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Understanding interactions between social security claimants and employment advisers- lessons from the UK

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-05-15, 13:04 authored by Merran Toerien, Roy Sainsbury, Paul Drew, Annie Irvine
This paper reports findings from the first study based on recordings of advisory interviews with benefits claimants in the United Kingdom. Previous econometric analysis found that programmes for unemployed people delivered through private sector Employment Zones (EZs) were more effective than their public sector equivalents, delivered through Jobcentre Plus (JCP). However, little was known about what occurred on the frontline. In this paper, we describe a conversation analytic comparison of 40 EZ and 48 JCP interviews, showing that EZ and JCP advisers typically adopted different ‘interactional styles’. We illustrate the five features that characterised the EZ ‘style’, arguing that they offer an important part of the explanation for the EZs’ outperformance of some JCP programmes. Given their systematic patterning, we also argue that these differences are not best explained at the individual level. Nevertheless, we conclude that there is no principled reason for the practices identified in the EZ to be considered to ‘belong’ in the private, but not the public, sector.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Social Work and Society

Volume

13

Issue

1

Pages

1 - 21 (21)

Citation

TOERIEN, M. ... et al, 2015. Understanding interactions between social security claimants and employment advisers- lessons from the UK. Social Work and Society, 13 (1), pp. 1 - 21.

Publisher

Center for Social Work and Social Policy, University of Duisburg-Essen.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Social Work and Society [Center for Social Work and Social Policy, University of Duisburg-Essen]. This is an open access journal and publishes under the Digital Peer Publishing Licence, further details are available here; http://www.dipp.nrw.de/lizenzen/dppl/dppl/

eISSN

1613-8953

Language

  • en