Returning to the case study, the newly formed Department of Manpower and Immigration (DMI) invested heavily in a back-end labour market intelligence apparatus that would guide employability enhancement. What officials would deem the “Manpower Information System” needed to be assembled nearly from scratch. The pre-existing NES had very limited labour market research capacities. While the NES had established an analysis and development division in 1946 to generate labour market information, it found it hard to retain statisticians and economists. Its research was poorly coordinated with other forms of labour market analysis conducted by the Research Branch of the Department of Labour. NES research was primarily for internal administration only (ECC 1964, 178). The sporadic efforts of local offices to compile data on local job openings were further hamstrung by a lack of employer cooperation. The DMI absorbed half of the economists in the Economic and Research Branch of the Department of Labour, which was then the primary body engaged in labour market research for other purposes. The department also went on a hiring spree. To populate a large field staff of manpower analysts it offered positions to university students with at least three completed courses in economics or statistics. Recruitment material

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Figure 2. DMI recruitment booklet, Get Involved through a Career with the Department of Manpower and Immigration. DMI (1967c)

asserted that the manpower analyst’s chief role was to “co-ordinate detailed current information about the supply, utilization, characteristics, training and demand for all categories of manpower” to ensure “sound counseling in the fields of manpower … It is their direct responsibility to provide counselors with a wide range of information of job opportunities and labour supplies, in terms of both present and future needs” (DMI 1967c).

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With the large field staff of manpower analysts in place, the DMI’s minister touted the Manpower Information System as “the most comprehensive and modern labour market information system of any industrial country … designed to assist all our clients in knowing where the jobs are, where the workers are, and to identify current and future manpower requirements” (Lang cited in Dupré et al. 1973, 140). To develop a cohort of counsellors able to accurately interpret and relay labour market data to service users, the DMI also recruited recent graduates in sociology, political science, business administration, and industrial relations. It promised fulfilling careers in manpower counselling, “one of the most important needs of Canada” (DMI 1967c). In sum, labour market policy and employment service delivery under the auspices of manpower planning looked very different from the way they do today. High-modern rationalities profoundly shaped the way employability was conceived and governed. High modernism’s characteristic emphasis on large-scale social planning was evident in the rapid inflation of the key objective of labour market policy: planning current and future labour supply so that it aligned with employer demand quantitatively and qualitatively, nationwide. A central feature of employment service during this period was the primacy of labour market data and manpower forecasting to guide decisions on employability enhancement. It warrants mention here that the highly datacentric configuration of service delivery during this time dispels the simplistic impression that calculative practices in employment service delivery or any other setting have somehow intensified with the onset of neoliberalism, an impression conveyed in much literature on neoliberal governmentality. It is more accurate to say that the focus and objectives of calculative ambitions shift. Indeed, the account of employment service delivery that follows in this book is largely a story of such shifts. Overall, recognition of the high-modern shaping of early active labour market policy is important, because it counters a common assumption that active labour market policy and discourses of employability enhancement are an exclusively neoliberal phenomenon. It allows us to better understand ruptures and mutations in the way authorities have sought to know and govern the unemployed in terms of their employability. But it also illuminates the forms of failure and contestation in which employment service delivery was quickly embroiled. The following section demonstrates how the work of translating this bold, technocratic vision into reality ran into unforeseen challenges. Manpower planning became entangled in its own technical limits, as

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well as in the encounter with groups espousing alternative, politicized visions of employability enhancement. The forms of service delivery that emerged from these encounters departed from officials’ initial highmodern visions of manpower planning. Reforms to the employment service during this period also exemplify how governmental practices can be radically reconfigured in the face of forms of contestation that cannot be contained. Encountering the Limits of Manpower Planning At the outset of manpower planning, officials recognized that their planning and administrative capacity would ultimately be limited. But the limits officials acknowledged were ones they knew needed to be self-imposed. Manpower officials acknowledged that, while planned employability enhancement of the nation’s labour force was necessary, it must not run up against the principle of individual choice in service delivery. The potential illiberalism inherent in manpower planning and counselling had been the subject of debate and reflection among policymakers and experts in both the United States and Canada. How best to reconcile the tension between the manpower needs of the nation and individual vocational choice was continually debated in vocational guidance trade journals (Holleman 1961; Mathewson 1964). The American Professional Guidance Association’s Executive Council intervened in this debate early on through a Statement of Policy, which warned against the “danger of tampering with freedom of choice” in the context of manpower service delivery (APGA Executive Council 1958, 454). For experts and DMI administrators, proper counselling techniques that respected the sanctity of individual liberty would hold such dangers at bay: “The manpower authorities are, of course, concerned that in their new role of actively trying to bring about equilibrium on the labour market they respect the principle of free decision by each person and enterprise essential to a democratic society. Their aim is not to pressgang the individual into an occupation for which he has no liking. On the contrary the manpower authorities wish to make available to the individual a number of options and leave it to him to choose the option which he favours” (Corcoran and O’Kelly 1971, 5). Along similar lines, a DMI counselling training manual, The Counselor and Canada’s Manpower Markets, included a section titled “The Client or the Economy?,” which asserted the primacy of the individual in service decision-making: “Circumstances will arise when what is good

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for the client is not good for the economy, and vice versa. In such cases the counselor’s decision should be made on the basis of what is best for the client … manpower policies aim at improving human welfare by helping the individual. He is the basis of policy, and general social gains cannot knowingly be made at the expense of the individual” (Pankhurst 1968, 101). These concerns corroborate Walters and Haar’s (2005) important observations on the capacity of high-modern governmentality to assume a liberal form. In contrast to Scott’s emphasis on high modernism’s more extreme manifestations in the twentieth century, situations in which the vision of a rationally ordered and legible society articulates with authoritarian state power, Walters and Haar point to the way liberal high-modern governmentality works within the confines imposed by liberal democratic representative institutions, and involves negotiation and compromise, and the voluntary enrolment of actors. Manpower’s early architects soon confronted other limitations more difficult to manage. Their ambitions were quickly thwarted by technical difficulties, underscoring Rose and Miller’s (1992, 191) key contention that technologies of government are often unwieldy, given “the impossibility of producing the technical conditions that would make them work – reliable statistics, efficient communication systems, clear lines of command, properly designed buildings, well-framed regulations, or whatever.” Specifically, the back-end Manpower Information System did not come together as intended. The problem of faulty aggregation of data was a major impediment. Manpower analysts stationed across the country were instructed to compile labour market data from diverse sources, including household surveys, employment data from business surveys, and administrative data from employment offices, among other sources. Yet methodological differences across the data sources, and the questionable quality of the administrative data, made aggregation problematic. These problems did not allow for the single, reliable statistical portrait of current labour market activity that was to be the crux of employability enhancement services (Dupré et al. 1973, 140–1). Manpower forecasting proved even more challenging. Among the greatest impediments to manpower forecasting was the lack of accurate general economic estimates on which to base manpower forecasts. Officials experienced additional difficulties attempting to model people’s movement in and out of the paid labour force, and the relation between people’s education and their occupation (Meltz 1968a, 235). As a result of these complexities, virtually no forecasting was successfully

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carried out during the first decade of the DMI. The Economic Council of Canada noted in its 1971 annual report that the general lack of statistical data about training needs to guide counselling remained a “fundamental and pervasive” problem: “Manpower forecasting is still a primitive art, here as elsewhere. It is not possible to produce, with any degree of confidence, forecasts of the needs for specific jobs in particular areas” (ECC 1971, 122–3). Indeed, by the early 1970s, manpower forecasting had become a somewhat discredited practice. There was growing recognition that what Dupré et al. (1973, 29) called the “Grand Design” of manpower policy reflected the technocratic hubris of midcentury policy discourse (French 1984, 20; see also Foot and Meltz 1992, 268). The statistical capacity on which any kind of manpower planning would rely remained lacking in Canada throughout the 1970s (Newton, Betcherman, Meltz 1981, 100). In lieu of elaborate labour market forecasts, the DMI did produce basic monthly reports for different regions in Canada (Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, and BC) that contained rudimentary information on recent developments in each region’s labour market (Meltz 1968a, 229). But administrators experienced great difficulty making counsellors utilize these reports as part of their work with service users. To remedy this problem, Professor Noah Meltz, a prominent labour market economist at the University of Toronto, was seconded from his academic position to become a full-time consultant for the department. Part of his task was to provide a detailed study of manpower counselling and its data requirements. His inquiry uncovered little awareness or use of published labour market information by manpower counsellors. He concluded that further instruction is necessary “so that counselors can understand what constitutes a labour market, how it operates and how it relates to the total economy” (Meltz 1968b, 95). Recommended forms of instruction for counsellors included reading assignments, a series of lectures to be delivered to counsellors in Canada Manpower Centres, as well as correspondence courses (95). The situation did not improve over the next several years. Dupré noted in his subsequent study that the very concept of the labour market remained an abstraction for staff in manpower offices. According to him, staff tended to regard statistical reports compiled by manpower analysts as yet more useless paperwork to be ignored (Dupré et al. 1973, 143). A senior administrator in the department later candidly admitted before a senate committee that “their [the counsellors’] orientation as individuals is very much towards trying to help the person and trying

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to fill the job. Their interest is in doing that job as well as they can. Their personal interest in statistics is very low. It is we who have the interest in statistics” (Campbell, cited in Canada, Parliament, Senate, Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, 1975a, 23). In short, plans to ground employment services in a robust system of labour market intelligence and planning could not be translated into an operational reality. These difficulties posed an insurmountable obstacle to implementing the vision of rationally planned manpower services. In addition, frontline counsellors tended to privilege their face-to-face work with individual service users over the high-modern design of manpower’s architects. Manpower’s Anti-Politics Challenged In Scott’s formulation, high modernism is anti-political. Its problematizations and solutions are forged through the expertise of planners and bureaucrats who think of themselves as above the political and partisan fray. Manpower planning reflected this aspect of high-modern governmentality. Its approach to employability was technical, and its privileged knowledge form was labour market statistics furnished through a labour market intelligence and planning apparatus. But this technocratic approach to employability and its governance was immediately punctured by alternative visions of employability, and what Nancy Fraser (1989) calls the politicized need interpretations of service users. Feminist and anti-poverty advocates challenged high-modern designs for the employment service, reposing the matter of employability as a political, distributional issue rather than a technical, datacentric one, and, in doing so, these groups highlighted political economic realities omitted from manpower officials’ technical scheme. For women’s groups, employability enhancement was less about the elaborate scheme of manpower forecasting than it was about dismantling the post-war gender contract, which systematically devalued women’s work, enforced highly unequal forms of occupational segregation, and positioned women as dependents. Similarly, for anti-poverty activists, the question of employability could not be disentangled from the class structures of the labour market and the class biases of employment service delivery. The collision of manpower planning with the gendered and political economic realities omitted from its technical schema forced the reassembly of employment service delivery into a form that did not resemble high-modern designs. The reassembly of service delivery

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practices also indicates the way in which governing practices and rationalities can be reshaped in the face of contestation (Murray Li 2007b; Brady and Lippert 2016). In what follows, the way in which feminist and anti-poverty advocates re-posed the purportedly technical issue of employability as a political matter is examined in detail. It quickly became clear to women’s advocates that the universalism implied in manpower’s language of planning and progress did not extend to them. Reflecting the dominance of the male breadwinner/ female caregiver gender contract of the post-war welfare state, manpower services were initially oriented towards the (predominantly) white young male worker citizen. Under the Adult Occupational Training Act, training allowances were not available to anyone residing with an employed spouse, a category that included predominantly women (Cameron 1996, 57). Anyone lacking three years of labour force “attachment” was also ineligible for subsidies. These criteria severely impeded women’s access to training opportunities and reinforced their subordinate positioning as dependent wives and mothers or state wards. The criteria were also consistent with the broader regulation of women’s participation in the post-war labour market through measures such as marriage bars, tax disincentives for married women’s employment, and a range of discriminatory provisions mitigating women’s access to UI (Vosko 2000, 89; Porter 2003; Stephen 2007). In addition, the training opportunities available to women were characterized by intensive gendered occupational segregation. In the first year of the AOTA, women comprised 79 per cent of the trainees in the low-paid categories of clerical and sales training (Canada, Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada 1970a, 197). The gendered assumptions underlying manpower policy were increasingly at odds with the rapid growth of women’s participation in the paid labour force, from 23 per cent in 1951 to 36 per cent in 1970 (Porter 2003, 94). Employment service delivery quickly became a key field of feminist struggle. The Royal Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1967 by Prime Minister Pearson in response to a push from women’s organizations, was a watershed in feminist organizing in employment services. Over the course of the commission’s six months of public consultations held across the country, women’s groups, social policy organizations, and individuals articulated new conceptions of the role of employment services in mitigating the male breadwinner/female caregiver gender contract and the gendered division of labour, promoting women’s entry or re-entry into the paid labour force and improving

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women’s income by facilitating their movement into non-traditional occupations associated with high wages enjoyed predominantly by men. Organizations and individuals appearing before the commission called upon the DMI to repeal the discriminatory provisions in the AOTA, promote more effectively the training opportunities to women, and provide more flexibility in the scheduling of training hours, for example by providing evening, weekend, or school hour training (Canada, Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada 1970b). The final report of the commission called for the elimination of gender inequities in the provision of employment and training services, and it implicated manpower counsellors in disentitlement and occupational segregation: Counselors should be aware of the changing pattern of women’s lives, the cultural biases of the sex-typing of occupations, and the factors relating to motivation and to the goals and expectations of women. They should also have an opportunity from time to time to examine their own attitudes toward the whole question of social equality between men and women. (Canada. Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada 1970a, 191)

The direct action tactics of women’s groups contesting inequitable service dramatically amplified these recommendations. In 1975, in Vancouver, a group of women titled the Ad Hoc Committee hung a sheet reading “Womenpower” in front of a downtown Manpower office and staged an occupation that “lasted 52 hours and involved 20 police officers” (Timson 1975). At issue in the occupation was the appointment of a women’s advocate to ensure more adequate accommodation of women’s needs in employment and training services. A few months later, a Canada Manpower Centre in Toronto was seized in a similar occupation by an organization called Women after Rights (WAR). As its chairperson had stated to the media during the occupation, “Every little girl that goes in there has ‘clerical worker’ stamped on her forehead … The type of retraining they have for women has an income level so low that you can’t support a family. Besides, who wants to be a clerk-typist?” (Schacter 1976). The burgeoning anti-poverty movement in the early 1970s, which saw the emergence of a new form of poor people’s citizenship characterized by politicized demands for basic income entitlements and input on the welfare services that affected them, also posed critical challenges to the legislative and administrative framework of manpower policy (Little 2007; McKeen 2012). For these groups, employability enhancement was a matter of dismantling the class divisions of Canadian society and its

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manifestation in the middle-class biases of employment service delivery. From the perspective of anti-poverty groups, a number of measures restricting access for those highly marginalized in the labour force were particularly problematic. Under the 1967 AOTA, training could not exceed fifty-two weeks. This rule was modified with the implementation of Basic Training for Skill Development, which allowed for one year of adult basic education leading to a second year in occupational training. Nevertheless, the two-year maximum often excluded from training opportunities those requiring more extensive skills upgrading to attain the minimum level of education that was required for almost all technical vocational schools in Canada. Regulations governing manpower counselling imposed further restrictions by specifying that referral to training should be granted only to those who demonstrated a specific occupational goal and the potential for increased earning capacity. These stipulations, along with the three-year labour force attachment regulation, often denied very poor workers the chance to upgrade their skills in a meaningful way. As Albo (1994) has noted, manpower counsellors tended to view the long-term unemployed as beyond the department’s economic-growth-oriented mandate. The Special Senate Committee on Poverty, established in 1968 by the Pearson government to investigate the cause of poverty, served as a forum for the crystallization of anti-poverty criticism of manpower policy. Anti-poverty advocates appearing before the committee pointed to forms of bureaucratic disentitlement of the poor in service delivery relations. One community organization, United Community Services of Vancouver, rejected outright the scope of bureaucratic discretion afforded manpower counsellors in the service delivery model of the time: “The principle must be established that no one should lack opportunity for training because of lack of money, or because of a negative evaluation by a counselor” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 1970a, 62). As a mechanism to oversee the work of employment counsellors, the Canadian Association of Adult Education proposed “eligibility and admission review boards composed of local citizens, including the poor” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 1970b, 55). Similar critiques were levelled in the Real Poverty Report, which was produced by staff members of the Special Senate Committee who broke off in reaction to the heavy editing of the committee’s final report. The Real Poverty Report described Canada Manpower Centres as “austere, bureaucratic institutions, usually located in areas far from concentrations of people with known employment problems” (Adams et al. 1971, 94). It stated that the

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requirement for service users to sufficiently demonstrate an employment goal to manpower counsellors was discriminatory, as the poor were least likely to “state their aims in a manner that would satisfy a manpower counselor holding the middle class views of his bureaucratic institution” (94). It further argued, “If the Manpower Department is to carry out its new responsibilities, it will itself need a shaking up. For it must be made responsible to the needs of individuals. As a start, personnel from the Manpower Department should be assigned to clients as their ‘advocates’” (131). In contesting the organization of manpower services, anti-poverty advocates pointed to the increasingly obvious failures of manpower planning. Their actions underscore how forms of governmental failure can open up a space for critical challenge, and prompt further reassembly of governmental arrangements. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment in 1970, the Canadian Welfare Council declared that the DMI had failed to live up to its own heady rhetoric and that Canada Manpower Centres remained in the eyes of many an employment service of last resort: “Manpower Centres have not achieved the expected reorientation from the old National Employment Service … Their penetration of the labour market is low; a minority of employers register vacancies with them” (Canadian Welfare Council 1970, 11). Such claims were bolstered by other evidence of the service’s shortcomings, such as the increasingly poor placement rates of Canada Manpower Centres. Permanent job placement rates actually decreased in the first few years after the launch of Canada Manpower Centres, from 960,000 in 1965/66 to 650,000 in 1970/71 (Albo 1994, 394). The Economic Council of Canada produced a study in 1968, which demonstrated that job seekers who relied on friends and relatives for information about job openings were far more successful in finding employment than those who only registered with a local Manpower Centre (Economic Council of Canada 1971, 179; Goldman 1976). Subsequent research undertaken by the DMI found that only around 20 per cent of Manpower Centre registrants acquired their job through the centre. Most found employment through cold-call applications or through friends or relatives (Goldman 1976, 64). What is important to stress here is that feminist and anti-poverty activism posed a profound political challenge to officials’ already flailing technocratic approach to employment service delivery. Under the logic of manpower planning, the governance of employability in service delivery was to hinge on statistical determinations of supply and

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demand in the labour market furnished by the Manpower Information System. But the contestation of women’s and anti-poverty groups cast questions of employability as inseparable from gender and class relations. Their challenge often focused on the work of manpower counsellors, who were the DMI’s most visible front-line representatives, and it reflected a growing challenge to the neutrality of bureau-professionalism across various sites that provided social service. Subsequent reforms to service delivery confirm insights into how resistance and contestation can reconfigure governing practices and thus constitute, rather than simply remain external to, governance (O’Malley 1996; Murray Li 2007b). Employment Service Delivery after Manpower Planning In the early 1970s, confronting technical failures and political contestation, manpower officials set out to reassemble service delivery. In 1972 DMI officials reassessed the basic objectives and processes of employment service delivery in a consultation known as the Manpower Policy Review. The purpose of the review was to identify ways to “respond better to the changing and complex labour market” (DMI 1973, 4). A number of significant bids for reform followed. One was a new “Manpower Delivery System,” implemented partially in response to the controversies that emerged over the discretion of counsellors, and partly reflecting a disavowal of the high-modern hubris of the manpower-planning model. In one report on the operation of Canada Manpower Centres, DMI officials announced, “Services must be personalized. Staff is encouraged to serve their clients rather than ‘the system.’ ‘The system’ is being reorganized to support this person-to-person process rather than control it” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 1975b, 31; italics in original). The new Manpower Delivery System scaled back the role of manpower counsellors in assessing service users and informing them of appropriate employment and training options, a paternalistic practice previously considered the lynchpin of manpower planning. Service users were instead invited to help themselves in a new self-service environment known as a Job Information Centre. A Toronto Star feature on the new self-service Job Information Centre described how “clients, as the job seekers are called by officials, can shop for employment by looking through lists of openings that are updated daily with the help of computers … There’s soft music and comfortable chairs, phones that job seekers can use to call potential employers, and lots of open space where people can mix with each other and the manpower officials” (Douglas 1973).

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Figure 3. From the Department of Manpower and Immigration pamphlet, New Approach to Job Placement. DMI (1974, French version), 2

In testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, Professor Meltz described the new self-service Job Information Centre as a major innovation in service delivery: “Where the conceptual breakthrough really comes in is in saying, ‘We are not going to do all this matching. We are not going to make the decision as to which worker should go to which jobs.’ We are going to open up the files and say, ‘Here are the jobs. You decide which ones you are interested in’” (Meltz cited in Canada. Parliament. Senate 1975c, 8). Such logic indicates deepening recognition of service users’ capacity for choice, thus registering an important element of the emergence of active citizenship. Yet the self-service model was not without controversy. Numerous reports warned that individuals would attempt to refer themselves to

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jobs for which they were unqualified and that the reputation of the employment service would suffer.7 The Economic Council of Canada (1971, 193) urged caution with the self-help model and argued that it should be adopted only after its merits had been proven in experimental settings “complete with control groups and appropriate data collection and analysis.” The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance articulated a similar concern in its report on manpower services. The committee recommended that “specifically designated staff should be constantly on the lookout for those who cannot take advantage of this service, who have deeper counseling needs and who should be directed to counselors responsible for giving this assistance” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 1976, 26). Such apprehension over the self-service model demonstrates authorities’ ambivalence about adopting technologies of active citizenship in welfare provision. It stands in contrast to the current dominance of administrative doctrines of self-help and consumer choice. Contestation by feminist and anti-poverty activism led to further reforms to service delivery, a result that indicates how governmental programs are forged through contestation and some degree of mutual accommodation. A number of equity-oriented reforms were adopted at this time. Officials lifted the restriction on training allowances for those who lived with an employed spouse, and recognized full-time caregiving as equivalent to labour force participation so that more women would qualify for training allowances (Cameron 1996). The department also published a policy paper titled “Manpower Programs and the Poor,” which acknowledged that “federal Manpower objectives put too much emphasis on growth, productivity and employer oriented goals” (DMI 1972, 1). It instituted new training programs that targeted those marginalized in the labour force. These included a wage subsidy program titled Training on the Job for the Disadvantaged as well as Basic Job Readiness Training (BJRT), combining adult basic education with work experience. It also implemented the Outreach Program in 1972 for groups “whose needs are not being adequately met” by existing services (DMI 1973, 8). Under this program the department contracted with organizations serving Aboriginal people, women, immigrants, the

7 For this reason, employer contact information was withheld from posted job notices. Clients received this information after being screened by a counsellor.

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disabled, youth, and ex-offenders, among others, to run employment services for their respective constituencies. Reflecting a new element of experimentation in the coordination of employment services, one outreach operation, the Ottawa Women’s Careers Project, operated out of a residential apartment, another in Labrador out of a private home. The department also deployed Mobile Service Units staffed with a manpower counsellor and a “clerk-driver” to service remote communities in a number of provinces. These measures indicate that, in the wake of manpower planning, notions of employability and how it might be governed were unsettled and amenable to experimentation. Such openendedness would not last long. As the next chapter shows, by the late 1970s, amidst deepening economic crisis, more punitive neoliberal logics would define service delivery. Conclusion Manpower planning in the 1960s is a critical starting point for any history of activation policy in Canada. It marks the point at which federal officials sought to resolve unemployment and foster economic growth through supply-side labour market interventions to enhance individual employability. But more central to this study, investigation of this period of employment service delivery underscores dramatic mutations and failures in the way officials have sought to know and govern individual employability, as well as the influence of rationalities other than neoliberalism that are often overlooked in studies of activation policy. The infusion of high modernism into labour market policy in the 1960s registered in new problematizations of the national labour market. The labour market appeared to officials to be in a “disequilibrium” between labour supply and demand, and in need of urgent, large-scale government intervention to guide the flow of the nation’s manpower resources. The model of service delivery envisioned under manpower planning hinged on an ambitious project of labour market legibility. The essential aspect of manpower planning was the articulation of oneon-one counselling with a large labour market intelligence apparatus able to generate data on current and future dynamics of supply and demand in the labour market. Arguably, much of the manpower planning framework would have been unthinkable had high modernism not already been a prominent governmental rationality in public policymaking in the mid-twentieth century.

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Investigating manpower policy also sheds light on the failure and contestation that immediately engulfed manpower’s architects. Early DMI administrators did not anticipate the sheer infeasibility of their scheme for rationally planned employability enhancement. Nowhere was this more evident than in the difficulties administrators faced in attempting to develop viable manpower forecasting techniques. No widely accepted method of manpower forecasting was developed in the decade after the DMI was founded, and the data that manpower analysts were able to generate were not easily operationalized in service delivery settings. Reflecting on this era of labour market policy, Meltz (1976, 225) concluded, “The actual implementation [of manpower policy] turned out to be much less straightforward than was imagined. One of the major difficulties was (and is) that no one really knew the best way to achieve the objective of adjusting supply to demand or in fact whether this was always possible or even desirable.” Dupré et al. (1973, 143) surmised that the failure of manpower planning was because governmental ambition simply outstripped technical capacity. Conceiving the enhancement of employability as a technocratic endeavour, administrators also failed to anticipate how contestation by women’s and anti-poverty advocates would expose the relations of gender and class that underpinned all aspects of service delivery. Contestation around manpower services unsettled notions of employability and notions of one’s productive potential and labour force attachment. The impact of feminist and anti-poverty activists in reshaping service delivery illustrates that governmental programs are formed in relation to contestation, and that contestation and resistance are not simply external to governance. Given the increasing influence of neoclassical theory in economic policy, enthusiasm cooled among federal policymakers and administrators for large-scale rational planning of the labour market via manpower policy (Hunter 1993) as well as for hard-won equity in service delivery. By the early to mid-1970s another departmental priority took shape around UI benefit control and rapid re-employment, and this entailed a more disciplinary orientation for the employment service. The following chapter details the difficulty officials faced in their attempt to implement these early forms of neoliberal activation, and the resourcefulness with which they sought to overcome such challenges.

Chapter Four

Making and Unmaking Front-Line Professionalism, 1977–1990

Introduction The structural conditions that sustained the post-war economic boom were unravelling by the mid-1970s. Policymakers’ simultaneous embrace of monetarism hastened a severe recession marked by unemployment unprecedented in the post-war period (McBride 1992). Yet the structural dynamics driving unemployment were progressively omitted from the logic of unemployment policy during this period. Reforms to employment service delivery and UI reflected a more punitive problematization of the unemployed individual as often choosing unemployment, lacking motivation or genuine labour force attachment, and as therefore requiring more stringent work incentives. A number of service delivery reform initiatives adopted throughout the 1970s placed greater scrutiny on the job searches of UI claimants. At the same time, legislative reforms to the UI Act put benefits out of reach for a growing share of jobless workers. In short, amid structural decline in economic conditions – and an acute shortage of jobs – unemployment policy revolved around an effort to more closely scrutinize the behaviour and merit of the unemployed. This chapter examines the way in which administrators sought to sustain and defend early activation-based reforms against their own failures and contradictions. It demonstrates how government officials sought to manage the failures they confronted by minimizing them as technical deficiencies in service delivery, rather than as attributable to fundamental contradictions and deficiencies of activation measures in the midst of structural recession. Specifically, the chapter examines how administrators increasingly laid blame for failures of activation on the suspect

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discretion and competency of front-line counsellors who worked most directly with the unemployed. The chapter then explores two divergent bids to reassemble service delivery that would entail dramatic shifts in the way authorities sought to know and govern individual employability. The first was spearheaded by a group of administrators deeply committed to employment counselling, and it sought to augment the welfare professionalism of front-line counsellors through a large-scale training program in counselling psychology. The training program aimed to enhance counsellors’ ability to diagnose and remedy the purported employability barriers of clients. A second bid for renewal was implemented in light of subsequent evidence that advanced counselling techniques did not result in increased job placements or a reduction of the UI case roll. Led by administrators less committed to social welfare professionalism than to managerial modes of monitoring and assessment, this second bid for renewal would seek to impose greater managerial control over counsellors. Overall, the chapter sheds light on how failure served to propel service delivery reform and reassembly, thus confirming governmentalitybased insights into the generative nature of governance failure. In detailing the strained deployment of psychological instrumentation, and its failure to furnish coherent ways to govern employability, the chapter runs counter to much governmentality research that often invokes the coherence and efficacy of psychological discourses in advancing neoliberal governmentality. Finally, in detailing early managerial reforms to service provision, the chapter provides insights into the emergence in Canada of what has been deemed double activation (Newman 2007; Considine et al. 2015), whereby more paternalist approaches to the unemployed are accompanied by more disciplinary managerial techniques imposed on service delivery staff. Early Activation Measures From the mid-1970s onward, as the ranks of the jobless grew, more hardened approaches to the unemployed defined labour market policy in Canada. UI benefits were cut in successive amendments to the UI Act, and more UI claimants found themselves having to account for their job search to counsellors in mandatory counselling sessions. These developments reflected the increasing influence of neoclassical economics in policymakers’ accounts of prolonged economic stagnation of the 1970s (McBride 1992; Albo 1994; Sawyer 2004). In labour market policy

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discourses, unemployment appeared less as a reality of market failure, or even a mismatch between labour supply and demand. It was instead increasingly presented as the result of individual behaviour and work disincentives generated mainly by the welfare state itself (Porter 2003, 163). The 1973 Orange Paper on the Social Security Review stressed the need to address the growing problem of “people who can work but who choose not to do so, and who are prepared to ‘live off’ the rest of the community” (Department of Health and Welfare 1973, 16). Conservative think tanks such as the Fraser Institute and later the Business Council on National Issues began a powerful campaign asserting a crisis of intentional UI abuse (Porter 2003, 149; see also Campeau 2005). Unemployment was once again becoming a problem of the unemployed. Following reforms to UI in 1971 that extended coverage and increased benefit rates to unprecedented levels, and subsequent growth of UI expenditure, the thrust of legislative reforms to the UI Act from the mid-1970s onward aimed to curtail access to benefits for unemployed people, all in the name of assisting “the unemployed in becoming reabsorbed in to the labour force as quickly as possible” (Dingledine cited in Albo 1994, 511). In 1975 policymakers established new restrictions for individuals who quit their previous job without just cause, failed to attend an interview or comply with the instructions of claims officers (Pal 1988, 45). Legislation passed in 1978 restricted coverage for seasonal workers and introduced a higher entrance requirement for individuals drawing on UI for the second time in the previous year. It also established new provisions for a group who would henceforth be deemed “New Entrants and Re-Entrants” (NEREs) – claimants with less than fourteen weeks of labour force attachment in the year preceding the qualifying period of their claim. The rationale for the new provision on NEREs was to minimize the “dependency” of the workers perceived as having not demonstrated sustained labour force attachment. The new hurdle disproportionately affected women and young people (Osberg 1979). A more disciplinary approach to employment service delivery and employment counselling accompanied the retrenchment of UI benefits. DMI officials had previously sought to separate employment services from UI benefits processing on the assumption that a modern employment service should not be too closely equated with the administration of UI and the work testing of claimants. However, the reintegration of the two functions became a pressing departmental priority by the mid-1970s. Numerous initiatives were adopted to quickly stream

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benefit claimants into employment counselling. Reflecting an increasingly individual-behavioural conception of unemployment, under such initiatives counsellors were required to assess the rigour of job searches of the unemployed and report those suspected of non-availability for work to the Unemployment Insurance Commission (UIC). For instance, under the Directed Interview Program, implemented in 1972, UI claimants in certain occupational fields were notified to report to a Canada Manpower Centre within twenty-four hours. During these interviews they had to account for their job search efforts, with unsatisfactory explanations grounds to terminate benefits. By 1973 Canada Manpower Centres had notified the UIC of 100,000 cases for special investigation (Andras, cited in Canada, Parliament, House of Commons 1973, 2132; see also Andras 1974). Policymakers emphasized that counsellors could quickly identify the purported employability barriers of the unemployed individuals and help them overcome the barriers largely through job search advice. A Joint Policy Coordinating Committee between the DMI and the UIC was subsequently struck in 1974. It initiated the Special Job Finding and Placement Drive, which also entailed mandatory counsellor interviews for UI claimants in certain fields of work. Efforts to stream UI claimants into activating services were formalized in 1977 when the DMI was brought under the same roof as the UIC with the formation of the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC). The Economic Council of Canada applauded the integration of employment services and benefits processing as a way to “go after malingerers directly” while not harming those “exposed to periodic and genuinely involuntary unemployment” (ECC 1976, 39–40). It is important to note that such disciplinary approaches to the unemployed reflected a more antagonistic relation between governments and labour. Antagonisms between governments and labour had become evident as early as the late 1960s, as the federal government had sought an agreement with the Canadian Labour Congress on voluntary wage controls, and as provincial governments relied more heavily on ad hoc back-to-work legislation in the face of greater worker militancy (Panitch and Swartz 1993, 22; Albo 1994). Officials confronted a persistent gap between what these early activation measures promised and their results. Strategies and technologies premised on an individual behavioural approach to unemployment could do little to resolve the structural economic stagnation that characterized the unravelling of the Fordist post-war period in Canada

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and elsewhere. A few statistics from Canada illustrate this point. Of the 400,000 UI claimants that were processed in the first year of the Job Placement Drive, only 8 per cent were placed into employment and only 1 per cent in training (McBride 1992, 172–3). The national unemployment rate hovered between 7 and 8 per cent from 1977 to 1980. With the recession of the early 1980s, it remained above 11 per cent from 1982 to 1984 (Statistics Canada 2016). Put another way, in 1977 there was a national average of 882,000 unemployed individuals, rising to nearly 1,000,000 in 1978 and over 1,500,000 in 1983 (Porter 2003, 183). During this period the Canadian labour market was characterized by an acute shortage of jobs. The reality that there were simply not enough jobs for all who wanted one was not redressible through, or even admitted in, the ascendant supply-side logic of activation, and its negation of the possibility of involuntary unemployment (O’Donnell 2006). Officials’ response to the poor results of activation reflect what Murray Li (2007b, 265) describes as managing failures: a governmental practice that entails “presenting failure as the outcome of rectifiable deficiencies; smoothing out contradictions so that they seem superficial rather than fundamental.” Officials tended not to acknowledge the fundamental inability of activation to redress depressed labour demand. Rather, officials tended to cast the failures of activation in technical terms, as though they stemmed from rectifiable deficiencies in service delivery techniques. Discussions of employment service delivery throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s often focused on deficiencies in the coordination of service delivery, and especially the productivity and competency of front-line counsellors who worked most closely with the unemployed (McElligott 2001, 137). In its 1977 report the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance complained that the counselling into which more UI applicants were being streamed lacked a clear focus on the goal of job placement. The committee claimed that the current direction of service delivery had “left the impression that the Canada Manpower Centre is an extension of the community social assistance agency. Manpower counselors should, as far as possible, restrict their activities to the improvement of the job seeker’s employment potential and should refer clients requiring guidance on personal problems to the appropriate agency” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 1976, 45). As part of its call for counselling services more closely related to job placement, the committee advocated the reinstatement of the position of job placement officer (of the former National Employment Service) more narrowly responsible for referring service users to listed vacancies

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rather than more in-depth employment counselling. The committee recommended that the title “manpower counselor” be largely decommissioned, reserved for a smaller set of specialized counselling staff. Related to this, the committee called for a reversal of the DMI’s emphasis on upgrading the educational qualifications of counsellors. In the senators’ view, the recruitment of university graduates to fill counsellor positions in the 1960s was ill considered. The Senate Committee Report reproduced testimony provided by Stephan Dupré, who had recently published his landmark study on the DMI’s operations. Dupré indicated that neither he nor the officials to whom he spoke during his research could identify a specific form of expertise required for the manpower counsellor position. The report of the Labour Market Development Task Force, the most influential of a spate of studies on labour market policy conducted during this period, reiterated criticism of the work of front-line counsellors. It noted that the purpose and practice of employment counselling had become “muddied”: “Increasing concern has been expressed both within the CEIC and by outside observers, that the counseling process is relatively ineffective … [and that] its ineffectiveness has had a major negative impact on the success of labour market programs” (Dodge 1981, 81). As supporting evidence, the report cited an EIC-commissioned customer survey, which indicated that a majority of employment service users were unsatisfied with their experience, particularly with the level of counsellor expertise and attentiveness (77). In short, in accounting for the failure of activation, officials attempted to render it technical instead of fundamental (Murray Li 2007b). Officials channelled criticisms towards the purportedly questionable discretion of front-line employment counsellors and not to the fundamentally deficient underlying logic of activation. Their efforts to manage failures of activation, largely by problematizing the competency and professionalism of employment counsellors, were pivotal in shaping efforts to reform service delivery over the next decade in pursuit of more efficient and effective activation. The following section traces the elaborate and labour-intensive ways in which officials reassembled service delivery. One bid for renewal attempted to augment the welfare professionalism of counsellors and enhance their ability to better identify and remedy the purported employability barriers of service users. In so doing, this initiative recast employability as a psychological attribute that could be known and governed through psychological knowledge and techniques. This initiative was eventually swept aside

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by another set of interventions into front-line service delivery headed by experts in managerial evaluation. Close examination of these two divergent governmental responses provides insights into administrators’ encounter with the limits and failures of activation, and administrators’ attempt to manage these limits through recourse to expertise and technique. Augmenting Welfare Professionalism on the Front Lines: The Turn to Psychological Expertise Over the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, employment service administrators rolled out a major bid to renew service delivery based on psychological expertise. Whereas a decade earlier, under the logic of manpower planning, employability assessment and enhancement were to be illuminated by labour market statistics, by the late 1970s such practices were seen to hinge on counselling psychology. Governmentality scholarship provides important insights for understanding the incorporation of psychological discourses in social administration including activation services. As Rose’s (1985, 1990, 1998) extensive research on the use of psychology in governance demonstrates, psychology facilitates the exercise of social authority in a seemingly legitimate and justifiable manner, “not in the light of arbitrary or wilful power, but on the basis of judgment claiming objectivity, neutrality, and hence effectivity” (Rose 2007, 10). Rose demonstrates how authorities appropriate the vocabularies and techniques of psychological expertise to consolidate their capacity to govern: “In purporting to underpin authority by a coherent intellectual and practical regime, psychology offers others both a grounding in truth and some formulas for efficacy” (Rose 1998, 87). Governmentality-based researchers have explored the use of psychological expertise and other clinical knowledges including medicine in activation. A central insight across all of these studies is that psychological discourse is central in individualizing unemployment; it constitutes unemployment as an individual psychological deficiency, and thus pathologizes the unemployed, while negating structural determinants of unemployment (Schram 2000; Lee and Curran 2003; McDonald and Marston 2005; Holmqvist 2009; Garsten and Jacobsson 2013). As Lee and Curran (2003, 64) argue, the use of psychological discourses in welfare-to-work programs often define front-line staff “as uniquely capable of providing objectivity and positions them as arbiters of clinical truth.”

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Similar observations have been made in studies of the conscription of medical expertise in activation services in the United States (Schram 2000) and Sweden (Holmqvist 2009; Garsten and Jacobsson 2013). It is critical to examine the incorporation of psychological discourses in Canadian employment service delivery, not because it would entrench neoliberal governmentality and the corresponding individualization of unemployment. On the contrary, it warrants study because it is an episode of service delivery renewal and reassembly that illuminates the difficulties and confusions that authorities faced when they attempted to implement individual activation. Administrators turned to psychological discourses amidst mounting criticism of counsellors’ ability to achieve rapid re-employment and reduce the UI roll. Implementation of the counsellor training program across the front lines was extremely labour and resource intensive, and many service users resisted and thwarted the use of psychological tools. As the case below demonstrates, administrators’ recourse to psychological discourse is one way in which authorities sought – but were unable to forge – coherent and authoritative ways to know and govern employability. The new vision for service delivery in which psychology figured centrally was spearheaded by administrators in the Employment Services Branch of the CEIC, including Director D. Stuart Conger, who had extensive background in vocational counselling and firmly believed in its benefits. From the perspective of this group, who had organizational power, a more effective delivery of service would not be achieved by reducing the skills of front-line counsellors, as the Senate Finance Committee’s study of employment services recommended. On the contrary, more effective employment services would require enhancing the capacity of counsellors to assess and remedy the employability barriers of clients. Unprepared to accept a fate of de-professionalization for counsellors, this group of officials lobbied heavily among senior management for new organizational resources to support counsellors in their work. Their efforts yielded significant organizational reinvestment in this area (Paquin 1982). A new emphasis on expanding the skills of employment counsellors was reflected in two developments in 1980. The department published a policy statement, titled Employment Counseling in the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission, confirming the commission’s counsellingbased model of delivery. The policy statement offered a rationale for employment counselling to clarify its “frequently misunderstood” role in employment service provision (EIC 1980a, 2). It enumerated the tools

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currently available to employment counsellors and committed the EIC to further develop a training program for front-line staff to enhance the quality of service delivery. In addition, in the fall of 1980 the EIC co-sponsored the first World Seminar on Employment Counseling with the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance and the Canadian Guidance and Counselling Association. Nearly 800 representatives from a number of countries’ employment services converged in Ottawa to exchange knowledge of best practices in employment counselling (EIC 1980b, 1). As one regional manager recalled, these initiatives “had significant effects on the organization. There was a requirement for a paradigm shift within the department … to a professional counseling service” (MacDonald 1993, 175). The potential of psychological expertise to help decipher the employability of service users had been showcased by the Diagnostic Services Program. This program was established in 1973 as part of the broader mandate to address the needs of the “non–job ready.” Under it, employment counsellors could engage the services of approved psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers to provide “a diagnostic evaluation of intellectual, psychological and social aspects of the client” (Jacques 1983, 812). An Employment and Immigration Canada (EIC) instructional manual on diagnostic services advised that psychological assessments were indicated for those with employability barriers that were not readily apparent: those who had a poor work history or work ethic for which there was no obvious explanation, those suspected of having attitudinal, interpersonal, or psychological problems, and those who had participated in employment services with little success (EIC 1980c, 3). Diagnosticians used psychometric tests of intelligence, aptitude, personality, and achievement as their principal instruments. They also used observational techniques such as sheltered workstation assessment. Information derived from diagnosticians’ assessments was reported back to Canada Manpower Centre staff in the form of “precise diagnostic information … which will allow them to help their clients more effectively to resolve certain employment-related problems” (Jacques 1983, 813). In this way we see psychological knowledge provided authorities with a new method to adjudicate individuals and decipher the truth of the unemployed subject. Enhanced diagnostic capacity was to be distributed to counsellors across the front lines of the organization through a large-scale, in-service training program launched in the late 1970s. It was developed in conjunction with counselling experts and comprised instructional modules

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that focused on a different set of theories and techniques of counselling psychology. Absorbing extensive financial and human resources in the course of its development (Hunter 1993), all components of the training program were the equivalent of approximately one year of university training (Conger 1986, 17). The EIC produced an extensive array of pedagogical material including manuals, textbooks, and specially commissioned departmental films. The training program involved employment service staff in self-directed study, in-class instruction, examinations, modelling demonstrations, and peer evaluation. Its launch provides a rich site for studying the labour-intensive work in fashioning ways to govern unemployment as a problem of individual employability. It allows us to appreciate that governmental technologies do not simply emerge from a broader rationality, but rather must be assembled through the work of actors. First to be developed was a certification program for counsellors in the administration of psychometric tests of aptitude, interest, and “achievement” (a proxy for intelligence), many of the tests previously performed by psychological experts under the Diagnostic Services Program. Counsellors were trained to administer the General Aptitude Test Battery, which was developed by the United States Employment Service in the late 1940s and purported to predict future job performance by measuring general achievement, as well as numerical and verbal aptitude, clerical perception, and manual dexterity (EIC 1982a, 16). The EIC certification program involved many stages. The first stage of training in psychometric testing entailed thirty hours of on-the-job self-study of specially prepared manuals covering basic personality and aptitude measurement theory, rudimentary statistics, and test interpretation. The next stage involved a training course where counsellors watched training videos, practised testing and interpreting test results, and then wrote an exam. Tellingly, the training emphasized repeated practising and evaluation so that “counsellor apprehension is reduced and a high level of counsellor success is promoted” (Bezanson et al. 1980, 17). Counsellor training in testing culminated in the recording of a live psychological test interpretation with an actual service user for subsequent evaluation by a psychologist (Monsebraaten 1980, 212). Along with their recorded sessions, counsellors submitted to a psychologist a detailed report outlining the reason for the test, methods of client preparation, and test interpretation strategies. By 1980 over 1,800 counsellors were trained to conduct tests, representing 45 per cent of the 4,000 counsellors across 551 CECs (Bezanson et al. 1980, 18).

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Training employment service staff to administer interest and achievement tests and their subsequent increased use may seem innocuous. Yet it provides one example of the way in which administrators drew upon psychological instrumentation to move the governance of employability from “the disputed terrain of politics” to the “tranquil yet seductive territory of truth” (Rose and Miller 1992, 188). Testing brought purportedly scientific measurement to questions of capacity, potential, and achievement – all central concepts of employability that had been vigorously contested over the previous decade. Testing furnished front-line staff with what was seen as a superior, scientifically derived diagnostic capacity. The superiority of tested knowledge of individual potential and employability was invoked in the EIC’s Employment Counseling Policy Statement: “Tests provide information on an individual’s strengths (or weaknesses) and potential (or lack of potential) in different areas. Decisions based on tested knowledge of one’s capacity to learn and to succeed in the future can be more reliable than personal judgment” (Employment and Immigration Canada 1980a, 10–11).8 In Canada the certification program in psychometric testing served as a prototype for further instructional modules that disseminated new forms of diagnostic capacity to counsellors. The next component of the training program to be implemented focused on counselling techniques to decipher employability barriers. It involved even more extensive training than was required for certification in psychological testing. Competency in employability assessment was derived from the completion of forty-five hours of self-directed study using specially prepared EIC materials as well as a ten-day course in which staff practised assessment strategies on each other (EIC 1985, 2). To guide employment staff in their work with the public, the crux of the 500-plus page

8 Ramping up psychometric testing in employment service delivery in Canada attracted little of the controversy that surrounded the practice in the United States. In the early 1980s use of the GATB increased dramatically in the U.S. Employment Service as part of an effort shift away from its equity mandate under the War on Poverty to a placement service for employers. In the new U.S. employment service delivery model, the GATB was applied to virtually every applicant in order to ensure only the most highly scored received referrals. As the test consistently scored African Americans and Hispanics below white applicants, a scoring procedure of grouping results by race was instituted. Subsequent controversy around the race-grouping procedure resulted in a proposal by the Department of Labor for a moratorium to investigate its discriminatory aspects. With the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1991) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the U.S. employment services suspended use of the GATB (Baydoun and Neuman 1992).

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textbook on employability assessment was a mini-diagnostic manual consisting of operational definitions of “standard” employability barriers and the diagnostic questions by which they would be made known to employment service staff. The standard employability barriers were: Adaptability/inflexibility Aggressiveness Aptitudes/abilities Assertiveness/submissiveness Chemical dependence Communication skills Decision-making skills Disadvantaged Emotional security/insecurity Emotional stability/instability Enthusiasm/vitality Geographical mobility Grooming and personal hygiene Indecisiveness/decisiveness Interests Interpersonal competence Job search techniques Level of education/training/experience Literacy Locus of control Management of finances Pessimistic/optimistic Possession/accessibility of clothes/tools/equipment Realistic/unrealistic aspirations Responsible/irresponsible Self-awareness Self-disciplined/impulsive Self-esteem Self-sufficient/emotional dependence Sociability Transportation Work motivation (Patsula 1981, 233) This diagnostic schema was envisioned as a “foundation upon which may be based a common (within and across CECs [Canada Employment Centres]) terminology to describe employability strengths and barriers

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of CEC clients” (Patsula 1981, 235). Out of the thirty-two employability barriers that counsellors were trained to screen for, twenty focused on clients’ psychological attributes. This diagnostic schema reflects how the use of psychological knowledges positions service delivery staff as arbiters of clinical truth (Lee and Curran 2003), while also individualizing the problem of unemployment and casting its solution as a matter of behaviour modification and psychic transformation (Schram 2000; Marston and McDonald 2005). The diagnostic schema also satisfied another condition by expediting the counselling encounter so that employability could be assessed in ways that did “not require extensive recording and is based on information readily available from client statements and behaviours and through counselor questioning and observation” (Patsula 1981, 235). By 1989, 1,676 employment counsellors had trained in the techniques of employability assessment (EIC 1989a, 12).9 Further indicating the labour intensiveness of psychological approaches to service delivery, administrators supplemented psychological scripts and techniques with techniques of emotional labour. Administrators and consultants developed courses to instruct employment service staff in methods to turn counselling into a kind of affective governmental medium (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009; see also D’Aoust 2015). One course drew upon the work of American counsellor Robert Carkhuff, who advanced a model of the client–counsellor relationship based on eight dimensions of relating: empathy, respect, genuineness, facilitative self-disclosure, concreteness, confrontation, immediacy, and client selfexploration. The EIC commissioned production of instructional films including Client–Counselor Relationships and Other Things That Go Bump (EIC 1981a) and Tuning In (EIC 1982b), to put these dimensions of relating into dramatic form in the setting of the Canada Employment Centre. With the narration of an expert guide, the films emphasized how productive client-counsellor relations required judicious use of counsellors’ body postures and gestures. The importance of body language was driven home in “The Anatomy of Employment Counseling,” published by the director of the Employment Services Branch (Conger 1985). Instructional courses were devised around these films, allowing opportunities for employment service staff to practise the modelled body 9 New service guidelines reducing staff caseloads allowed for more substantive counselling. Such guidelines were welcomed by many staff who had expressed concerns that their newly honed counselling and employability assessment skills were underutilized, given time constraints with clients (Hynna 1986, 586).

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language techniques. While perhaps minuscule, these practices were far from trivial. Their detailed cataloguing in counsellor training material suggests that they were an important part of the affective and embodied work involved in trying to manage unemployment as a problem of individual employability. They also betray the bizarre eclecticism of employability governance. By the early to mid-1980s extensive progress was made in augmenting the counselling service available to the unemployed. Staff were equipped with new diagnostic capacities to make employability knowable and governable, drawing largely on psychology. Yet the point of the preceding discussion has not been to assert that psychology individualized unemployment and entrenched neoliberal modes of responsible and autonomous subjectivity – a narrative emphasized in governmentality literature. Rather it has been to explore this strained deployment of psychological instrumentation for what it reveals about the difficulties authorities have faced in governing unemployment as a problem of individual employability. This bid to renew service delivery underscores the labour-intensive pursuit of coherent means to know and govern employability. Ultimately psychological discourses failed to furnish the governmental capacity that administrators sought. The fragility of psychological discourses is evident in training material, which betrays Michael Lipsky’s astute observation that “what street-level bureaucrats think they do may have little connection with what clients think is going on” (Lipsky 1980, 60). The problem of the “reluctant client” who does not cooperate in their employability assessment is a recurrent theme in training documents. Not seen as an indictment of the underlying individualizing premise of service delivery, reluctance is cast in EIC instructional material as a provocation to governance – “a counseling challenge” (Bezanson, DeCoff, and Stewart 1985, 75). Reflecting the emphasis placed on the client–counsellor relationship mentioned previously, a recurrent theme in the training material was overcoming client resistance through emotional labour of staff. Training material posited a correlation between effective emotional labour and body language by staff and client compliance. An instructional film titled Cross-Currents was produced by the EIC as part of a course for counsellors in techniques to diffuse service users’ anger (Employment and Immigration Canada, 1981b). Training material also instructed staff in techniques to manage more subtle forms of client resistance to employability assessment. It enjoined

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staff to be alert to clients’ disinterest and indifference throughout the service encounter. Training material specified “checkpoints” in the counselling at which point staff were to assess and confirm the “degree of client commitment” to both the determination of a client’s individual employability barrier and to the action plan to remedy it (Bezanson et al. 1985, 50). Another strategy to manage client indifference anticipated the extensive use of contractualism as a prominent technology for activation in employment service provision (Freedland and King 2003). Administrators encouraged staff to introduce the written contract into their service delivery to secure clients’ agreement in the enhancement of their employability. Finally, training material also turned therapeutic technologies back on counsellors. It posited counsellors’ capacity for reflexive introspection as a resource in the ongoing attempt to overcome client recalcitrance: Counsellors may begin to feel awkward and insecure with a reluctant client … Handling one’s own emotional reactions to a counseling relationship problem are important to counseling effectiveness. The first step in handling reluctance effectively is to handle yourself and your own reactions. Processing the feelings and understanding their sources permits a counselor to avoid unwittingly reinforcing the reluctance. It also provides the objectivity needed to find alternative ways of remaining effective in the presence of reluctant behaviours. (Bezanson et al. 1985, 78 and 80)

Such injunctions suggest the complex and contradictory ways in which staff are situated in governmental relations. They illustrate Clarke’s (1998, 179) observation that service delivery work often entails attempts to render major social contradictions and conflicts technical and can be an exceedingly uncomfortable environment for staff. Efforts to enhance the welfare professionalism of counsellors also sat in tension with the discourse of the “will to work” of the unemployed. The counselling methods in which staff were trained were premised on a depth model of the unemployed psyche. In contrast, notions of willingness to work, expressed in ongoing calls to work test UI claimants, rationalized the unemployed subject in the image of Homo economicus. That is, increasingly dominant neoclassical theories recast the unemployed subject as a wilful and calculating agent responsive exclusively

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to work incentives and sanctions. This rationalized conception of the unemployed subject was not easily reconciled with the model of the client–counsellor relationship emphasizing therapeutic elicitation of employability barriers. Ongoing concern over the will to work of the unemployed was expressed in a series of high-profile reports in the 1980s. The Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (the MacDonald Commission, 1985) and the Commission of Inquiry on Unemployment Insurance (the Forget Commission, 1986) concluded that work disincentives generated by UI were a critical factor in persistently high unemployment rates, and that employment policy needed reform in order to reduce labour market distortions. As well, both the Ministerial Task Force on Program Review, established by the new Conservative government in 1984 to assess federal spending, and the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (in 1983 and 1988) called for greater coordination of employment service provision and UI administration to detect “deliberate” misuse of UI funds (McElligott 2001). Another set of work test schemes was implemented following from this wave of reports. In 1986, the Increased Interview Activity Program (IIA) was implemented, primarily in Ontario and Quebec Canada Employment Centres. It involved mandatory “Employment Assistance Interviews” and “Entitlement Determination Interviews” for selected UI claimants to scrutinize their job search. Under the IIA, claimants were disqualified from benefits for six weeks for failing to attend an interview without justification. They were also disqualified from benefits for refusing to accept the jobs to which they were referred by employment service staff during these sessions. Between July 1986 and July 1987, 536,242 such interviews were conducted, resulting in a 15 per cent disqualification rate (EIC 1987, 8). The IIA was cancelled in 1987, as it failed to generate the savings EIC officials anticipated. Yet an essentially similar scheme known as the Claimant Re-employment Strategy was put into place in 1989 requiring UI claimants to report for interviews regularly, with similar disentitlement provisions. In short, building on developments in the 1970s, a more antagonistic policing role was becoming more central to the provision of employment service. These initiatives remained highly controversial among staff and were regularly resisted by counsellors who retained significant discretion in determining the adequacy of the job search efforts of UI claimants (McElligott 2001). In testimony to the Parliamentary Subcommittee on Labour and Employment, EIC Deputy Minister Arthur Kroeger

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conveyed the difficulty counsellors faced in reconciling their dual roles. As he indicated, counsellors “recoil at the idea of being policemen. They consider that they are there to help people to find jobs, not to squeal on them to the UI staff who will cut off their benefits” (Canada, Parliament, House of Commons 1989, 18). Continuing concern over counsellor ineffectiveness, tinged with long-standing suspicion that counsellors were resisting their job search policing role, hastened the adoption of managerialism. The Encroachment of Managerialism Efforts to buttress activation by augmenting the therapeutic expertise of counsellors occurred when welfare professionalism was in eclipse more generally. By the 1980s, the rise of New Public Management (NPM) saw authority across institutional sites increasingly accrue to actors with skills in monitoring and measurement. A product of Thatcher-era Britain, and drawing intellectual inspiration from neoclassical economic theory, NPM is premised on a profound distrust of public bureaucracy and welfare professionalism. Influential NPM tracts such as Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992) portray public sector bureaucracy as a “monopoly” that is inefficient, unresponsive to citizens and elected officials, and detrimental to the wealth-generating capacities of the private sector. NPM seeks to remake public sector bureaucracy in the image of the private sector by introducing competitive tendering of government services, privatization and new benchmarking protocols that bring public sector organizations into comparison with other public and private sector entities, and restructuring the work of public sector employees in search of efficiencies. The effects of NPM in the provision of social welfare are amply demonstrated in the literature about social policy and public administration (Foster and Wilding 2000; Evans and Harris 2004; Baines 2006; Brodkin and Marston 2013; Griffith and Smith 2014). NPM limits the discretion of social service workers through routinization and surveillance of their work. It orients the activities of social service workers away from concerns about professional ethics or the needs of service users and towards centrally defined imperatives of efficiency and accountability. This shift is reflected in the valorization of skill sets traditionally attributed to management, including budgeting, measuring, coordinating, and performance reporting. Managerial modes of coordination also utilize new information and communication technologies in ways that make service

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providers increasingly calculable to centres of administration, and in ways that incite self-monitoring of service delivery staff (Henman 2010; Schram et al. 2010). In the section below, we will see how a new bid to reassemble service delivery elevated these technologies and marked the emergence of double activation (Newman 2007). Efforts to make activation services work as intended would no longer involve augmenting the welfare professionalism and discretion of front-line counsellors. Henceforth it would entail efforts to narrow counsellors’ discretion and ensure they oriented their activities around measurable results. The turn to managerialism was prompted by the continued and increasingly sharp criticism of the efficiency and effectiveness of the employment service in achieving rapid reemployment and UI savings. The Office of the Auditor General of Canada reported on the continued ineffectiveness of employment service delivery, noting in its 1983 report that the “CEIC seems to attach more importance to the placement and counseling processes than to their results” (Office of the Auditor General of Canada 1983). The Neilson Task Force on Program Review, established by the new Conservative government in 1984 to assess federal spending, was especially critical of the job placement work of counsellors. It called for extensive program evaluation of employment service operations and issued a stark challenge: “If at the end of the two year period the quality of the CEC placement service has not improved significantly, the government should eliminate the service at that time” (Canada 1985, 82). The Forget Commission of 1986 similarly recommended that the EIC’s job placement service be terminated in the absence of measured improvements in efficiency (Canada 1986). Administrators implemented the recommendations by embarking on a “global evaluation” of the National Employment Service, headed up by the EIC’s Strategic Planning and Policy Branch. This initiative entailed ten evaluations of employment service operations, and it entailed methods such as longitudinal tracking of clients, surveys of employers and workers, and efficiency/cost-workload analyses, among others. In place of traditional volume or process-based measurements that focus on the number of clients served, this global evaluation aimed to determine net impact: “the extent to which the NES program actually promotes more efficient and more equitable labour market adjustments than would otherwise occur” (EIC 1989b, 1). Frontline counsellors were the focus of several studies. Initial evaluation of employment counselling by a consultancy firm was qualitative. Evaluators sought to penetrate and map out the dynamics of counsellor

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discretion. The evaluation consisted of site visits, direct observation of counselling sessions, and examination of counselling case files, in search of “an understanding of what actually happens in employment counseling sessions. Of particular interest were variations in client needs and behaviours as well as variations in counselor behaviours, and to see how the activities conducted in the counseling sessions are translated into case file entries” (ABT Associates of Canada 1988, 8). Unsurprisingly, many counsellors resisted this managerial inquiry into their counselling, citing ethical and professional commitments to the privacy of client-counsellor interactions (9). Quantitative evaluation of the net impacts of employment counselling quickly followed qualitative assessment. Evaluators modelled their work upon previous studies of employment counselling undertaken in the United States.10 EIC evaluators drew together longitudinal data on the labour market outcomes of employment counselling clients and compared this information to data on the situation of a non-counselled control group to determine if employment counselling provided net benefits to clients (EIC 1988, 14). The use of net impact evaluation is often seen as a neutral form of program assessment. But it is more accurately understood as a governmental intervention in itself. Net impact evaluation often shifts the power to speak authoritatively about service delivery away from those directly engaged in their delivery and towards social scientists, administrators, and policymakers who subscribe to standards of evidence derived from econometrics (Breslau 1998). The results of net impact assessment allowed evaluators to authoritatively assert, in a way that could not be effectively countered by counsellors, that employment counselling had little impact on service users in their duration of employment, probability of finding a job, or hourly wage (EIC 1988). On the basis of these reports, and affirming long-standing criticisms of the effectiveness of the counselling service, the Treasury Board joined the chorus of calls for the EIC to demonstrate the accountability of counsellors through the measures of rapid re-employment and UI savings (EIC 1993, 5).

10 One influential study by Stanford Research Institute International (1977) examined the average effect of counselling on several labour market outcomes: duration of unemployment, weekly earnings, job satisfaction, and job search effectiveness. The conclusion was that counselling did not significantly affect the labour market experiences of the counselled clients.

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Following the publication of the net impact studies, EIC administrators quickly introduced new service delivery protocols by which “accountability” was to be “driven downward” to the point of service delivery (EIC 1993, 5). In place of efforts to augment the discretionary capacity of counsellors, there were attempts to bring their discretion to heel around organizational objectives of rapid re-employment. EIC officials rolled out a new vision of employment counselling in a report titled Employment Counseling into the 1990s (1991). In contrast to the counselling statement released a decade earlier, which emphasized investment in the professional discretion of front-line staff, the 1991 counselling statement announced that their activities were to be brought into line with a new managerial emphasis on performance. The new principles of counselling would henceforth emphasize the accountability of counsellors for achieving clearly measurable results (EIC 1991, 9). A newly struck national EIC Working Group on the “impact” of service delivery was to specify how counsellors could be made accountable. In 1991 this working group developed a proposal for performance measurement (scheduled for implementation in April 1993). The work of the Working Group was stalled amidst rapid institutional change occasioned by the formation of Human Resources Development Canada in 1993. Nevertheless it was significant because it signalled a shift in administrators’ strategies and tactics to reform service delivery. A managerial response had been provoked, and future bids to renew service delivery would draw on the calculative and disciplinary techniques of managerialism. Conclusion Early activating reforms in the mid- to late 1970s that emphasized rapid re-employment of the unemployed met with little success. Official explanations for the failure of such measures to deliver on their promise seldom pointed to the inherent limits of individualized activation in a recessionary context when demand for labour was weak. As we have seen, officials tended to cast blame on service delivery itself, especially counsellors’ discretion and competency. This problematization was the basis for two bids to reassemble service delivery, each entailing widely divergent knowledges and techniques. One set of administrators set out to upgrade the skills of counsellors in counselling psychology. In detailing this episode, my account runs counter to much governmentality literature on psychology and activation. My central aim was not simply

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to claim that psychology cultivated neoliberal subjectivity among the unemployed. Rather, I explored the introduction of the counsellor training program for what it reveals about the difficulties faced by authorities in attempting to govern unemployment as a problem of individual employability. I stressed the hard and uncertain work in distributing this knowledge across the front lines, the fragility of the resulting practices, and the presence of service users who refused the use of therapeutic techniques. The chapter then traced a major shift in the dominant knowledge and techniques of service delivery in the late 1980s. As evidence mounted of the continued ineffectiveness of activation measured in either UI rolls or job placement figures, subsequent efforts to renew service delivery would privilege managerial knowledges and techniques over welfare professionalism. In this context, a new cadre of experts with skills in evaluation and performance measurement were tasked to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of employment service delivery. My account confirms the salience of notions of double activation (Newman 2007; Considine et al. 2015) in the delivery of employment service. By the late 1980s paternalist approaches to the unemployed were increasingly buttressed through more disciplinary, managerial technologies targeting the conduct of service delivery staff. Of course neither bid to make or subsequently unmake the welfare professionalism of counsellors allowed re-employment of the unemployed on the scale that authorities envisioned. This is because the difficulties and failures of activation stem not simply from administrative deficiencies, but from the fundamental fallacies and contradictions of the underlying neoliberal logic of the framework. The chapters that follow examine efforts to buttress activation through managerial interventions into the conduct of front-line staff, as well as the unintended effects generated by such interventions. As we will see, during the 1990s, those fluent in econometrics and program evaluation led in pursuit of evidence-based methods of activation.

Chapter Five

Within Reach of the “What Works Best Solution”: Evidence-Based Activation, 1994–2000

Introduction We need to identify what works, what doesn’t, what gets results and what doesn’t, to question what we do at all levels in all functions, and to stop doing things that do not add value for our clients, and to concentrate on what we do best and do it better. Jean-Jacques Noreau (1995)

Those were the words of the deputy minister of HRDC in a videotaped message to staff across the country. His comments conveyed both the pressure and uncertainty facing the employment service. While criticism of its effectiveness persisted, often singling out front-line counsellors for blame, the recently elected Liberal government signalled it would redouble its efforts to activate the unemployed by adopting measures outlined in the OECD’s “Jobs Study.” As the deputy minister also made clear, doing more with less would be the new normal. This chapter demonstrates how the search for more efficient and effective activation took more technically ambitious forms during the 1990s. In a context of activation and austerity, department evaluators who had become increasingly influential in shaping the delivery of employment services set out to develop statistical profiling technology known initially as the Client Monitoring System (CMS), and subsequently as the Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS). SOMS brought the science of program evaluation to the counselling of unemployed service users, promising a form of evidence-based activation. It computed client data in econometric models in order to direct individuals to employability interventions predicted to result in optimal re-employment. For

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many HRDC administrators, the technology appeared to open up the possibility of a technical and individual solution to the collective problem of unemployment by “letting scientific research inform the management and practice of employment service delivery” (Colpitts 2002, 284). The chapter then examines the failure and contestation in which SOMS was immediately embroiled. The technology encountered extensive counsellor resistance, and a series of technical glitches and modelling difficulties generated further doubt of its predictive power. Finally, SOMS became caught up in a paradox of targeted governance (Valverde and Mopas 2004). The enormous amount of personal information on individual service users that the technology computed to make its predictions began to raise concern among observers that it was violating liberal norms of limited government as expressed in privacy legislation. In this way SOMS illustrates how governmental imperatives associated with neoliberalism, such as targeted and predictive risk management, can exist in tension with other tenets of neoliberalism such as the ethos of limited government. Overall this chapter illustrates how a governmental lens can direct light on ruptures and shifts in how authorities sought to know and govern employability, and on the struggles around such shifts. The chapter also vividly exemplifies what O’Malley (1996, 311) calls the subterranean practices of government that authorities often engage in to sustain and defend governmental practices and technologies from challenge. As we will see, efforts to implement SOMS entailed defensive strategizing by administrators on a range of organizational actors deeply opposed to the technology. HRDC’s Service Outcome Measurement System SOMS emerged out of a context of activation and austerity. Following its election in 1993, the Liberal government embarked on a campaign of labour market policy reform and administrative austerity that formed the backdrop for the attempted adoption of the statistical targeting technology. The government’s election campaign promise to reduce the deficit dominated its policy agenda (Banting 1995). The 1995 federal budget led to ambitious funding cuts, amounting to a reduction of the federal civil service by 45,000 staff (Swimmer 1996). HRDC, a new super-department formed in 1993 out of a number of other federal bureaucracies, was the largest of all federal departments and was subject to a 20 per cent reduction in staff, or 5,000 of its approximately 25,000 workers (Colpitts 2002, 286; see also Good 2003).

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In January 1994 the minister of HRDC announced a major assessment of Canada’s social welfare system under the auspices of a social security review. The review’s discussion paper, titled Improving Social Security in Canada, clearly indicated the direction of reform the government wished to pursue. It replicated the tenets of the OECD Jobs Study, released just a few months earlier, by invoking the need to restrict socalled passive income support measures. It claimed that the UI program was impeding economic adjustment and was “open to abuse” (HRDC 1994a). The discussion paper also recommended raising entitlement requirements and reducing the level and duration of benefits in order to reduce “dependency” among the unemployed (HRDC 1994a). As part of its 1994 budget, the government had already passed measures to restrict access to UI. It raised qualification requirements for regular benefits and reduced the duration of benefits for claimants in high unemployment regions (Lin 1998). The social security review discussion paper also emphasized the need for more effective activating measures. It called for enhancements to employment service provision that included more individually tailored needs assessment and case management. It suggested that these enhancements could be financed from savings realized by UI reform and from the managerial streamlining of employment service provision. Under the heading “Building Employment Development Services That Really Work,” it noted that employment services had not met expectations: “Do employment development services in fact help people get jobs? Today the answer is yes – sometimes – when assistance is carefully tailored to an individual’s needs, and linked to real job opportunities. However, the system now is too hit-or-miss. That’s why the results have been inadequate. Too many people end up in programs that have little to do with their aptitudes or opportunities. Many get training for jobs that don’t exist locally. Many are shunted from one program to another, when all they really need is basic counselling on how they can best fit into the job market” (HRDC 1994a). In making this argument, the discussion paper reiterated the findings of a large, cross-national literature on evaluation of public employment services, which attributed shortcomings of activation services to deficiencies in service delivery technique (see OECD 1992). A common claim in this literature was that, in the many jurisdictions where reforms had failed to work, such failure stemmed from inadequacies in traditional modes of front-line decision-making about unemployed service users. Studies indicated that service delivery decisions based on eligibility

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criteria were unable to accurately identify who among the unemployed needed employability enhancement services the most, and which type of intervention would be most beneficial (Black et al. 2003; Lechner and Smith 2003). Assigning individuals to employment services on the basis of their eligibility according to administrative regulations, while perhaps clear-cut, was a program-centric method to decide about service delivery, one that operated on the basis of a bureaucratic logic of entitlement rather than individual need and was therefore inherently limited as a method of targeting activating services to individuals (Hasluck 2004). Counsellor discretion appeared in evaluation studies as equally problematic, cast as overly subjective and inconsistent. Evaluation of activation programming in a range of countries pointed to two common misallocations of service. First, those who were seen as not needing employment services were referred to additional services, resulting in so-called deadweight losses for employment service agencies (OECD 1998a). Conversely, evaluators found that those who were seen as needing intervention were not properly identified and targeted, resulting in expenditures from prolonged unemployment benefit payments (Behncke, Froelich, and Lechner 2006). A growing number of analysts and administrators in HRDC asserted that truly effective employment service delivery required a new evidence-based approach. A series of documents were circulated around the department that called for a new scientific evidence base for both policymaking and implementation. As one report noted, “To meet our new mandate we need new hard knowledge – statistics, research, modeling, performance measures … And we need to know how to make better use of the information that is collected – to turn it into applied knowledge” (HRDC 1994b, 1). Central to this was making greater use of the department’s administrative data; turning organizational information – administrative data, evaluation results, tacit knowledge of staff – into tangible and applicable “knowledge products” resulting in a more evidence-based form of employment service provision: “It requires that in everything we do, we manage information as a resource to be minded and refined in value adding ways that will bring about huge return on needed and essential investments. Better data … are essential if we are to develop better [and] more cost effective programs that make a difference, and if we are to move to programs that concentrate on preventative strategies rather than on expensive cures” (HRDC 1995a, np). Indeed HRDC officials envisioned a department-wide “evaluation culture.” This entailed a new approach to program evaluation that

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responded to the criticism that the forms of evaluation that came to prominence in the 1970s – periodic evaluations, usually nationwide to satisfy Treasury Board requirements for accountability – had little relevance for program managers and staff. The new evaluation culture would democratize access to scientific policy knowledge, based on a new information technology infrastructure. Policy and program data would be amassed and processed in order to make evaluation “an integral part of day to day client and operational decision making” (HRDC 1994c, 2). Perhaps most importantly, it could be mobilized to provide answers to the increasingly urgent question framing “active” labour market policy interventions – “what works best” to facilitate rapid reemployment for individual clients. The emerging practice of statistical profiling of the unemployed appeared as the way to usher in evidence-based activation. The OECD began to promote statistical profiling of the unemployed as a way to allocate individuals to employment service interventions based on predictions of their risk of long-term unemployment. Generally statistical profiling tends to involve an initial data collection and profiling exercise that allows officials to specify the personal and environmental factors that correlate with long-term unemployment and their relative importance. This information is then incorporated into multivariate statistical models that estimate the probability of long-term unemployment for any benefit applicant. Client data derived from administrative records or from a questionnaire administered at the point of service delivery is entered into the statistical models to generate a risk calculation. Individuals allotted to a “high risk” category are typically targeted for intensive employability interventions. This method is used to ensure that employment service expenditures target those most at risk. According to proponents of statistical profiling in employment service delivery and other social service settings, the technique promises to take the guesswork out of decisions on service delivery. Decisions based on calculable risk factors are associated with enhanced predictive capacity and consistency and are therefore seen as superior to the subjective assessment of welfare professionals (Parton 1998; Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto 2003; Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010). Two countries on the leading edge of activation during the mid-1990s had already been developing risk-profiling technologies that remain in place today. In 1993 Australia implemented a profiling system that would evolve into the Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI) in 1998. The JSCI is administered by phone or in person to social security

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applicants (Australian Law Reform Commission 2011). It assesses applicants in light of eighteen risk factors associated with long-term unemployment including country of birth, indigenous status, age and gender, job search history, criminal convictions, and other personal characteristics. The JSCI then assigns applicants a score that determines the level of service intensity they can receive (Australian Commonwealth 1998). The risk score also determines the funding that agencies in Australia’s quasi-market of competing employment agencies receive for providing employment services to a particular service user. In the United States the Social Security Act was amended in 1993 to require states to implement measures to prevent long-term unemployment among the unemployed. The Department of Labor encouraged the use of statistical models to identify UI applicants “at risk” of benefit exhaustion, and it offered technical assistance to state governments to facilitate their development. Almost all state-level governments developed profiling systems to automatically assess applicant risk using administrative data, and they went online in 1995 (Sullivan et al. 2007). Typically state-profiling systems generate a list of applicants deemed most likely to exhaust UI benefits and transmit this information to local employment offices. Offices often then require these applicants to participate in employability enhancement services. Those who do not participate could have their benefits terminated. In the autumn of 1994, officials in HRDC’s Strategic Policy Evaluation and Data Development branch demonstrated to department managers their statistical allocation prototype named the Client Monitoring System (CMS). CMS developers viewed their new technology as providing the means “for converting masses of data into practical knowledge” (HRDC 1994d, 3). The CMS entailed two modules. One was a performance monitoring system including an “office profiling” function that enabled administrators to generate instantaneous reports on the “performance” of Human Resources Canada Centres and the average impact of each office on clients’ employment and income. A promotional video produced by the department touted the CMS’s capacity to facilitate the redirection of funds to offices that obtained “better results” (HRDC 1995b). The value of this knowledge would not have been lost on administrators proceeding with departmental downsizing. The second element of the Client Monitoring System was a statistical targeting module that furnished front-line staff with a “menu of evaluations” in order to choose service interventions for clients

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(HRDC 1994d, 3). By linking individual client information to a database on the service outcomes of 6,700 previous employment service users, the CMS predicted which of ten employment services, such as training, apprenticeship, and counselling, would most likely result in re-employment. The predictions included changes in client earnings and other measures of employability. For senior administrators and evaluators, much of the appeal of CMS lay in the way it promised to frame the interactions between service users, staff, and management in an instrumental imperative of “what works.” Human Resource Canada Centre managers would use the performance measurement module of the CMS to evaluate the performance of their offices and, potentially, front-line staff. In turn, staff would use the service delivery module to forecast and monitor the impact of service provision on client employability (HRDC n.d., 6). In this way the technology “would eliminate delays in providing efficient, high speed service to CEC clients” (HRDC 1996a, 7). The predictive component of the CMS put Canada at the vanguard of statistical profiling. It was a major advance beyond the systems under development in Australia and the United States. In contrast to Australia’s JSCI, the statistical profiling technology developed in Canada did not rely on questions to claimants at the point of service delivery, which raised the possibility that claimants would not answer the questions “truthfully.” As well, Canadian officials had access to a database from which they could derive an exponentially larger set of variables to calculate employability than were used in other profiling systems in the United States. The CMS prototype also aligned with the federal government’s wider embrace of information technology in administration and service delivery. Two publications released by the Treasury Board – Blueprint for Renewing Government Service Using Information Technology (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 1994a) and Enhancing Services through the Innovative Use of Information Technology (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 1994b) – emphasized the role of information technology in rationalizing service delivery by providing staff with “desktop intelligence,” including new ways to manage client information at points of service. As part of this initiative, federal departments were enjoined to incorporate greater use of information technologies into their service renewal. As the CMS prototype program was unveiled, officials in HRDC’s evaluation branch were expanding the technology (which would be renamed the Service Outcome Measurement System [SOMS]). The

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first step involved dramatically expanding its statistical database. In 1994 evaluation branch staff undertook an eighteen-month-long effort to incorporate data on the service outcomes of nearly eleven million people – all those who had accessed UI or employment services between 1987 and 1995 (Colpitts 2002, 285). This database was constructed from data in databases that HRDC had inherited from departments it had taken over, including Health and Welfare, Labour Canada, and Employment and Immigration Canada, and from external databases including provincial welfare files, Revenue Canada income tax returns, and a landed immigrant data system. The result: with the entry of a social insurance number, SOMS generated 160 pieces of information on individual service users, including their demographic data, longitudinal data on their employment and earnings history, their previous use of UI and other HRDC services, and any previous use of provincial social assistance. These client data functioned as variables in statistical models that predicted the effects of twenty-two employment service treatment options, such as wage subsidies, selfemployment assistance, counselling, and job referral. The predicted outcomes included changes in UI use, changes in income, duration of employment, and savings to the UI account (287). Eighty-eight econometric models were specified in the development of SOMS. An important feature of SOMS was its user-friendly graphical interface, which was designed to appear like Windows 95. HRDC staff could initiate service predictions simply by clicking a button on the screen labelled the “What Works Best Solution.” In summary, SOMS represented another attempt to manage the failures of activation by resorting to technique. Its implementation was fuelled by the long-standing belief that the failure of activation services to re-employ the unemployed as efficiently and effectively as expected stemmed from deficiencies in service delivery – namely the questionable discretion of front-line counsellors. It was believed that more effective activation could be established by basing service delivery on more formal, scientific modes of decision-making. Yet because the failures of activation stem not simply from administrative deficiencies, but from the fundamental fallacies and contradictions of the framework’s underlying neoliberal logic, they cannot be resolved administratively. While the failure of SOMS was therefore preordained, the dramatic nature of this failure warrants close examination. The remainder of this chapter explores political and technical impediments that led to the abandonment of this technology.

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Dilemmas of Statistical Activation Critical social policy research on the adoption of risk technologies to deliver social services allows us to understand initial counsellor resistance to SOMS. This literature demonstrates that service delivery staff charged with operating risk profiling technologies often view them as deeply flawed (Parton 1998; Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010). Front-line staff view the certainties that are said to flow from rationalized and automated service delivery as largely illusory (Broadhurst et al. 2010, 1059). As Watts makes clear, “Whatever the intention of classification and associated risk management practices, the daily lives of ordinary people are rarely understood accurately nor all the complexity of these lives grasped sufficiently in risk management technologies” (Watts cited in Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010, 401). Statistical technologies can process a limited amount of information, and often not the information that is most relevant for understanding the situation and needs of the individual service user. Moreover, statistical profiling systems impose an instrumental, non-dialogical rationality that subordinates the discretion of service delivery staff and can entrap staff in routinized and de-skilled labour (Henman 2004). Need determination is less a matter of staff judgment than it is one of entering data into a statistical equation. The preliminary roll-out of SOMS gave rise to extensive counsellor resistance to the technology. Indeed many counsellors who interacted with SOMS perceived it as a disturbing and dangerous technology. But, as we will see, the technology’s creators developed plans to manage counsellor resistance. Documenting counsellor resistance and the way it was managed is important because it illustrates the extent to which activation can be internally contested. Moreover, it exemplifies the subterranean governmental manoeuvres that are consequently required to defend and sustain activation (see O’Malley 1996). In the summer of 1995 CMS developers proceeded with the first phase of testing the technology with employment service staff. Focus groups were held in six cities across Canada so that HRDC administrators could gain feedback from front-line staff as they interacted with the new technology. Reflecting the long-standing goal of scientific managerialism to separate the conception and execution of labour processes, focus group tests involved an exercise to codify counsellors’ knowledge. Moderators sought to elicit from counsellors optimal treatment decisions corresponding to hypothetical service-user profiles. If

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counsellors could agree on a standard course of treatment, it would be used in development of the models. Perhaps not surprisingly, tensions emerged from the focus groups. For many counsellors, SOMS entailed a radical departure from the norms and ethics of service work. Many counsellors viewed the technology as averse to client-centred counselling and claimed that no single “optimal” treatment sequence could be determined for service users because any number of interventions could have beneficial results. Counsellors also emphasized the impossibility of modelling their service delivery decisions, as they were based on information that cannot be processed electronically. As one counsellor asserted, decision-making “depends on who the person in front of you is. What’s their attitude like?” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 24). Other counsellor responses recorded were: “I deal with people, not statistics.” “This will depersonalize the counselling process.” “It’s very cold and mechanistic.” “This is based on the past experience of clients, but no two clients are alike.” “I don’t trust statistics. You can make them say whatever you want.” (14)

Counsellors also expressed fears of the potential for de-skilling of their jobs. They were concerned that their training might enable them to navigate the software, but it would provide them with very little understanding of “where the numbers and predictions come from” (OECD 1998b, 73). In the context of departmental downsizing, which amounted to a 20 per cent reduction in staff, counsellors also suspected that the technology could facilitate their redundancy. Indeed, some HRDC executives looked to the technology as a kind of expert system that could facilitate departmental downsizing, even if those directly involved in its development did not foresee replacing counsellors as possible or even desirable (Colpitts 2002, 285). Nevertheless the developers of SOMS were attuned to its implications for the work of staff. According to one report, the technology’s implementation required careful manoeuvring around different groupings of staff. One particularly problematic group was dubbed “the Philosophically Opposed” who “pose the greatest challenge in the continued development of the system and in its eventual implementation … Keenly aware of the trends within HRDC … [t]hey are least likely to believe that the predictive elements of the Client Monitoring System will be used ‘as just another tool’… They have

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the potential to emerge as leaders and influence others, particularly the uncommitted segment” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 26). Another sizable group was named “Threatened Pessimists”: “They are the most cynical group and are invariably closed-minded to the potential of the Client Monitoring System. Their salient characteristic is a tendency to search for reasons why the Client Monitoring System is flawed and unworkable. They fear that the Client Monitoring System will ‘dehumanize’ their work and allow management to gain control over them. They are hostile towards ‘Ottawa’ … Adequate training is key to making them feel more secure and breaking down their resistance” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 26). These two groups were contrasted with “Open Minded Optimists”: “Supervisors, counselors and others in ‘professional’ positions [who] appear to be the most job secure group and among the best educated … they see the introduction of Client Monitoring System type technology as ‘inevitable’ and consistent with the direction HRDC is taking … During training they should be allowed to consolidate their position as leaders within the CEC [Canada Employment Centre], as they will be in the best position to help others use the Client Monitoring System once training is completed” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 26). Almost two-thirds of pilot participants were categorized as either philosophically opposed, threatened pessimists, or uncommitted (HRDC 1995c). A Management Steering Committee was struck shortly after the pilot testing to consolidate senior management support for the technology. Another implementation strategy included “opening lines of communication” between national headquarters (NHQ) and local offices (HRDC 1995c). The focus group report concludes, “Training must succeed in making participants feel comfortable with the system and trust it” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 27). What is important to note here is the extent to which implementation of the technology was perceived to require administrators’ defensive manoeuvring around counsellor resistance. This exemplifies authorities’ labour intensive work to hold governmental arrangements together in the face of risks posed by internal resistance and contestation. Modelling Difficulties The case of SOMS illustrates how difficulties inherent in attempts to govern unemployment as an individual problem are cast as technical problems to be solved by those possessing the requisite knowledge – in

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this case econometric expertise. Under such expertise, activation services come to rest on whether or not the right equations are specified, whether they incorporate the right variables, or whether the administrative data sets used in the calculations are sufficiently coherent, among many other technical considerations. Under these conditions it is not difficult to see how the quest for greater certainty via statistics can radically multiply uncertainty. To reduce this tendency, statistical modelling systems are seen to require that modellers remain vigilant. According to one study on the profiling of the unemployed, “Far from being a once-off operation, [profiling] requires continuous assessment and updating to ensure accuracy levels are maintained and improved” (O’Connell et al. 2009, 15). Assembling profiling systems is therefore ongoing, uncertain, and labour-intensive work. The development of SOMS in Canada was characterized by modelling difficulties. While “judged theoretically sound by leading econometricians” (Colpitts 2002, 292), the statistical models proved unwieldy in practice. Over the course of many rounds of modelling revisions, staff and private sector and academic consultants struggled to develop the equations that would lead to “accurate” predictions for individuals. A problem that developers confronted at one modelling stage was that over 90 per cent of the recommendations generated by the technology centred on one employment service treatment out of the many on offer. Models could also produce contradictory predictions; a recommended course of treatment could predict increased employability in one measure and decreased employability in another (Applied Research Consultants n.d., 11). Developers acknowledged that such contradictory results would be exceedingly difficult for front-line staff to interpret. The experience of Canada in this regard was consistent with the conclusions of the OECD’s cross-national report on worker profiling that statistical modelling systems remained beset by inaccuracies (OECD 1998b). Problems of inaccurate or missing data compounded modelling difficulties. Despite extensive data scrubbing of the SOMS database, inconsistencies in the data proved impossible to eliminate. This problem came to a head during another round of testing of the technology in employment offices in Nova Scotia in 1997. In one pilot site, counsellors noted faulty data on the marital status of clients generated by the program, as well as other client data they knew to be inaccurate or outdated. Inaccurate data further undermined the perceived validity of all the program’s predictions (Applied Research Consultants 1997, 27).

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SOMS’s predictive models suffered not only from stale or faulty data, but a more fundamental limitation: the variables in its models were limited to the administrative data that were available. As an official involved in the development of SOMS acknowledged, “The problem [of inaccurate predictions] may result from the presence of unknown or unmeasurable attributes of clients, i.e. unexplained heterogeneity. In effect, people differ with respect to certain behaviours in ways that we cannot comprehend or model using available data” (Colpitts 2002, 293). The problem posed by the data limitations was not specific to Canada’s experiment in statistical targeting. It was seen as a serious challenge to the viability of worker profiling everywhere. In recognition of such deficiencies with profiling systems, the OECD’s cross-national report on worker profiling recommended that “more should be done, to refine statistical profiling models … expanding the set of possible explanatory variables. Among this expanded set should be some attempt to capture so-called ‘unobservables’ such as motivation” (OECD 1998b, 26). Other rapidly unfolding developments in labour market policy cast doubt on the implementation of SOMS. Beginning in May 1996, the federal government began to negotiate the transfer of its EI-related labour market programs to the provinces, and interest in the technology among provinces was uneven. The need for profiling technology was also called into question, given the department’s increased contracting out of employment services. Like other jurisdictions, Canada was influenced by the call of the OECD Jobs Study to contract out employment service delivery. HRDC implemented a Service Delivery Network under which the department’s 450 Canada Employment Centres were replaced with 100 “parent” offices. These offices were to develop arrangements with community-based and some private-sector service providers for employment services including counselling (Bakvis 1997). Contract bidding, monitoring, and renewal enabled another way to exact efficiencies from agencies that did not require the involvement of government officials in day-to-day service delivery or heavy investment in front-line technologies such as SOMS. Under this arrangement, the performance of offices could be managed through a chain of managerial incentives and penalties that ran from the federal government, to agency management, to front-line staff, and ultimately to the unemployed service user.11

11 For a discussion of the cascading chain of disciplinary relations involved in the contemporary governance of employment service delivery, see Schram et al. (2010).

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A department memo circulated in July 1997 noted, “In today’s environment of LMAs [labour market agreements] and third-party contracting, it is unclear whether this [the predictive] component is relevant to HRCC [Human Resource Canada Centre] decision-making” (Bertrand 1997). Paradoxes of Targeted Governance While problems of staff resistance, modelling difficulties, and growing recourse to alternative service delivery called the viability of SOMS into question, a fourth problem in the matter of privacy and use of personal data eventually proved to be insurmountable and directly related to its permanent abandonment. The SOMS experiment became increasingly characterized by what Valverde and Mopas (2004) describe as the paradox of targeted governance. As they argue, the imperative of targeted governance stems from a neoliberal critique of the implausibility and expense of universal provision. Yet targeting is animated by its own utopianism – a belief that the acquisition of more and better data will enable more efficiently targeted and predictive governance. Under systems of targeted governance, they suggest, the neoliberal imperative of limited government gives way to the vast ambitions of predictive and targeted risk management requiring an endless amassing of information (see also Henman 2005; Amoore and Piotukh 2016). The extensive data-mining and data-linking work of HRDC officials brought them into conflict with historically entrenched liberal rationalities of limited government expressed in limits on government use of personal information. Concerns over the illiberal aspects of the technology were evident at the outset. Focus group testing of the Client Monitoring System prototype revealed discomfort among front-line staff over the extensive personal data used in the CMS database. Staff perceptions of the technology as akin to “Big Brother” were common across all focus group sessions (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 10). The report suggests the ways in which moderators handled these concerns: “In the course of the discussions on the issue of personal privacy, participants generally recognized that the political and economic climate in the country was strongly supportive of government efforts to reduce abuse of social programs; something to which they could easily relate given their direct contact with program recipients. Framed in this broader societal context, participants appeared much more willing to accept what they considered to be a real reduction in the personal privacy of Canadians” (19).

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Focus group testing further revealed that the name “Client Monitoring System” was sending out the wrong message. Participants indicated “use of the word ‘monitoring’ was too ‘heavy,’ ‘harsh’ and ‘authoritarian’” (EKOS Research Associates 1995, 19). This is the reason why the more palatable name of “Service Outcome Measurement System” was subsequently adopted. During the second round of pilot testing, staff in one office also raised concerns about how the department could guarantee the security of the data if they were in the hands of third-party agencies (HRDC 1997a, 28). SOMS developers sought to mediate the privacy concerns. They proposed that once implemented in HRCCs, access to the data contained in SOMS would be granted strictly on a “need-to-know” basis (HRDC 1995d). A password-protected screen was also proposed to limit access of non-HRDC staff to the program in service delivery settings shared by both HRDC and provincial agencies, or other service providers. Such measures reflected the initial approach to the privacy issue by HRDC officials (as a problem to be managed, not one that posed a major impediment to implementing the technology). It was the position of the department’s privacy specialist that SOMS was technically not contravening any privacy legislation. This interpretation rested on administrators’ view of SOMS as a “research/evaluation” instrument rather than an administrative technology that would be used to make decisions about service users. Administrators believed it was authorized by provisions in the Privacy Act and in information sharing agreements with provincial social assistance agencies, allowing personal information to be used in research and evaluation. In a letter to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), an HRDC senior privacy officer stated, “Please also keep in mind that SOMS will be used for evaluation purposes and will be used as one of the many tools at the disposal of our employees in order to assist the client. It does not provide an ‘administrative decision’ in its true sense” (Seeger 1997, 3). The logic of HRDC administrators was that, since front-line staff would retain the capacity to choose not to follow the technology’s recommendations, it did not amount to the prohibited use of administrative data to make decisions about people outright. SOMS was one of several data-matching projects initiated by HRDC officials in an effort to realize new efficiencies by converting administrative data into “applied knowledge.” Such data-mining opened up conflict between HRDC and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. In 1995, while the SOMS prototype was under development,

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the department undertook a separate pilot project to mobilize administrative data in new ways to crack down on UI fraud. The project involved matching files on UI claimants with the data on people reentering Canada by plane, which were recorded on Revenue Canada travel declaration cards. HRDC would receive the logs from Revenue Canada and run them against its own UI files, using a special computer program. Administrators believed that this data matching would allow them to identify those who had left the country while on benefit and had therefore failed to meet the entitlement requirement that claimants be “available for work” daily. HRDC received conditional approval from the privacy commissioner to initiate the pilot. It analysed 18,000 travel declaration forms logged by Revenue Canada. Matches were found, representing 1.5 per cent of the sample (Delisle 1998). HRDC then developed the pilot into an actual program. The department paid Revenue Canada approximately $1 million per year to supply it with logs containing data from the customs cards. HRDC also made the data-matching program retroactive, collecting travel declaration forms from 1992 onward. Those individuals for whom a match was discovered, including those who travelled in previous years and who were no longer even on an active claim, were contacted by their local Canada Employment Centre and pressed for an explanation. As the chief compliance officer for the UI program stated to the media, “If an individual hadn’t reported they were out of the country we send them a letter: ‘would you kindly explain this discrepancy?’” (Stewart cited in Ottawa Citizen 1996). Among those called to account for their whereabouts were women on maternity benefits. They were expected to produce evidence that they left the country accompanied by their children in order to avoid repayment penalties (Delisle 1998). Those who could not satisfactorily explain were issued a penalty, including a potential repayment order. Having never authorized full-scale implementation of the Revenue Canada–HRDC UI data-matching scheme, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner raised objections immediately with both departmental ministers and was not satisfied with their response. In his 1996–7 annual report, the privacy commissioner stated, “No more crucial issue has arisen in my six years in this Office” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 1997). The commissioner further stated, “Governments now have the means for tracking virtually all their residents’ contacts with the state, assembling comprehensive data bases from that data and sharing it widely. And with the means come the pressures – downsize,

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rationalize and deliver service more efficiently. Some of this information collection is a legitimate activity of a government program – a ‘consistent use’ of the data. Some, we find disturbing.” Discussions between the privacy commissioner and HRDC as well as Revenue Canada failed to alleviate the privacy commissioner’s concerns. In the meantime, the Privacy Commissioner’s Office had received a large number of complaints from individuals contacted by their local Canada Employment Centres. By 1998, 305 individuals filed complaints with the OPC over the data-matching program (Delisle 1998). The commissioner decided to initiate legal clarification from the Federal Court on the validity of the data-matching program in July 1997. At issue was whether the disclosure of information was authorized in law and if the minister of national revenue was authorized to approve this disclosure, given restrictions in the Privacy Act on use of data for purposes other than that for which it was collected from individuals. The commissioner also had a more fundamental objection. His position was that the data-matching exercise not only violated privacy legislation, but that it was unconstitutional: “Searching every returning traveller on suspicion of defrauding Employment Insurance offends the ‘reasonable search and seizure’ provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 1997). This question was considered by the Federal Court of Appeal, which sided with HRDC by ruling that “there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for Canadians in information contained in travel declaration forms such as to engage section 8 of the Charter (right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure)” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2001). The privacy commissioner then appealed the decision of the Federal Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court, which in 2001 affirmed the previous decision. During the period of legal proceedings over the Revenue Canada– HRDC data-matching program, tensions between HRDC and the privacy commissioner were emerging around a different HRDC initiative. In 1998, perhaps provoked by the data-matching program, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner conducted an informal review of HRDC’s personal information–handling practices. This review revealed to the Privacy Commissioner’s Office the full extent of HRDC’s data-mining and data-linking and, more specifically, the department’s Longitudinal Labour Force File (LLFF) (a file linking up to 2,000 pieces of information, much longitudinal, on thirty-three million Canadians, living or deceased). The commissioner once again expressed his misgivings to

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HRDC senior management. In correspondence with HRDC officials, he indicated that the database contained twenty-three times more information than the database containing all information collected by Statistics Canada in the 1996 census, excluding identifiers (Phillips 1998a, 1). The commissioner noted, “Such an unlimited universal collection with its immense concentration of personal data is highly privacy invasive and provides the basis for producing the kind of detailed, composite data portrait so feared by privacy advocates (the single, master data file)” (Phillips 1998b, 4). He questioned the logic HRDC officials invoked to present their activities as “evaluation” and specifically cited the development of the Service Outcome Measurement System as evidence that “the temptation to use research data for administrative purposes is almost overwhelming” (4). HRDC officials were not particularly moved by these concerns. The department struck a review committee on the matter, which concluded that it was not in violation of the Privacy Act, given its provisions allowing for the collection of data for research and evaluation. In correspondence with the privacy commissioner over the LLFF, department officials invoked the necessity of data mining in pursuit of efficiently targeted governance. HRDC officials stressed the need to gather a vast amount of information to assess the results of service interventions and to determine what works best for specific populations and individuals. “Labour market and social policy analysis,” they argued, “must take account of a daunting array of factors” (HRDC cited in Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2000). The privacy commissioner then commented extensively on HRDC’s data-collection practices in his annual report for 1999–2000. He asserted that HRDC’s data-centralizing practices had resulted in a “comprehensive, permanent and, to all intents, invisible citizen profile” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2000). His report singled out the development of the Service Outcomes Measurement System as an example of the way in which this citizen profile may be put to governmental use: “Compiling such comprehensive longitudinal records by record linkage or matching is a hazard to informational privacy because of the temptation for government to use the information for data mining and individual profiling. A so-called ‘research database’ may soon lend itself to other purposes, raising fears that data could be used to make decisions or predictions about individuals, or could be retrieved in unforeseen ways – by disabilities or ethnic origin, for example – to the detriment of individual rights. This fear is not unfounded; about

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two years ago HRDC launched a pilot project – the Service Outcome Measurement System – to use research data for program administration” (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 2000). Reaction to the Longitudinal Labour Force File data-matching program was far more pronounced than public reaction to the UI data-mining program. Critical media reporting on what became known as HRDC’s “Big Brother Database” was extensive and was most pronounced in the western provinces and Quebec. Debate in the House of Commons played out as well. HRDC was already caught up in what was deemed the “billion dollar boondoggle” by opposition parties and media following an internal audit that revealed some record-keeping deficiencies. In this context, the HRDC minister was unable to counter the active framing of HRDC’s data-mining practices, particularly by members of the Reform Party, as a threat to individual privacy and, indeed, to national security. HRDC officials had no choice but to publicly realign themselves with liberal rationalities of limited government through a series of highly publicized privacy measures. In May 2000 the minister responsible for HRDC announced the dismantling of the Longitudinal Labour Force File databank, along with protocols for maintaining privacy in policy research. In addition, the department offered to send to individual citizens all the data that had been collected on them. Sixty-nine thousand citizens took up this offer, overwhelming the administrative capacities of the department in the process (Lawton 2000). With these developments, it was no longer possible to amass the administrative data required to run the Service Outcome Measurement System, and the technology was permanently abandoned. Conclusion Critical studies of statistical profiling of the unemployed in other jurisdictions claim that these technologies embed neoliberal governmentality in employment service delivery (Caswell, Marston, and Larsen 2010, 384; see also McDonald, Marston, and Buckley 2003; Henman 2004). These studies emphasize how statistical profiling individualizes unemployment by casting it as an individual risk that can be predicted and managed. The case of SOMS developed in this chapter pursued a different set of insights. I approached the assembly of SOMS as a particularly dramatic episode in officials’ search for coherent and durable – even scientific – ways of governing unemployment as a problem of individual employability. The case of SOMS yields insights into the difficulties and confusions officials have faced in attempting to make activation

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work, and the strange technical and administrative resourcefulness with which officials in Canada have sought their circumvention. It also exemplifies radical ruptures in the strategies and techniques used for knowing and governing employability. A more general implication of the preceding chapter warrants mention. A central feature of the attempt to implement SOMS was officials’ perceptions of the need for defensive and anticipatory manoeuvring around those who challenged its implementation. Those involved in the development of SOMS attempted to manage and deflect deepening criticism over the patently illiberal nature of the technology. The case of SOMS exemplifies the imminence of contestation to governmentality, and the richer, more complex, and less predictable account that emerges by tracing its internally contested nature.

Chapter Six

Towards a Culture of Results, 1996–2000

Introduction This book develops two central insights into activation policy in Canada. First, the book reveals the depth of difficulty confronting administrators trying to implement activation. As we have seen, the efforts of administrators to govern unemployment as a problem of individual activation and individual employability have often met with little success. Second, the book shows how officials have sought to manage failures of activation. The previous chapters demonstrate how officials have managed the limits of activation as if they were problems amenable to administrative or technical resolution. Whereas in the mid-1970s and early 1980s efforts to buttress activation entailed augmenting the welfare-professionalism of front-line staff, from the late 1980s onward bids for renewal have assumed a managerial form. This chapter examines administrators’ recourse to yet another managerial technique that promised to bring efficiency and effectiveness to service delivery – a performance measurement system known as the Results-Based Accountability Framework (RBAF). The first key argument of the chapter is that, much like the ill-fated experimentation with statistical profiling technology, the RBAF was premised on administrators’ persistent problematization of service delivery as the source of activation’s failure. From the perspective of many administrators, the disappointing job placement track record of the employment service stemmed from deficiencies in the performance and accountability of front-line staff and not from fundamental inadequacies of the activation paradigm’s individualized, neoliberal logic. On the basis of this problematization, the solution to service

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ineffectiveness lay in exacting greater accountability and performance from front-line staff. Devised to complement landmark labour market policy changes occasioned by the passage of the Employment Insurance (EI) Act (1996), the RBAF altered the terms by which public and third party agencies delivering employment services to the public were measured. In place of measures of administrative process, such as the number of clients served, the RBAF imposed two primary “results-oriented” performance indicators: the number of individuals returned to work and the savings in unpaid EI benefits generated as a result of rapid client reemployment. In imposing these new terms of measurement through the RBAF, administrators sought to harness the disciplinary capacity of performance measurement amply documented in governmentality scholarship to achieve rapid re-employment of the unemployed. Yet the following account diverges from the overly coherent portrait of performance measurement as a disciplinary technology found in much literature on neoliberal governmentality. The second key argument of the chapter is that the efforts of administrators to impose calculability encountered a series of dilemmas. These include the mundane but significant difficulties of technical coordination, which led many to doubt the RBAF’s validity from the outset; forms of contestation by organizational actors and external observers invested in different terms of measurement; and finally, growing recognition that the meaning of the performance data was inherently ambiguous, given the difficulties in deciphering the causal factors underlying performance data. Rather than furnishing a bottom-line measure of organizational results, the performance measurement regime gave rise to new ambiguities around the effects and very measurability of service delivery. The chapter thus contributes to recent scholarship that captures the contradictions and forms of contestation that inhere within calculative practices associated with neoliberalism (Higgins and Larner 2010; Howard 2016). Performance Measurement and Employment Service Delivery As Brodkin (2012) notes, few managerial techniques have been as widely replicated as performance measurement. It is a governmental technique that entails the establishment of organizational objectives and quantifiable indicators that can serve as a proxy for these objectives. Performance measurement entails benchmarking to establish and communicate expectations of organizational performance and to compare such

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performance with other organizations or with previous achievements (Larner and Le Heron 2004). Performance measurement also involves the development and implementation of automated methods to compile and distribute performance data. Finally, it entails methods to deliver sanctions or rewards, depending on organizational performance. These include shame and blame associated with public reports, or systems of performance pay for workers and management. In addition, when coupled with alternative service delivery, the effect of performance measurement often bears directly on the allocation of contracts and often organizational survival. Performance measurement has long been central to efforts to fashion legible and governable spaces. The pursuit of organizational transparency via performance measurement has antecedents in the efficiency movement of the Progressive Era, prominent in the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere. During this time, the principles of scientific management, popularized by Fredrick Taylor and others in the nascent professions of management consultancy and industrial engineering, transformed the world of manufacturing. Taylor’s inquiries into the labour of factory workers, including his signature time-motion studies, were central to managers’ efforts to gain control over production processes in the name of efficiency. Yet the imperative of efficiency was by no means limited to industry. Taylor’s analysis of government efficiency, published posthumously, emphasized the need to bring the tenets of scientific management to public administration – specifically to conduct work-time analyses in order to set efficiency standards by which to gauge the productivity of civil servants (Schachter 2007). Practices complementary to Taylor’s vision of public sector scientific management were already making inroads at the municipal level in the United States. By 1920 Municipal Research Bureaus in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere were placing performance measurement at the centre of municipal administrative modernization and were experimenting with ways to assess government operations and integrate performance data in budgeting and planning (Williams 2004; Nguyen 2007). Antecedents of contemporary practices of performance measurement are also found in the Management by Objectives (MBO) movement in management theory. MBO is “a process whereby the superior and subordinate managers of an organization jointly identify its common goals, define each individual’s major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him, and use these measures as guides for operating

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the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members” (Odiorne 1965, 55–6). The central aspect of MBO is the assessment of an organizational unit’s performance through quantitative performance indicators alongside greater managerial autonomy. The philosophy of MBO informed experiments in rationalist public administration in the United States and Canada in the 1960s, known as Planning, Programming, and Budgeting (PPB). Stemming from work in the area of “systematic decision making” undertaken by analysts in the Rand Corporation in the fifties, PPB sought to transform budgeting by tying decisions on resource allocation to government objectives rather than the elaboration of standard expenditure categories such as staff salaries or departmental overhead, which were seen as unfocused on results. PPB entailed a complex analytical process involving the articulation of organizational objectives and goals, cost-benefit analysis of prospective means to meet specified objectives, and assessment of departmental performance in achieving results using performance information (Balls 1970, 294). It was among a range of modern managerial practices including management by objectives, systems analysis, and operational performance measurement, introduced between 1965 and 1975, that sought to bring rigorous quantitative visibility to all government functions “in search of the public sector approximation of private enterprise’s ‘bottom line’ and for the operational control and clarified political choices consequent thereon” (French 1984, 33).12 The ascendance of New Public Management as the dominant paradigm of public administration, implemented to a greater or lesser extent in all advanced industrialized countries (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000), has furnished the practice of performance measurement with a new and highly durable conceptual rationale.

12 In the United States, PPB was first used in the U.S. Department of Defense, and, under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was implemented across the federal bureaucracy. In Canada, elements of PPB were recommended in the report of the Royal Commission on Government Organization (Glassco Commission) (1962) and were implemented in federal departments beginning in 1965. In both countries, however, PPB proved short-lived. It was extraordinarily difficult to implement and administer. PPB created unrealistic demands for evaluative capacity, and its rationalist dimensions were uneasily reconciled with more expedient political considerations that determine the allocation of resources by the governments of the day. It remained largely rhetorical, given what Balls (1970, 292) describes as a “gentleman’s agreement” among administrators that its key terms and concepts “need never be defined.”

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Governmentality scholars emphasize the links between performance measurement and neoliberal governance (Rose and Miller 1992; Miller 1994). From the perspective of governmentality studies, performance measurement appears as a key technique of neoliberal governance that enables the activities of widely dispersed actors to be “made inscribable and comparable in numerical form, in figures that can be transported to centres of calculation, aggregated, related, plotted over time, represented in league tables, judged against national averages, and utilized for future decisions about the allocation of contracts and budgets” (Rose 1999, 153; Larner and Le Heron 2004). It can induce selfmonitoring in scrutinized individuals and organizations. Those under performance measurement may internalize its norms and values and conduct themselves accordingly (Miller 1994; Lambert and Pezet 2012). Performance measurement delineates what activities constitute performance, while excluding others from the organizational record (Shore and Wright 1999). Performance measurement has become central to the administration of employment services. From the early 1990s onward, the OECD stressed results measurement as a necessary component of activation reforms (OECD 1994), and it became a major site of policy transfer and expertise in the area. Reports produced by the OECD suggested that traditional bureaucratic administration that emphasized management through regulations such as legislation, directives, and other guidelines was not adequate to the localized and individualized project of activation. It called for a new management culture in which “outcomes are tracked, program impacts estimated and less effective programs are replaced with more effective ones” (OECD 2005, 214). The results-based measures used in most jurisdictions relate to the number and speed of job seekers re-employed and the exit of individuals from benefits as a result of service interventions. Performance measures may also be established for specific populations such as the long-term unemployed, youth, or older workers. Many jurisdictions use performance measurement along with performance pay, competitive tendering, customer satisfaction surveys, or the engineering of quasi-markets of employment service providers. When combined with competitive tendering of service delivery, performance measurement shifts risk to the service delivery level. The aim is to generate accountability for results generated by new forms of performance measurement, which will prompt providers to search for increasingly effective and efficient strategies for ensuring the rapid reemployment of individuals (Considine 2001; Brodkin 2005;

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Borghi and van Berkel 2007; Bredgaard and Larsen 2008; van Berkel 2010; Schram et al. 2010). Performance results are often publicized or enforced with performance pay systems distributed at the individual or agency level. A growing number of OECD countries have tied performance measurement to competitive tendering where there is a distinction between the purchaser (government) and provider (agency). In these contexts, performance measurement can bear directly on the renewal of contracts. Reflecting the disciplinary capacity of performance measurement that governmentality scholarship highlights, policymakers often set performance benchmarks continually higher to induce service providers to increase job placements. It is in this sense that contemporary welfare provision entails “double activation” entailing “the interplay of paternalist systems for disciplining clients (e.g. sanctions) and neoliberal systems for disciplining service providers (e.g. performance management)” (Soss et al. 2011a, i205; see also Newman 2007; and Considine et al. 2015). Indeed, those jurisdictions that have most vigorously pursued active labour market policy at the level of formal policy have also been the jurisdictions that have implemented performance measurement in service delivery most intensively (Nunn, Bickerstaffe, and Mitchell 2009; van Berkel 2010; Brodkin 2011; Soss et al. 2011a; Rudman et al. 2017). The Results-Based Accountability Framework The Canadian government’s implementation of performance measurement in employment services reflected government-wide shifts in the administration of federal bureaucracies (Ilcan 2009).13 The importance of performance measurement was a central message of the Treasury Board, which assumed new powers under the Liberal government as a catalyst of managerial reform (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 1997). The Treasury Board restructured the departmental parliamentary reporting

13 In 1994 the government introduced a program evaluation exercise known as the Program Review, which made the efficiency of government operations a key consideration. As part of the Program Review, senior departmental managers were charged with examining the operation and performance of their departments and developing funding cut proposals in order to meet federal deficit-reduction targets (Kroeger 1996).

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process on performance management. By 1996, thirty-two departments had begun publicizing key medium and long-term “results commitments.” In 1997 the Treasury Board implemented biannual reporting. Departments were required to submit an annual spring Report on Plans and Priorities that specified key departmental objectives, and to submit a Departmental Performance Report in the fall, which reported on the results achieved (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2000). The Treasury Board president’s 1996 Annual Report proclaimed, “We must equip ourselves with better systems for evaluating the actions of government so that we can genuinely answer for our actions, first and foremost to our fellow citizens who are both clients and taxpayers. This is the only way our government can evaluate and debate the merits of the decisions we make every day on the public’s behalf” (Massé cited in Nakamura 1997, 2). The federal employment service increasingly stood out among federal operations as an evaluative challenge. The difficulty of isolating the direct impact of an employment service such as employment counselling or training fuelled concerns among policymakers and administrators that employment services may be absorbing resources without beneficial impacts. The measures of organizational activity for employment services were input or process measures such as the money spent on services or the number of clients served. They provided no indication of results or outcomes. In a period of intensifying managerialism, the inability of administrators to assert that employment services were achieving value for money was increasingly problematic (HRDC administrator 2010). Attempts to derive knowledge of service outcomes remained sporadic; a few individual employment offices conducted their own surveys of clients with money left over at the end of the fiscal year (HRDC 1994e, 38). Criticism over the lack of results-based assessment was repeatedly levelled at employment service officials from the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (1983, 1988, 1997; see also McElligott 2001). The OAG claimed that employment service officials measured their administrative processes rather than results, and that existing methods of measurement, such as client satisfaction surveys, did little to demonstrate accountability (1988). The accountability of service providers was all the more pressing, given HRDC’s Service Delivery Network (SDN). Introduced as a way to achieve the steep savings targets imposed on the department, the SDN replaced HRDC’s 450 Canada Employment Centres with 100 hub

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Human Resources Canada Centres managed by executive-level designated managers. Under the SDN, bureaucratic regulations governing service delivery were to be relaxed in order to facilitate localized decision-making. The exact make-up of each locality’s employment service offerings was to be determined by managers of parent HRCCs as they developed their office’s business plan in consultation with local community representatives. Consistent with the administrative prescriptions for employment service provision contained in the OECD’s Jobs Study (1994), namely decentralization and the elimination of the “public monopoly,” the SDN involved alternative service delivery. HRCCs were to develop arrangements with community-based and private sector service providers to deliver employment assistance. This new decentralized arrangement hinged on the development of the capacity of staff throughout HRDC to continually monitor the performance and accountability of service providers, and this task fell to many who were employment counsellors prior to devolution to third parties. In 1996 administrators at HRDC national headquarters set out to institute a new performance measurement regime that would provide unambiguous data on Employment Benefits and Support Measures (EBSMs) outlined in the new EI legislation, including skills development (training), targeted wage subsidies, self-employment assistance, as well as more short-term employment assistance (less expensive interventions including counselling, résumé preparation, job search clubs, etc.). Discussions between national headquarters administrators on the specific performance measures that would be adopted were framed by the priorities of the day (HRDC administrator 2010). Given the emphasis on rapid reemployment and EI “dependency” articulated in the federal government’s Social Security Review Paper, administrators adopted two primary results measures: the number of clients employed or self-employed as a result of a service intervention, and the amount of savings in unpaid EI benefits resulting from client re-employment. Following the determination of the primary indicators, HRDC management directed staff in the Evaluation and Data Development Branch of HRDC to develop primary indicator benchmarks to assess the performance of HRCCs (Wong and Wesa 1999, 4).14 Service targets were tabulated nationally and provincially and were distributed to regions

14 Evaluation staff did so by drawing on administrative data on UI claimants who accessed employment services in 1994 and 1995. Evaluators developed a client

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in 1996, as the basis of their operational targets. In turn, regional headquarters tended to allot performance targets to HRCCs based on the proportion of resources they used: an office that absorbed 10 per cent of the regional budget would be allotted a target of 10 per cent of the region’s primary indicator targets (HRDC 1998, 43). There was limited involvement of local offices in this initial target setting exercise. However, in subsequent fiscal years, and in negotiation with senior administrators, individual HRCCs began to participate in target setting (HRDC 1996b, J1). According to a promotional document released by HRDC titled The Results-Based Accountability Framework, Human Resource Centres of Canada will operate in an environment that is characterized by: decentralized service delivery, relaxed bureaucratic controls, and increased flexibility for managing resources and programs to optimize service to the public. Armed with the latest in information technology, HRCC managers will be freed to focus on the client and to determine how best to meet client needs efficiently and effectively. Results will be the principal measure of success in this environment, rather than the means of achieving them. However, increased local level authority and flexibility need to be balanced by a clear set of management accountabilities. Managers require a clear vision of what they will be held accountable for, and what results are expected of them, and how these results will be measured and used. (HRDC 1996c, 2)

return-to-work benchmark by determining the number of service users on benefits who, in 1994 and 1995, stopped drawing benefits before the end of their entitlement. They then derived unpaid benefit benchmarks by calculating for each UI claimant who participated in an employment service intervention the difference between the benefits received and maximum entitlement (weekly benefit rate multiplied by the number of weeks left on claim) and aggregating these figures provincially and nationally (Wong and Wesa 1999, 6). Evaluation officials provided their benchmarks to staff in the Human Resources Investment Branch (HRIB) who, in turn, proceeded to develop their own targets. HRIB officials augmented the benchmarks provided by Evaluation Branch staff to include those among the 1994/5 employment service recipients who had received an employment intervention and returned to work after their entitlement period, as determined by data from the Canadian Jobs Strategy Survey, a calculation not made by the Evaluation Branch. Also, given that under the 1996 EI Act, “reach-back” clients (those not currently claiming a benefit but who did so in the three years prior to seeking employment assistance) were eligible for employment benefits, HRIB also included an estimation of the number of these clients who would be returned to work by employment offices.

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A computerized performance-tracking system went online in July 1996 along with the new system of Employment Benefits and Support Measures. The process of tracking results was initiated with the entry of client information in the case management program, the National Employment Services System (or other case management software for third party service providers), at the outset of a client’s employability intervention. For active EI claimants who received services and returned to work before the end of their benefit entitlement, the system automatically recorded the found-work count and the benefits savings, and credited both to the office where services were provided.15 An employment service user who attained employment after benefit exhaustion would count only for the found-work measure, as would non-EI claimant service users who found work. These individuals were to be captured through an automatically scheduled follow-up telephone survey conducted twelve weeks following completion of their return-to-work action plan. If they had found a job, a count was credited to the office.16 The results from service interventions were compiled by national headquarters and posted monthly on a departmental website. Managers were encouraged to use the data to monitor their office’s performance in employment and savings results. While individual HRCC resourcing decisions were not affected by performance measures (despite statements coming out of the Treasury Board that emphasized the need to link resources with results), they were taken into consideration in management compensation. The intended effect of performance measurement was to introduce a cultural change throughout the organization – to communicate the message that staff would be held responsible for their performance in achieving targets rather than their ability to follow

15 An active benefit claimant was automatically considered employed if he or she stopped drawing benefits before the end of entitlement or drew 25 per cent or less of maximum entitlement for twelve consecutive weeks (or less if there were fewer than twelve weeks of benefit payment remaining of the entitlement). 16 HRDC also devised a method to determine the employment and savings counts resulting from their self-service offerings such as the electronic job bank. HRDC’s evaluation branch would conduct surveys of self-service clients to ask if they believed self-service offerings assisted in their job search, and, on the basis of these survey data, generate estimates of employment and savings counts for such services (HRDC 1996b, J4). However, plans to calculate self-service results were eventually abandoned.

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administrative procedures (HRDC administrator 2010; Good 2003, 41). While not officially sanctioned, the potential for individual-level performance assessment was embedded in the technology as results by individual counsellors were available. Departmental records indicate a shift towards short-term services, suggesting that the RBAF immediately began to reshape the conduct of staff in ways predicted by governmentality literature. One measure was the growing proportion of short-term interventions such as employment counselling and job clubs when compared to more expensive long-term interventions such as actual job training. The first Employment Insurance Monitoring and Assessment Report released after the EI Act and the RBAF were implemented indicated a striking shift in service provision. Total expenditures on active measures in the first twelve months following the reform decreased by 30 per cent compared to the year leading up to reform. Yet 32 per cent more people received employment services in the year following the implementation of EBSMs than in the year leading up to the reform. The 1997 EI Monitoring and Assessment Report concluded that this dramatic change resulted from a shift to short-term services (Canada Employment Insurance Commission 1997). In the year following the new EI Act and the performance measurement system, the average cost per participant dropped 47 per cent, from $7,300 to $3,900 (Canada Employment Insurance Commission cited in McBride 2006, 271). This pattern of short-term interventions continued in the years following the implementation of EBSMs.17 The 2000 EI Monitoring and Assessment Report noted that the performance measure of unpaid benefits “may be linked to the relative decline in the use of long-term interventions. Short-term interventions have a greater impact on unpaid benefits since clients require income support for a shorter period of time than is the case with long-term interventions” (Canada Employment Insurance Commission 2000, 27). The 1998 formative evaluation of EBSMs similarly concluded that short-term results had dominated the provision of employment services (HRDC 1998, 73).

17 The number of short-term services increased nationally 54 per cent between fiscal years 1995–6 and 1998–9 (CEIC 1999, 34). Expenditures on short-term interventions in 1998–9 tripled from the amount spent on them in 1995–6 (36). There was a further 20 per cent decrease in long-term interventions between 1998/9 and 1999/2000 (Canada Employment Insurance Commission 2000, 27).

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In sum, the federal government implemented a regime of performance measurement in its employment service delivery system as an important element of activating reforms to labour market policy. Administrators and policymakers subscribed to the panoptic promise of performance measurement to open up new ways to coordinate activity at a distance by imposing calculability and self-monitoring (Ball and Wilson 2000, 542). Developments in Canada were thus consistent with the rise of double activation observed in other countries such as the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Newman 2007; Considine et al. 2015). Such developments further corroborate comparative research indicating how performance measurement in employment service delivery fosters convergence around a short-term, low-cost, rapid re-employment service model (Brodkin 2011). Yet as the following sections demonstrate, this bid to impose calculability quickly became embroiled in unintended consequences that receive short shrift within governmentality narratives of discipline and surveillance. The RBAF was quickly entangled in dilemmas of technical coordination, forms of political contestation, and the indeterminacies of quantification. In documenting these dynamics, the following section builds on governmentality studies that highlight the fragility and contestability of calculative practices (Grundy and Smith 2011; Howard 2016) and more broadly on studies that detail the work involved in sustaining technologies of governance from challenge and in the face of failure (O’Malley 1996; Walters 2012; Mitchell and Lizotte 2016).

Difficulties of Technical Coordination While the RBAF was implemented in order to generate unequivocal information about program performance, uncertainty surrounded the performance data it generated. This problem registered in at least two ways. First, there was deep doubt about the validity and integrity of the performance data, given the range of problems associated with data collection practices. A consistent finding of early EBSM evaluations was that the results of service activities were being chronically underestimated as a large number of front-line staff were not entering client information into the case management system at the outset of a service intervention, thus preventing results from being automatically registered in the management information system. One report notes “a lack of confidence in its reliability” among staff: “Staff also felt they were inadequately trained in data entry, compounding the confidence issue

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and leading some staff to not enter data as routinely as they should” (HRDC 2001, 15). In addition to a lack of data entry at the outset of employment interventions, there were numerous difficulties with client follow-up twelve weeks following the end of service provision. Departmental documents betray a lack of uniformity in methods for conducting follow-up surveys. Early documents indicate that surveys would be conducted by national or regional headquarters. Others suggest that individual HRCCs would be provided with resources to carry out the follow-up surveys either by using local third parties, HRCC staff, or regional telecentre facilities (HRDC 1996b, J3). Whatever the case, deficiencies in follow-up were commonly reported in departmental reports. Despite assurances from national headquarters of adequate funding, offices reported having scant human and financial resources to devote to client follow-up (HRDC 1998). Ensuring uniform practices for collecting and recording client data was rendered even more challenging given the diverse arrangements with contracted agencies. Widespread doubts over the validity of the performance data, given problems associated with lack of data entry and follow-up, called the performance measurement system into question. Indeed, some staff doubted “whether results could be measured at the national level” (HRDC 1998, 50). The EBSM formative evaluation also noted “confusion at the local level concerning how results are calculated and, very importantly from management’s point of view, what they mean and how to use them once they have been reported” (43). Similar findings were reported in the formative evaluation of EBSMs in the Ontario region, where office managers perceived the performance data to be lacking integrity and comprehensiveness (HRDC 2000). An assessment of the management information system given by an administrator was that it was more sensitive to changes in data entry and follow-up practices than in picking up changes in client employment: “The whole data side and tech side has been a nightmare. Most of the results and changes in the results can be explained in making efforts to get better data and not by what’s happened to unemployment” (HRDC administrator 2010). Nevertheless, managers were encouraged and expected to download the data from an internal departmental website to assess the performance of their respective offices. These data were also used to evaluate their performance as managers. The possibility of gaming of the performance measurement system at the office level further undermined confidence in the data it was generating. As a large public administration literature demonstrates,

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under performance measurement systems, the substantive objectives that programs are established to achieve (i.e., improving health) can be rendered secondary to meeting a narrow set of quantitative performance targets (i.e., reducing wait times) that may have little relation to fundamental objectives (Perrin 1998; Bouckaert and Peters 2002; van Thiel and Leeuw 2002; Paton 2003). This form of goal displacement can distort organizational functions and result in less rather than more effective service (Perrin 1998, 371). In employment service delivery this problem takes several forms. One is known as creaming, a practice whereby employment service providers seek to aim services at those who are deemed to facilitate the attainment of performance targets (Kerr, Carson, and Goddard 2002). Widely documented across jurisdictions, creaming is fuelled by the emphasis commonly placed on shortterm indicators such as the number or speed of job placements. One practice noted among service delivery agencies in the United States is the retroactive registration only of those who had found a job so that high placement rates could be recorded (Trutko and Barnow 2010, 25). Departmental records indicate that the RBAF immediately began to skew the service delivery strategies adopted by service providers. There were immediate indications that service providers were beginning to reorient their service strategies in order to satisfy the short-term focus of the performance measures. On one hand, given that performance results were counted only for case-managed clients (i.e., clients who had a return-towork action plan entered in the case management software), some offices had begun to expand their case management practices to “everyone who walks through the door” (HRDC 1997b, 7). By doing so, a computer record would be generated in the hope of accumulating a return-to-work count. This effect of performance measurements is common in employment service delivery as agencies seek to accumulate performance points by providing unnecessary service (Nunn, Bickerstaffe, and Mitchell 2009, 15). Other offices pursued the exact opposite strategy by finding ways to limit services to those who facilitate performance achievement, essentially those without more complex or multiple employment-related needs (Working Group on Medium-Term Savings [WGMTS] 1999). The problem of creaming generated by the performance measurement framework was acknowledged in the formative evaluation of EBSMs released by HRDC in 1998. The evaluation conveyed service providers’ concern that “some organizations have adapted or changed the clientele they served in order to obtain results. Consequently, some staff believed that some clients were “falling through the cracks” (HRDC 1998, 42–3).

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In addition, the pull of the performance measurement system towards short-term interventions was also uneasily reconciled with the objective, central to the Service Delivery Network, that individual HRCCs tailor EBSM services to meet community and individual needs. While offices were expected to consult with community stakeholders in the development of localized service, there was concern among NHQ administrators that office managers were devising service strategies around performance measures rather than community needs. Following the implementation of the RBAF, individual HRCC managers began requesting from national headquarters a breakdown of the results expected per employment service to determine the service interventions that would result in the highest possible employment counts and benefit savings (WGMTS 1999). This reflects a widely observed paradox of performance measurement. While performance measurement is often implemented in the name of decentralization and managerial flexibility, it tends to render service delivery experimentation risky and generate conformity (Bredgaard and Larsen 2008; Mosley 2008; Considine et al. 2015; Rudman et al. 2017). Senior department administrators sought to mitigate these tensions in several ways. They believed they had designed the performance measurement regime in ways that would minimize the potential of creaming and gaming. They purposefully avoided extensive “stretching,” a practice common in other jurisdictions whereby service providers are held accountable for meeting continuously rising benchmarks. Administrators recognized that overly ambitious targets would exacerbate gaming and other dysfunctions and that service to individuals with extensive needs remained a policy objective (HRDC administrator 2010). Given evidence of a rapid shift among service providers to short-term interventions, and growing concern among staff and office managers over the problem of creaming, national headquarters released communications and organized workshops admonishing offices to maintain what they called a “balanced portfolio” of clients (HRDC 1996d). Senior HRDC officials claimed that, while the EI benefits savings measure was indeed short term, the second measure of found work, which was to be determined by a survey conducted twelve weeks following the conclusion of a service delivery, was the way that service providers could account for services to the full range of clients. A memo from the deputy minister reiterated that “HRCC client targeting and selection strategies should be based first and foremost on an analysis of local labour market needs and conditions. The key to improved results and increased [EI] Part 1 savings is in establishing a strong staff and client focus on realistic

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return to work plans, ensuring that EI dollars are wisely invested, and on ongoing case management and follow up to ensure returns to work are achieved in a very high percentage of interventions” (HRDC 1996d, np; emphasis added). According to the logic of senior management, balancing short-term placement and savings targets with “balanced portfolios” was a matter of the right kind of decision-making of frontline staff. A principal dynamic of the RBAF was that of downloading responsibility to individual offices for managing the tensions of the new regime. As well, in years subsequent to implementation of the RBAF, the initial top-down approach to numerical target setting was to be replaced with a bottom-up approach. Offices were to set their own targets in negotiation with national headquarters. This reflects how the assembly of governmental technologies may entail accommodation and compromise in an effort to make them workable (O’Malley 1996). Overall the technical challenges associated with the RBAF illustrate the tenuousness of officials’ efforts to impose new forms of calculability, a dynamic that remains under-explored in governmentality literature. Difficulties in data entry and growing suspicions of office-level gaming quickly generated doubts among staff about the integrity of the performance data. Attending to difficulties of technical coordination such as these can productively complicate governmentality studies and counter the risk of over-emphasizing the coherence of governmental techniques such as performance measurement.

Political Challenges As critical public administration research shows, performance measurement systems function by delineating what counts as the official record of work and thus “guide particular values, orientations, interpretations and practices in the direction of some constructions of social reality rather than others” (Dahler-Larsen 2007, 19; see also Paton 2003, 45). Under performance measurement systems, certain activities constitute performance, while others are excluded from the organizational record (Boland and Schultze 1996). This aspect of performance measurement makes their study critical as these technologies furnish the practical means to embed and circulate certain representations and orientations in organizational practice. Yet the power of performance measurement to define organizational activity is never fully consolidated. Official performance measures typically fail to attain the status of a self-evident and valid metric of organizational activity (Breslau 1998, 40; Paton 2003, 45). This is especially so

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in complex systems of social welfare provision such as public employment services. In such settings there is seldom an obvious single measure of outcomes, given the range of differently situated actors invested in different terms of measurement. Here narrow performance measures can generate new institutional tensions as they influence organizational activity in ways that conflict with long-standing norms and values such as due process or equity (Chan and Rosenbloom 2010). The RBAF gave rise to such tensions among differently situated organizational actors, thereby exemplifying the contestability of calculative managerial technologies. Far from simply generating calculating and self-disciplining subjects, the RBAF did not sit easily with the values of many staff and was contested. Implementation of the RBAF was immediately controversial, given the tumultuous organizational context of the mid-1990s. At the time of its implementation, HRDC was in the midst of an extreme downsizing exercise amounting to a 20 per cent reduction in its full-time staff and involving much greater use of community-based and for-profit service providers. The Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU), an active union among the federal public service (McElligott 2001), was deeply critical of these developments. The union newsletter, Paranoia (a name inspired by the department’s newsletter Panorama) reported regularly on how funding for government-run employment services was being redirected to thirdparty providers, including for-profit agencies (CEIU Ontario 1994, 3). As one vocal HRDC staff member stated in Paranoia, the new service delivery model was eliminating the role of the employment counsellor: “We’ve been in situations where counselors are being sent out to train community partners how to do our jobs … there’s no counseling going to be left under this model. If you’re just going around monitoring contracts, then you’re no longer a counselor” (CEIU Ontario 1997, 3). The national president of the CEIU later characterized this period as one in which employment counsellors were “reduced to passive compilers of paperwork” (Meunier McKay 2005). The new hollowed-out administrative arrangements were unwelcome for many staff whose sense of professionalism remained closely tied to human service work rather than the “rituals of verification” of NPM (Power 2004; personal interview, HRDC employment counsellor, 2008). In this context it is perhaps not surprising that when NHQ staff went out into the field to promote the new performance measurement framework to office managers and front-line workers, reaction was far from enthusiastic. Many employment service staff objected to being rendered accountable for

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the outcomes of clients (Office of the Auditor General of Canada 1997; HRDC administrator 2010). Considerable internal resistance to the performance measurement system was evident at its outset. The RBAF’s emphasis on short-term interventions and benefit savings was particularly contentious. There was recognition that it drew employment service delivery practices in a direction that was not mandated by current legislation. One departmental report noted, “The message that had been heard across the organization was that immediate savings were to be achieved by the rapid return to work of active claimants to the detriment of other clients covered by the eligibility criteria of the EI Act” (HRDC 1997c, 6). At a meeting of HRDC administrators at which the RBAF was discussed, one external academic advisor consulted by HRDC evaluators stated that the performance measurement system was reorienting service delivery “against the spirit of the [EI] bill” (Nakamura cited in HRDC 1997d, 16). Staff and community stakeholders had also begun to criticize the way the short-term measures provided no way to account for the quality of work found in job stability or duration. The result, increasingly cited by staff and stakeholders, was the problem of client rollover and labour market churning (HRDC administrator 2010). Amidst growing controversy over developments in employment service delivery, the Unemployed Workers Council (UWC) (an advocacy organization established in 1992 by the Toronto Labour and Building Trades Councils) organized a twenty-seven-city tour of Ontario to raise awareness about the increasingly exclusionary nature of employment service delivery under the new performance-based regime. The UWC claimed that the RBAF’s emphasis on generating EI savings constituted discrimination against the disabled, social assistance recipients, immigrants, women, and people of colour. The UWC sought to initiate a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, but it was unable to do so as it was not a direct victim of discrimination. It subsequently established a hotline and encouraged any who felt they were denied a service unfairly to call (CEIU Ontario 1998, 3). In sum, the RBAF generated contestation poorly captured in many governmentality studies of performance measurement. It was uneasily grafted onto an organizational context characterized by divergent visions of service delivery goals. Values of due process, equity, and quality service provision posed obstacles to the new performancebased regime. The RBAF thus underscores how techniques of neoliberal governmentality do not simply extend themselves unproblematically across social and organizational fields, steamrolling over past

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formations in the process. Instead, as Brodie (2008, 148) argues, “Previously cultivated identities, political consensus, and cultural ideals … constitute obstacles to the promotion of a new governing order, and its particular way of representing and intervening.” Documentation of these obstacles and their implications is necessary to avoid overstating the reach and effects of calculative techniques associated with neoliberal governmentality such as performance measurement. It further illustrates how such techniques can be both an instrument of governance and a field of struggle (Grundy and Smith 2007; Howard 2016).

Confusions of Causality The most serious challenge to the legitimacy of the RBAF was causality and attribution. Proponents of performance measurement tend to present the outcomes of organizational activity recorded in performance measurement (such as job placements) as attributable to actors being measured and not any other influences, thus often simply sidestepping the issue of causality. Yet as Mayne (1999, 7) notes, “For anyone with even a little knowledge about the program and its environment, this kind of performance information will have little credibility … In most cases, any number of factors can be advanced to explain the observed outcome other than the program itself. The more obvious these other factors are, the less credible is the performance information.” This credibility gap is compounded by widespread recognition that outcomes are almost invariably a complex co-production between agents that cannot be easily credited to one source (Paton 2003, 45). The determination of attribution – whether a program outcome was caused by the program under study and not any other factor – has traditionally been the exclusive purview of program evaluators trained in impact assessment. Drawing from a medical research paradigm of treatment effects, net impact evaluations seek to determine the net or incremental impact of a program, that is, the benefit that would not have occurred in its absence. This mode of inquiry requires the use of highly sophisticated methodologies. The gold standard is the random experimental control trial, in which the effects of government programs and services are assessed by comparing the outcomes of government program participants with a similar group of non-participants (Blalock 1999). Below the random experiment on the hierarchy of scientific evaluation methods are a range of non-experimental methods that involve advanced statistical analysis typically using administrative data to

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compare the situation of program participants against counterfactual estimations of the effects of non-participation. Yet the popularity and use of net impact evaluation has waned since the 1970s and has been eclipsed by performance measurement. Costly and time consuming, net impact evaluations are often criticized for privileging analytical issues of methodological defensibility over the production of findings of direct relevance to officials in the fields under study (Howlett 2009). Associated with an increasingly outdated model of the policymaking process – that of planning, implementation, completion, evaluation, and feedback – large-scale evaluations cannot provide the continual evaluative feedback now expected at all stages of the policy cycle. In contrast, what performance measurement lacks in scientific rigour it promises to make up for in managerial utility. Performance information systems are implemented to generate continual streams of easily understood performance data, allowing managers to identify deficiencies in organizational performance and immediately rectify deviations from performance targets (Bastoe 2006). Controversies over causality and attribution undermined the authority of the RBAF. For many staff and management, the RBAF was a fundamentally misguided administrative experiment that generated very little information of value. Many acknowledged that the performance measurement system was fundamentally limited, as it confused correlation with causality. In actuality, while the RBAF could provide some information on how an employment office is functioning and perhaps provide a way to loosely compare one office to another, in no way could it actually indicate whether the outcomes recorded in the management information system were a result of service interventions and not the result of any number of factors, including chance (HRDC [Strategic Evaluation and Monitoring] 1998). It was believed by many, especially those in the evaluation branch who were trained in methods of evaluation, that determining the results of service delivery in a manner that met a bare minimum of scientific legitimacy required a “net” impact evaluation that could isolate program impacts from other confounding influences. The issue of attribution was not simply a qualm of methodological purists. It took no special training in evaluation to recognize that attributing employment placement and EI savings results to services such as short-term group sessions was a highly questionable practice. Given that the majority of individuals on EI do not exhaust benefits, even when they do not receive services, many questioned the logic of

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treating “savings” in unpaid benefits as an attribute of service delivery and a measure of performance (HRDC administrator 2010). Staff and office managers complained that, lacking any way to determine causality, the performance measurement system was unfairly penalizing offices where failure to meet performance targets in returns to work and EI benefit savings reflected poor economic conditions rather than any deficiency in services rendered. Conversely, many claimed that the RBAF was crediting HRCCs points that were more likely the result of the buoyant local economy (WGMTS 1999). In September 1997 a workshop on accountability was held with representatives from different branches of HRDC. During this event, the inadequacies of the performance measurement system were discussed. A working group emerged from this meeting to devise an “analytically meaningful operational measure of medium-term savings to help mitigate the effects of undue reliance on short-term measures and confusing signals the accountability regime was sending to HRCCs” (WGMTS 1999, i). The working group settled on an alternative methodology to measure the results of employment services known as difference-indifferences. This is a non-experimental technique well established in the discipline of program evaluation, which involves both a pre- and postimpact assessment and a counterfactual comparison group.18 By comparing the average pre- and post-change in UI use of service participants with the average pre- and post-change in UI use of a control group of non-participants, evaluators claimed to have isolated the difference that

18 The group began developing this methodology to assess the medium-term impacts of the five EBSMs, including targeted wage subsidies, job creation partnerships, self-employment assistance, employment assistance services, and training. The method involved isolating all those individuals who drew UI benefits in 1992 and who received an employment intervention that year, sorting them by the employability program they participated in, then calculating the change in UI payout three years before and three years after their service intervention. The next step involved a counterfactual exercise comparing the change in UI use of individuals three years before and after a given employment service intervention with what their “expected” UI use would be in the absence of a service intervention. To derive their expected UI use, evaluators assembled data on individuals who drew UI in 1992 but did not participate in an employment service intervention. This population was sorted into 2,160 control groups on the basis of UI region/age group/UI claim history to facilitate more accurate comparison with employment service participants. The average change in UI use three years before their 1992 claim and three years after it were calculated for each non-participant control group.

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the particular employability intervention made in UI savings that would not have occurred in its absence. The savings were averaged over participants in a program to determine its medium-term savings. The working group viewed this methodology as bringing muchneeded scientific rigour to the assessment of HRCC results, as it incorporated a counterfactual comparison group using administrative data. This would allow for automatic correction of external influences such as economic conditions and thus enable the determination of attribution, which did not occur under the RBAF (Nakamura 1997, 9). The working group also believed that this measurement system would entail important organizational consequences. By allowing for a longer time horizon in which results could be documented (three years versus twelve weeks), it would alleviate the pressure placed on service providers to generate short-term results and allow for agencies to better accommodate the needs of individuals and communities. Given widespread scepticism about the adequacy of short-term found-work and benefit-savings measures, there was much support throughout HRDC for an alternative system of measurement that considered mediumterm outcomes. The development of an alternative measure of performance was considered a top priority for senior regional managers, office managers, and staff (WGMTS 1999). A report produced by the Medium-Term Indicator Working Group noted, “Staff appear to be the biggest demanders of medium-term savings. They want to know that their interventions are making a difference and they want assurances that delivery decisions that they are making are supported” (HRDC 1997b, 8). HRDC staff involved in developing medium-term indicators recognized the need to present their message and methodology carefully to secure senior management support (HRDC 1997e). By this time (late 1997/ early 1998), extensive resources had already gone into the implementation and promotion of the current short-term-oriented performance measurement system. Working group members were well aware that performance measurement regimes always embed and advance certain organizational interests and that changes in measurement systems represent shifts in the balance of organizational power. When they presented their measurement model to senior management, the reaction was unfavourable, as the new model was perceived to compete with the current RBAF (HRDC [SEM]) 1998, 3). Medium-term net measures were never implemented in the primary performance measurement system, as many had hoped, even though some senior management

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did express interest in incorporating such measures (HRDC administrator 2010).19 In summary, the case of the RBAF highlights the fragility and incoherence that can characterize calculative techniques associated with neoliberalism such as performance measurement. While the RBAF aimed to rationalize organizational activity around the imperative of rapid re-employment, its capacity to do so was always compromised. Many effects of the RBAF were contradictory and unintended. Actors throughout the employment service recognized that the integrity of the data could not be assured, given the difficulties involved in standardized data entry and client follow-up. The RBAF also became caught up in dilemmas that result from attempts to apply narrow quantitative evaluation to a complex social welfare service. Far from simply generating calculating subjectivities, the RBAF did not sit easily with the values of many staff and was contested. An even more fundamental ambiguity arose over the question of attribution and causality. Senior departmental administrators were forced to defend and sustain measures of performance that were widely recognized as virtually meaningless. As one NHQ administrator recalled, “As we went to implement it there was a lot of struggle … if you pulled at these measures they weren’t that robust” (HRDC administrator 2010). Another departmental report similarly concluded, “Both HRDC and [the] TB [Treasury Board] are in transition towards a new government-wide accountability and performance measurement regime that neither may be fully comfortable with, nor understands” (WGMTS 1999, 13). A significant result has been a quiet organizational divestment in the performance measurement of unpaid EI benefits. While this measure is still reported in departmental performance reports to Parliament, and in the EI Monitoring Assessment reports, administrators charged with their collection heavily doubt their validity. As one official frankly admitted, “We don’t spend a lot of time trying to analyse them” (HRDC administrator 2010). Ultimately, rather than furnishing a bottom-line measure of organizational results, the performance measurement regime gave rise to new ambiguities in the measurability of service delivery.

19 Medium-term net measures were, however, included as part of the subsequent EBSM evaluations carried out in the different regions.

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Labour Market Development Agreements and Performance Measurement: Results-Based Federalism? The RBAF initially devised for internal HRDC use became the basis of the intergovernmental accountability regime under the Labour Market Development Agreements (LMDAs), which transferred responsibility for employment service provision to the provinces. This section highlights how irresolvable controversies over the meaning of performance measurement data were reproduced in the agreements. In late 1995 Prime Minister Chrétien offered to turn the administration of EI Part II Employment Benefits and Support Measures to the provinces. Training policy had long been a contentious area of jurisdiction between the federal government and the provinces. It was a policy field that straddled the realm of national economic policy, for which the federal government was responsible, as well as the provincial jurisdiction of education (Cameron and Simeon 2002; Boismenu and Graefe 2004). Provincial governments, Quebec in particular, had long sought to gain more control over this policy area (Dupré et al. 1973). It made certain sense that this policy field would be on offer to the provinces as a means of renewing federal relations. In May 1996 details of the federal offer were spelled out. Under Labour Market Development Agreements, responsibility for the EI Act’s active measures would be transferred to the provinces, along with funding and HRDC staff. This offer was followed by negotiations with the provinces. Different agreements followed. Some provinces such as Alberta and Quebec agreed to full devolution. Five other provinces that chose not to take on the new responsibility agreed to co-management (Wood and Klassen 2009). Under the co-management model, the federal government would retain its staff and facilities, and the province would be allowed greater input into the design and delivery of the programs. Ontario did not sign an agreement and HRDC continued its operations there until 2007, two years after an agreement was formalized in 2005. Full devolution to all provinces eventually followed. Implementation of LMDAs was part of a nascent model of intergovernmental coordination that came to be known as “instrumental” (Phillips 2001) or “collaborative federalism” (Cameron and Simeon 2002). Instrumental federalism was promoted in the name of pragmatism; federal and provincial governments would work together in pursuit of “what works” and would focus less on jurisdictional conflicts that had impeded federal-provincial innovation (Saint-Martin 2004). In this way,

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instrumental federalism promised a way to renew intergovernmental relations following two rounds of failed attempts at constitutional reform and the 1995 sovereignty-association bid in Quebec (Cameron 2013). Also the fiscal austerity of the federal government, which registered in the adoption of block grants such as the Canadian Social and Health Transfer, left very little federal control over the way in which federal funding could be used by the provinces (Saint-Martin 2004). The model of instrumental federalism marked a dramatic shift in the mechanisms used to coordinate federal-provincial activities in social welfare. For three decades a regime of conditional grants under the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) provided the main instrument for this purpose. Established through legislation in 1966 to coordinate federal funding for provincial income security programs meeting certain federally stipulated conditions, CAP ensured provincial accountability through federal and provincial legislation, bilateral agreements, and administrative systems for ensuring provinces’ compliance with the terms of the legislation (Cameron 2007, 163). By contrast, the model of accountability advanced under instrumental federalism was deeply influenced by New Public Management. Federal funds transferred to provinces for social welfare programs were accompanied by new regimes of provincial performance measurement (Phillips 2001; Cameron and Simeon 2002; Saint-Martin 2004; Cameron 2007). Under instrumental federalism, emphasis was placed not on formal legislation as a coordinating mechanism, but on what Cameron (2013) calls the public reporting model of accountability. This model emphasized making data available to the public in order to facilitate the soft-law strategy of “shaming and faming” and to ensure the promotion and adoption of best practices. It positioned the citizenry as the enforcers of performance and accountability. Citizens were “empowered” to assess the performance data and hold governments accountable through the ballot box. Consistent with the public reporting model of accountability, the LMDAs concluded between the federal and provincial governments made performance measurement the key basis of accountability. The LMDAs included three measures of provincial performance to be reported on in EI Monitoring and Assessment Reports. Two of the measures were drawn directly from HRDC’s internal performance measurement regime: the number of EI claimants returned to work, and the EI savings generated as a result of service interventions. The LMDAs also incorporated a third measure, the number of active EI claimants served. This measure was intended to ensure that provincial operations

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would privilege active EI claimants in programs funded out of the EI account (funded through employer and employee contributions). As one administrator explained, it was intended as a “safety mechanism” to ensure that provinces would not prioritize social assistance clients, essentially using federally funded services to lessen provincial expenditures on social assistance claimants (HRDC administrator 2010). In the context of negotiations with provinces, HRDC officials used the targets that the department had developed as part of its own benchmarking. Initially provincial targets were derived from historical data on clients served between 1993 and 1995. The targets “represent[ed] the federal government’s best efforts to quantify results-based accountability and [were] the same numbers which HRDC would use to implement the system within its own regions and offices” (HRDC 1996e, 3). In subsequent years of the LMDAs, performance targets for provinces were established on the basis of the performance data from the previous year (HRDC administrator 2010). While the federal government initially set the primary indicators and benchmarks, it subsequently emphasized negotiation of performance targets and results via federal-provincial evaluation and monitoring committees. Quebec was the exception, as it is responsible for defining and measuring its own results (Bakvis and Aucoin 2000). Provinces are also subject to formative and summative evaluations to determine the outcomes and net impacts of LMDAfunded employment programs.20 Financial accountability for EBSM services is verified through financial statements audited by provincial auditors-general. A number of scholars question this model as a means to coordinate intergovernmental relations and secure accountability for government expenditures (Phillips 2001; Cameron 2013; Anderson and Findlay 2010). They point to how the public reporting model amounts to downloading oversight to citizens’ advocacy organizations and overestimates their capacity to interpret and act on performance data. Public access to the performance data may be lacking, and the data themselves may be organized in a manner that makes it difficult to interpret (Anderson

20 The evaluations employed multiple lines of research. They entailed quantitative methods such as surveys of program clients, analyses of administrative data, and econometric modelling. The studies also used qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews with administrators. For a detailed discussion of the evaluations’ methodology see Nicholson (2008).

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and Findlay 2010). In addition, public reporting systems may be premised upon questionable data – that is, data that are easily recorded and quantifiable but do not convey fundamental policy measures. As Phillips (2001, 23) notes, “The difficulty of relating outcomes to particular programs should not be underestimated. For instance, it is one thing to collect data on literacy rates or child health and quite another to make the case that changes in these rates are the result of specific programs for early childhood development.” The accountability frameworks embedded in the LMDAs exemplify such deficiencies. While public reporting of performance data remains the basis of the LMDA accountability regime, the public had no input in defining the criteria of performance. In this way the LMDA accountability regime illustrates how the measures used in performance measurement systems may have little relation to outcomes that matter to citizens but rather are promoted as the outcomes that citizens ought to be most concerned with. In such instances, despite the managerial rhetoric of adaptive and responsive government, it is most often citizens who are exhorted to adapt their preferences and expectations to the managerial definitions of accountability and performance on offer (Kelly 2005, 81). In addition, while accountability in this field is premised on the availability of performance data that will allow the public to compare targets to outcomes in various jurisdictions, the EI Monitoring and Assessment Reports caution readers against interprovincial comparison, given different labour market conditions and program mixes (Wood and Klassen 2009, 265). Perhaps most troubling, however, is the way the LMDAs reproduced the dilemmas of the accountability framework originally intended for use in HRDC. There was extensive contestation on the validity of the measures. Many believed the short-term measures reflected neither the needs of service users nor the work undertaken by service staff. Performance measures were also inherently ambiguous. There were doubts about whether results could even be measured, given the range of challenges associated with the development of a uniform data collection system in a context of highly decentralized service provision and widely divergent data collection practices. There was also extensive debate over whether the results recorded in the management information system could even be attributed to employment service. The fact that the highly problematic accountability framework originally devised for HRDC became the basis of the intergovernmental accountability regime has meant that these unresolved dilemmas and deficiencies have been

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reproduced at the level of intergovernmental relations. As an administrator noted, critiques initially levelled at HRDC’s internal RBAF were soon made of the LMDAs: “After the agreements were signed … there were some legitimate criticisms that the definition of found work wasn’t rigorous enough or the benefits [measure] wasn’t meaningful” (HRDC administrator 2010). The accountability regime appears all the more ambiguous, given that federal officials tend to not view the benefit savings measure as a meaningful metric, even though provinces continue to report on it as a measure of accountability (ibid.). The primary effect of the accountability framework devised in the mid-1990s for HRDC-run offices was the communication of a new priority of rapid re-employment through short-term measures. This effect of the accountability regime was reproduced in LMDAs (Klassen 2000; Boismenu and Graefe 2004). The performance measures in the LMDAs provided no measure of the long-term outcomes for workers or the quality of employment found. In this way the LMDAs legitimized the practice of creaming (Klassen 2000, 185; Critoph 2003). Under the LMDAs, provinces targeted EBSMs to active EI recipients, even more than federal officials expected they would (HRDC administrator 2010). As a result, those arguably most in need of access to quality training and employment services, including immigrants, social assistance recipients, and youth were often ineligible for federally funded training programs (de Wolff 2006; Wood and Klassen 2009; Lahey and Hall 2009). Following continued pressure from the provinces and labour market policy stakeholders, the federal government signed additional labour market agreements with all of the provinces and territories that provided additional federal funds for training and employment services to workers who do not qualify for EI EBSMs (CEIC 2010; Wood 2015). These agreements were in place from 2008 to 2014. Conclusion The RBAF reflected Canada’s embrace of “double activation,” a phenomenon observed in the United States, United Kingdom, several European countries, and Australia, whereby unemployed service users and service providers are both subject to disciplinary measures (Newman 2007; Soss et al. 2011b; Considine et al. 2015). Administrators implemented the technology in an effort to orient the conduct of staff and managers in a short-term rapid re-employment model. Staff were to become accountable for achieving job-placement and EI savings targets.

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Yet this bid to renew service delivery also exemplifies the fragility and contestability of calculative practices too often elided in scholarship on neoliberal governmentality, but foregrounded in recent studies of calculative practices such as performance measurement or census taking (Best 2014; Howard 2016). Discipline and self-surveillance in staff were by no means the RBAF’s only organizational effects. It became embroiled in technical and political challenges and unintended consequences. Far from simply generating calculating subjectivities, the RBAF did not sit easily with the values of many staff and was contested. Rather than imposing a grid of calculability, the RBAF generated considerable confusion about the validity and meaning of the performance data. Actors throughout the employment service recognized that the integrity of the data could not be assured, given the difficulties involved in standardized data entry and client follow-up. An even more fundamental ambiguity arose over attribution and causality. The performance measurement system initially devised to manage service delivery within HRDC was incorporated into bilateral LMDAs between federal and provincial governments. The ambiguities and controversies that surrounded HRDC’s experiment in performance measurement were reproduced in intergovernmental accountability regimes.

Conclusions

A central premise of this book is that understanding activation policy requires close examination of its street-level practices. Given how activation hinges on the people and information systems designated to manage the behaviour of individuals (Marston 2006, 88), street-level interactions between service delivery organizations and the unemployed are a key site of labour market policy. Yet as a rapidly growing body of literature on activation in jurisdictions beyond Canada shows, what happens at street level has long been poorly understood and documented. Street-level organizations mediate and enact policy in ways that depart from formal policies on the book, especially when such policies are ambiguous on implementation (Brodkin 2013). As this book demonstrated, a range of actors and practices shape how labour market policy is enacted at street level but remain largely invisible from the perspective of formal policy, or even documents produced for the public such as department annual reports. Managerial techniques such as performance measurement and contracting are also driving reform of service delivery in ways that are poorly understood in many jurisdictions, including Canada. A related premise of this book is that the opacity of street-level practices impedes critique of activation. It hampers the development of a more complete understanding of the costs of activation for those who must try to make it work in practice. As critical political economy scholarship powerfully demonstrates, activation is a fundamentally deficient response to the problem unemployment, given its myopic individualist, neoclassical conceptual underpinnings. But the ways employment service administrators and staff encounter the limits and contradictions of activation receive only sporadic attention in critical

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social policy literature. As a result, we continue to under-acknowledge the incoherence and fragility of activation services and the labourintensive work involved in their maintenance. This study took up the insights of governmentality to illuminate the practices of street-level activation services in Canada. It probed the ways in which unemployed individuals are problematized in service delivery; the ways their purported deficiencies are made knowable and governable, and the procedures and techniques for acting on their conduct. Yet the study’s critical orientation went well beyond simply tracing the problematizations and techniques of activation and asserting their congruence with neoliberal rationality. Following scholarship that calls for more attentiveness to the messy encounter between governmental practices and the people and things they seek to transform (Murray Li 2007c; Brady 2011), I approached street-level employment services as a rich terrain for exploring how authorities confront and seek to manage the limits and contradictions of activation. I developed a history of employment service delivery in Canada that offers new insights into (1) the imminence of failure to activation; (2) the ways in which authorities continually manage the failures of activation by reassembling service delivery arrangements; and finally (3) the mutability of conceptions of employability across cycles of service delivery failure and renewal. The remainder of this conclusion expands on each of these themes. The central finding of this book is that, while the logic of activation posits the individual as the locus of reformative intervention, coherent means to govern unemployment as a problem of individual employability have remained remarkably elusive. The fashioning of service delivery methods to activate the unemployed have been marked by difficulty and failure, far more than is evident in studies of activation that focus on formal policy. In highlighting the imminence of failure to activation practices, this study challenges and complicates a central theme of governmental studies of activation – namely that disciplinary individualization is somehow “achieved.” The preceding chapters highlighted how activation’s dominant individualized problematizations are continually enfeebled by actors who advance alternative diagnoses and prescriptions, many of which point to structural and systemic determinants of unemployment. The chapters also demonstrated how careful study of techniques of activation such as motivational counselling or statistical profiling – techniques that appear in other studies to instantiate the disciplinary individualization – can yield contending insights into authorities’ failure to govern unemployment as

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an individual problem. This study emphasized how techniques of activation are destabilized by forms of contestation, technical failures, and actors who simply do not operate them according to plan. Beyond countering overly systematized accounts of disciplinary individualization in governmental studies of activation, the preceding study contributes to governmentality scholarship more broadly by taking up early but often overlooked insights into governmentality as a “congenitally failing” endeavour (Rose and Miller 1992). This book advances the development of governmental approaches that account for “the dislocations, translations, subversions, and collapses of power with as much meticulousness as [its] programs and strategic operations” (Brockling, Krasman, and Lemke 2011, 20). A second original insight of this book concerns the labour-intensive work employment service administrators undertake to manage the failures of activation. The study traced the way administrators managed the failures of activation over several decades as if they stemmed from technical deficiencies in service delivery and not from the paradigm’s myopic and contradictory underlying logic. Confirming governmentality insights into the productive and generative nature of failure, the study documented the strange resourcefulness of administrators’ efforts to continually remake activation anew by assembling new knowledges and techniques into service delivery. Indeed, the perpetual reassembly of activation in Canada is a chief expression of administrators’ ongoing encounter with the paradigm’s fundamental limits and contradictions. It must be stressed that the central role failure and its management have played in activation in Canada is largely imperceptible in high-level official documents such as department reports or pronouncements by politicians that convey official problematizations. Documenting failure management required the examination of much more minor archival and administrative records (emails, meeting minutes, correspondence between officials, departmental memos to staff), which betray in detail the dilemmas administrators encounter in their efforts to implement directives. This study thus confirms how governmentality research limited to examination of problematizations as they appear in sanitized, official documents can generate an impoverished account of governing practices and may obscure their actual effects (Murray Li 2007a, 279). This inquiry into the history of employment service delivery in Canada has fostered a third insight that is original to studies of street-level activation. The study put into relief the radical mutability of employability as an object of knowledge and government. Over the period under study,

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cycles of service delivery failure and renewal have led to dramatic shifts in the ways authorities have sought to know and govern employability. We have seen how ways of governing employability were shaped by a range of governmental rationalities (both neoliberal and non-neoliberal) and entailed often conflicting techniques and associated forms of expertise. A brief review of the different ways in which employability was governed in the last few decades of the twentieth century underscores its ruptures and disarticulations. Under the manpower planning era of the 1960s, the governance of individual employability bore the influence of high-modern rather than neoliberal rationalities. Employability was configured as one’s potential optimal contribution to the productivity of the nation’s labour force. Employability enhancement of unemployed individuals thus hinged on efforts to render dynamics of supply and demand in the national labour market legible through large-scale manpower forecasting, and on efforts to channel these data to the service delivery level to enlighten vocational choices of service users. This highly technocratic vision, betraying a faith in the promise of social science and bureaucracy, make the manpower era distinct from more recognizably neoliberal iterations of active labour market policy that would follow. The following decade saw a marked shift in the way authorities problematized the unemployed in terms of their employability. The determinants of employability would recede into the unemployed subject. First the mid-1970s saw notions of employability reshaped by problematizations of wilful unemployment among the unemployed, which were inspired by resurgent neoclassical economic theory. Changes to UI and employment service delivery signalled that the unemployed were to be governed as willing and calculating agents, and their employability was be incited by structuring incentives and penalties, namely imposing punishment for the purported choice of unemployment. The logic behind the reintegration of UI benefits processing and employment service delivery in the mid-1970s was intended, in large part, to better identify and penalize those deemed to be wilfully unemployed. Yet by the late 1970s psychological and therapeutic approaches to individual unemployment and employability would briefly eclipse the salience of deliberate malingering. Employability became a more deeply rooted psychological attribute that could be known and governed through psychological techniques and instruments. Major service delivery resources were channelled into training front-line staff in para-psychological assessments, as well as the affective and embodied

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techniques of the counselling relationship, seen as necessary to elicit the truth of employability. This approach betrayed a long-standing but increasingly strained governmental optimism about the powers of the properly trained welfare professional and the benefits that could be wrought from the counsellor–client relationship. Subsequent attempts to govern unemployment as a problem of employability drew on radically different forms of knowledge and techniques. The development of statistical targeting technology in the mid-1990s was premised on the idea that the deficiencies in the employability of service users could be deciphered in a scientific manner that could potentially bypass the perceptions and input of service users and employment counsellors. The employability of the unemployed could be made knowable and governable by computing administrative data in econometric models. Underscoring its radical departure from previous service delivery methods, SOMS appeared alien to many frontline employment counsellors. More recently, ways of representing the employability of the unemployed articulated with the managerial coordination of employment services. The employability enhancement of service users came to be represented chiefly in performance measures for job placement and EI benefits savings, measures by which staff and offices could be brought under the calculative scrutiny of more senior officials. This history demonstrates that ways of knowing and governing employability are by no means fixed and settled. The individual attributes that signify employability, the techniques to assess the unemployed for their employability, and the experts deemed qualified to do so, all undergo continual change. In tracing the profound incoherence of employability enhancement over several decades, the book has brought a critical perspective to bear on policymakers’ continued emphasis on individual employability enhancement as a solution to deepening labour market insecurity. The history offered in the preceding pages provides ample reason to doubt employability’s promised solutions. Individualized employability enhancement has been – and will remain – inherently deficient as a response to the collective problem of unemployment and precarious employment. Effective responses to such insecurity require thinking beyond individual employability and beyond individualized behavioural prescriptions. Only by doing so can we envision more progressive policy frameworks that foster greater labour market security for everyone.

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Index

accountability: public reporting model of, 119 activation policy: central claims about, 12–13; conceptual framework for studying, 6, 7, 18, 19, 28–9; contestation of, 27–8; criticism of, 18, 21, 124–5; disciplinary practice in, 7; feminist perspective on, 6–7; general characteristics of, 5–6; governmental perspective on, 23–8; implementation of, 21–2; individualized problematizations, 25–6, 27, 28, 125; limits and contradictions of, 7, 13–14, 15, 16, 19–29, 58; management of, 12, 22, 82; methods and techniques of, 24–5, 125, 126; origin of, 4, 20; political economy scholarship on, 20–1, 22–3; reforms of, 73; sources of failure, 28, 126; streetlevel practices of, 7–8, 124, 125, 126; theoretical and empirical investigation of, 13, 14, 15. See also double activation; evidence-based activation

Adult Occupational Training Act (AOTA), 34–5, 45, 46, 47 Albo, Greg, 47 American Professional Guidance Association, 41 “Anatomy of Employment Counseling, The,” 66 anti-poverty movement: contestation of manpower services, 46–8, 51, 53 assemblages, 11–12 Basic Job Readiness Training (BJRT), 51 Basic Training for Skill Development, 47 Blueprint for Renewing Government Service Using Information Technology, 81 Bradford, Neil, 37 Brodie, Janine, 7, 113 Brodkin, Evelyn, 96 Budget Implementation Act, 3–4 “Building Employment Development Services That Really Work,” 77

158

Index

Business Council on National Issues, 56 Cameron, Barbara, 119 Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), 119 Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC), 57, 59. See also Employment and Immigration Canada (EIC) Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU), 111 Canada Employment Centres, 87, 91 Canada Manpower Centres, 35, 36, 47, 48, 57, 58–9 Canadian Association of Adult Education, 47 Canadian Labour Congress, 57 Canadian Welfare Council, 48 Carkhuff, Robert, 66 Chrétien, Jean, 118 client-counsellor relationships, 66, 67, 69 Client-Counselor Relationships and Other Things That Go Bump (film), 66 Client Monitoring System (CMS): advantages of, 81; focus group testing, 88–9; introduction of, 17, 75, 80; modules of, 80–1; staff perception of, 84–5; technological expansion of, 81–2. See also Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS) Committee of Inquiry into the Unemployment Insurance Act, 33 Conger, Stuart, 61 counsellors. See employment counsellors Cross-Currents (instructional film), 67

Dean, Mitchell, 10, 13 Department of Manpower and Immigration (DMI): criticism of, 48; formation of, 34; labour market research, 36–7, 38, 43–4; manpower analysts in, 38–40; promotional materials, 36, 39, 50; training manual, 41–2 Diagnostic Services Program, 62, 63 Digest of Benefit Entitlement Principles, 4 Directed Interview Program, 57 double activation, 26, 55, 74, 100, 106, 122 Dupré, Stefan, 43, 53, 59 Economic and Research Branch of the Department of Labour, 38 Economic Council of Canada (ECC), 33, 43, 48, 51 employability: anti-poverty advocates’ view of, 44–5; assessment, 17, 64–5, 67–8; barriers to, 65–6; changes of notions of, 127; class division and, 46–7; concept of, 7; enhancement services, 19, 30–1, 128; feminist perspective on, 44; governance of, 126–7, 128; psychological approach to, 127; technocratic approach to, 44 Employment and Immigration Canada (EIC): counselling support initiatives, 62; Employment Counseling Policy Statement, 64; employment counselling report, 73; instructional materials, 62, 63, 66; net impact studies conducted by, 71–3; service delivery protocols,

Index 159 73; training programs for frontline staff, 62. See also Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC) Employment Benefits and Support Measures (EBSMs), 102, 104, 107, 118, 120 Employment Counseling in the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (policy statement), 61 Employment Counseling into the 1990s (report), 73 employment counselling: impact on labour market outcomes, 72n10 employment counsellors: certification program for, 63, 64; criticism of, 59; net impact evaluation of, 71–3; organizational resources to support, 61–2; psychometric testing of, 64; qualifications of, 106–7; “reluctant clients” problem for, 67–8; resistance to new technology, 83–4; responsibilities of, 127–8; service guidelines for, 66n9; training programs and materials for, 62–3, 66–7, 68, 74 Employment Insurance (EI), 3, 87, 102, 102–3n14, 118 Employment Insurance Act, 17, 96, 103n14 Employment Insurance (EI) claimants: performance management, 104, 119–20; re-employment of, 104n15 Employment Insurance (EI) Monitoring and Assessment Report, 105, 119 employment service administrators: management of failure of

activation, 7–8, 12, 13, 54–5, 126; social policy literature on, 124–5 employment service delivery: case studies, 13–14; changes in, 40, 53, 69–70; cost of, 69, 71, 105; criticism of, 44, 46–8, 71, 101; data-intensive vision of, 35, 37; development of alternative, 102; disciplinary approach to, 16, 17, 56; employability enhancement and, 38; establishment of, 15, 30; evidence-based approach to, 78; gender inequities in, 45; “help-and-hassle” model of, 16, 25; high-modernist approach to, 31; initiatives to improve, 16, 17–18; lack of results-based assessment, 101; management of, 87; during the manpower era, 38; Outreach Program, 51; performance measurement of, 95, 100–1; problem of “reluctant client,” 67–8; psychological discourses in, 60, 61; reforms of, 49–52, 51, 55, 105; scholarly studies of, 11, 12, 22, 77–8, 125; self-service model of, 50–1; shift in knowledge and techniques of, 74; short-term services, 105, 105n17; technological innovations and, 25, 83; user satisfaction survey, 59 Enhancing Services through the Innovative Use of Information Technology, 81 evidence-based activation, 75, 79 failures of activation, management of, 58, 59–60, 126 federal civil service budget cuts, 76 Forget Commission, 71

160

Index

Foucault, Michel, 8, 13 Fraser, Nancy, 44 Fraser Institute, 56 French, Richard, 37 Friedman, Milton, 5 front-line counsellors. See employment counsellors General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), 63, 64n8 governance: liberal perspective on, 10; practices of, 9–10; selfhood notion of, 10; targeted, 88; techniques, 10; of unemployed, 10–11 governmentality: concept of, 8–9; methodological and theoretical approaches to, 13, 20; scholarship on, 9–10, 11, 42, 60 Haahr, Jens Henrik, 42 Harvey, David, 20 high modernism, 15, 31, 44, 52 Human Resources Canada Centre (HRCC), 102–3 Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC): accountability framework, 17, 115; assessment of social welfare system, 77; data-matching projects of, 80–1, 89–91, 93; evaluation culture, 78–9; formation of, 73; information-handling practices, 91–2; performance measurement system, 102, 104–5, 109–10, 111–12, 115, 120; service delivery practices, 87, 101–2, 103, 104n16, 105. See also Results-Based Accountability Framework (RBAF) Human Resources Investment Branch (HRIB), 103n14

Improving Social Security in Canada (discussion paper), 77 Increased Interview Activity Program (IIA), 69 instrumental (collaborative) federalism, 118–19 Job Information Centre, 49–50 Job Placement Drive, 58 Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI), 79–80 Joint Policy Coordinating Committee, 57 Kent, Tom, 30 Keynesianism, 5, 32–3, 37 Kroeger, Arthur, 69 labour force: potential productivity of, 33; problem of supply and demand, 33–4 labour market: data collection about, 37–8; problematizations of, 33–4, 52; research of, 43–4; scholarship on, 7; supply-side interventions, 15 Labour Market Development Agreements (LMDAs): accountability frameworks, 120, 121, 122; employment programs funded by, 120; between federal and provincial governments, 122, 123; performance measures in, 118, 119–20, 122 Labour Market Development Task Force, 59 labour market policy: high-modern vision of, 31, 32; theoretical perspectives on, 15–16 Larner, Wendy, 11

Index 161 Li, Murray, 11, 12, 58 Lipsky, Michael, 67 Longitudinal Labour Force File (LLFF), 91, 93

Newman, Janet, 26 New Public Management (NPM), 16, 22, 70, 98, 119 Noreau, Jean-Jacques, 75

Management by Objectives (MBO) movement, 97–8 management skill set, 70 managerialism, 70–3 manpower analysts, 38–9, 40 manpower counsellors, 59 manpower forecasting, 37–8, 40, 42–3, 44, 53 Manpower Information System, 15, 31, 38, 42 manpower planning: adoption of, 5, 15; anti-politics of, 32, 44–9; contestations of, 45–6, 53; criticism of, 47; evolution of, 30–2, 52; failures of, 48; federal officials’ position on, 34; gender inequities, 45; high modernism of, 30–53; labour market data gathering for, 42; limits of, 40–4, 48–9; technical difficulties of, 42 “Manpower Programs and the Poor” policy paper, 51 Mayne, John, 113 Meltz, Noah, 43, 50, 53 Miller, Peter, 28, 42 Mobile Service Units, 52 Mopas, Michael, 88

OECD’s Jobs Study, 75, 77, 87, 102 Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG), 101 O’Malley, Pat, 76 Orange Paper on the Social Security Review (1973), 56 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 17, 33 Ottawa Women’s Careers Project, 52

National Employment Service (NES), 32, 34, 35, 38, 71 Neilson Task Force on Program Review, 71 net impact evaluation, 72, 113, 114 “New Entrants and Re-Entrants” (NEREs), 56

Pearson, Lester B., 45, 47 performance measurement: challenges of, 110–11; data collection practices, 106–7, 120, 121; definition of, 96; development of alternative, 116; difference-in-differences method of, 115–16, 115n18; disciplinary capacity of, 96, 99, 100; effect on service delivery, 105, 106, 109; in employment services, implementation of, 99–101; follow-up surveys, 107; gaming and creaming practices, 107–8, 109; goal displacement practices, 108; historical overview of, 97; impact on business decisionmaking, 100; as key basis of accountability, 119; medium-term indicators, 116; “stretching” practice, 109 Phillips, Bruce, 121 Phillips Curve, 33 Privacy Commissioner’s Office, 91–2

162

Index

problematizations, 9 Program Review, 100n13 public problems, analysis of, 37 Real Poverty Report, 47–8 Reinventing Government, 70 Results-Based Accountability Framework (RBAF): challenges of, 96, 113–14; fragility and incoherence of, 117; impact on staff, 111; introduction of, 17, 95–6; issue of attribution, 113, 114–15; issue of causality, 113, 114; organizational effects of, 112–13, 123; performance indicators in, 96, 116; political challenges, 110, 111, 123; service delivery strategies, 108; target setting, 110; technical challenges, 106, 110, 123 Rose, Nikolas, 28, 42, 60 Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, 69 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 45–6 scientific management principles, 97 Scott, James, 15, 35, 42, 44 Senate Committee on Manpower and Employment, 33–4, 48 Service Delivery Network (SDN) of HRDC, 87, 101–2 Service Outcome Measurement System (SOMS): as attempt to manage failures of activation, 82; data accuracy, 86; implementation of, 17, 75, 76, 81, 85, 94; limitations of, 82, 87; modelling difficulties, 86–7; as paradox of targeted

governance, 88; pilot testing of, 83–5; privacy concerns, 88, 89, 92–3; staff resistance to, 83–4, 88, 128; statistical database, 82 Special Job Finding and Placement Drive, 57 Special Senate Committee on Poverty, 47 Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, 51, 58 Stanford Research Institute International, 72n10 statistical profiling of unemployed, 79–81, 83, 86, 93, 128 street-level practices of activation, 7–8, 124, 125, 126 Taylor, Fredrick, 97 Technical Vocational Training Act (TVTA), 35n6 Toronto Star, 49 Training on the Job for the Disadvantaged, 51 Treasury Board reports, 100–1 Tuning In (instructional film), 66 unemployed: concern over will to work of, 68, 69; disciplinary approaches to, 57; focus on rapid re-employment of, 73, 74; governance of, 10–11, 127, 128; problematizations of activation of, 25–6, 27, 28, 54, 125, 127; psychological deficiencies of, 24, 25; rationalized conception of, 68–9; statistical profiling of, 25, 79–81, 83, 86, 93, 128; training for, 35n6, 47, 51–2 Unemployed Workers Council (UWC), 112

Index 163 unemployment: as calculated choice, 25; federal policies, 30, 33–5; governance of, 5–6, 85–6, 125–6; governmentality perspective on, 23–8; individual behavioural conception of, 4, 5, 19, 56, 57–8; inflation and, 33; Keynesian approach to, 5, 32, 33; legislation related to, 56; medicalization of, 25n4; notion of “involuntary,” 19; in the post-war period, 54; problematizations of, 4, 5, 23–4; psychological discourses of, 24–5, 127; statistics, 58 Unemployment Insurance (UI): abuse of, 56; benefit rates, 55, 56; data-matching scheme, 90–2; detection of fraudulent claims for, 90–1; qualification requirements, 32; reform of, 54, 55, 56; revocation of benefits, 57; separation from employment service, 56

Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants: benchmark for assessment, 102–3n14; statistics, 58 Unemployment Insurance Commission (UIC), 57 United Community Services of Vancouver, 47 United States: activation policies in, 26; Planning, Programming, and Budgeting (PPB), 98, 98n12; Social Security Act, 80 Valverde, Mariana, 88 Walters, William, 11, 23, 42 welfare systems, 9, 77 Women after Rights (WAR), 46 women’s access to training, 45, 51–2 women’s organizations: contestation of manpower services, 45–6, 51, 53; political actions of, 46 World Seminar on Employment Counseling, 62

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19 Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate in Canada, 1970–1995 / Wendy McKeen 20 Collective Action and Radicalism in Brazil: Women, Urban Housing, and Rural Movements / Michel Duquette, Maurilio Galdino, Charmain Levy, Bérengère Marques-Pereira, and Florence Raes 21 Continentalizing Canada: The Politics and Legacy of the Macdonald Royal Commission / Gregory J. Inwood 22 Globalization Unplugged: Sovereignty and the Canadian State in the Twenty-first Century / Peter Urmetzer 23 New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis / Edited by André Lecours 24 Mothers of the Nation: Women, Family, and Nationalism in TwentiethCentury Europe / Patrizia Albanese 25 Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy: Four Provinces in Comparative Perspective / Rodney Haddow and Thomas Klassen 26 Rules, Rules, Rules, Rules: Multi-Level Regulatory Governance / Edited by G. Bruce Doern and Robert Johnson 27 The Illusive Tradeoff: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation Systems, and Egypt’s Pharmaceutical Industry / Basma Abdelgafar 28 Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice / Gavin Fridell 29 Deliberative Democracy for the Future: The Case of Nuclear Waste Management in Canada / Genevieve Fuji Johnson 30 Internationalization and Canadian Agriculture: Policy and Governing Paradigms / Grace Skogstad 31 Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada / Deborah Cowen 32 Public Policy for Women: The State, Income Security, and Labour / Edited by Marjorie Griffin Cohen and Jane Pulkingham 33 Smiling Down the Line: Info-Service Work in the Global Economy / Bob Russell 34 Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver / Kristin R. Good 35 Policy Paradigms, Transnationalism, and Domestic Politics / Edited by Grace Skogstad 36 Three Bio-Realms: Biotechnology and the Governance of Food, Health, and Life in Canada / G. Bruce Doern and Michael J. Prince 37 North America in Question: Regional Integration in an Era of Economic Turbulence / Edited by Jeffrey Ayres and Laura Macdonald 38 Comparative Public Policy in Latin America / Edited by Jordi Díez and Susan Franceschet

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