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You are warmly invited to a research seminar organised by the ISS21  Work, Organisations and Welfare research cluster.  Papers will be presented by Dr Jay Wiggan University of Edinburgh and Dr Michael McGann University of Melbourne. This will be followed by presentations from PhD researchers related to the cluster, with further details to follow.  

Dr Jay Wiggan, University of Edinburgh. Acceleration and the (dis)complementarities of UK labour market policy in the 2020s: pursuing a ‘temporal fix’

Dr Jay Wiggan is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh.  His work is primarily concerned with the politics, policies and governance of labour markets, public employment services and social security for working age people.  Underpinning his research is an interest in policy history and how sedimentation of conflicts between competing ideas and interests within state institutions shape contemporary policies and policy making. His most recent book was published with Policy Press in 2024:  The Politics of Unemployment Policy in Britain: Class Struggle, Labour Market Restructuring and Welfare Reform. 

The delivery of social services has become increasingly subject to the logic of market competition, as exemplified by Australia’s employment services system—the largest area of Commonwealth procurement outside defence. The rationale behind quasi-marketisation is that the dynamics of competition and choice can be harnessed to achieve services of higher-quality and lower-cost compared with monopolistic state provision. However, this requires quasi-markets to be frequently opened to competition so that alternative providers can challenge incumbents for contracts and market share. This leads to an ‘inescapable’ problem of transaction costs in quasi-markets (Bredgaard & Larsen, 2008); each episode of procurement brings considerable expense for governments (who must design tenders, evaluate bids, negotiate contracts), service providers (who sink resources into biding), and service-users (who face discontinuity).

Dr Michael McGann is an Associate Professor at the School of Political and Social Sciences, University of Melbourne.  Michael's research focuses on welfare governance and the street-level delivery of active labour market programs. He is particularly interested in quasi-markets in social services, and the intersection between the administrative turn towards marketisation and the social policy turn towards activation, mutual obligations, and welfare conditionality. he has undertaken research on these questions in a range of jurisdictions, including Australia, the UK and Ireland, and using a variety of methods (ethnography, surveys of frontline employment services staff, and in-depth interviews with jobseekers, street-level workers, and policy officials).