The Management Centre Research Papers - CONSUMING WORK: FRONT-LINE WORKERS AND THEIR CUSTOMERS IN JOBCENTRE PLUS
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The Management
Centre
Research Papers
CONSUMING WORK:
FRONT-LINE WORKERS AND THEIR
CUSTOMERS IN JOBCENTRE PLUS
By
Patrice Rosenthal
& Riccardo Peccei
Research Paper 030
Subject area: Organisation Studies
April 2004
Further information may be found at the Centre’s web site: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/managementTHE MANAGEMENT CENTRE
RESEARCH PAPERS
Consuming Work:
Front-Line Workers And Their Customers In Jobcentre Plus
By
Patrice Rosenthal
& Riccardo Peccei
Research Paper 030
Subject area: Organisation Studies
To request a paper please contact Mr. William Munday at the following address:
The Management Centre
King's College, University of London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
150 Stamford Street
London SE1 9NN
United Kingdom.
Tel/Fax: +44-(0)20-7848 3883
Email: william.munday@kcl.ac.uk
Corresponding Author:
Dr Patrice Rosenthal
The Management Centre
King's College, University of London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
150 Stamford Street
London SE1 9NN
United Kingdom.
Tel/Fax: +44-(0)20-7848 4122
Email: patrice.rosenthal@kcl.ac.ukConsuming Work:
Front-line Workers and Their Customers in Jobcentre Plus
Patrice Rosenthal1 Riccardo Peccei2
Abstract
The concept of the customer is central to theories of the new public management. Less
understood is how the customer ideal is being expressed and enacted in the practice of
public administration. Our broad focus in this paper concerns attempts by contemporary
public organisations to restructure and reframe their relationships with their 'customers'.
We address this through a more specific focus on the changing nature of consumption
and service interactions within the public sphere. We explore these issues in Jobcentre
Plus, an emerging organisation charged with delivery of the government's work-focused
welfare agenda. In the first part of the paper, we consider how administrators seek to
manage consumption in order to achieve the complex aims of the agency. At a general
level, customers are to experience a sense of themselves as being, simultaneously,
controlled and in charge. They are obligatees, but are also offered what Korczynski and
Ott (2004) have termed ‘the enchanting myth of sovereignty’. Within more
individualised service interactions, agency staff are to encourage the consumption by
customers of a complex range of resources and values, designed to facilitate
“competitiveness” and employability. In the second part of the paper, we address how
this project is rendered into a negotiated reality by the front-line staff responsible for its
delivery. Drawing on exploratory interviews with front-line workers, we analyse the
complexity and ambiguity of worker and customer roles and hence, their interactions.
Introduction
1
PATRICE ROSENTHAL, King’s College, University of London
2
RICCARDO PECCEI, King’s College, University of London
3Service workers are the enablers and facilitators of contemporary consumption. This is
true in a mechanical sense, but also in terms of meaning and experience. Central to
prevailing analyses of consumption is the notion that goods and services are consumed
not (just) for their use-value, but for what they represent or signify- be that status,
distinctiveness, normality or some other state. The nature of the interaction between
customers and representatives of organisations can make it more or less likely that
consumers experience the values they are seeking – or the ones the organisation seeks for
them.
In this paper we explore the role of front-line workers in consumption during public
sector service interactions. Much has been written about the centrality of customer
sovereignty to the theory of ‘the new public management’ (Alford, 2002; Osbourne and
Gaebler, 1992; du Gay, 2000). What is less understood is how the customer ideal is
being expressed and enacted in the practice of public administration. What messages and
images do public administrators try to convey to customers about customers themselves,
the organisation and the relationship between them, and to what end? Are these
meanings consumed and expressed by staff in their direct dealings with customers, or is
the story edited or re-written by the front-line of the public sector?
Jobcentre Plus, the new agency charged with delivery of the government’s work-focused
welfare agenda, is emblematic of the new public management and therefore a useful
context in which to explore these questions. In the first part of the paper we consider the
service interaction as an important vehicle for the achievement of the agency’s core aim,
the reduction of ‘worklessness’. Drawing on exploratory interviews with thirteen front-
line workers, we then address the question of how agency staff render this project into a
negotiated reality. In the final part of the paper we discuss how the study can contribute
to an understanding of consumption and the service interaction in the new public
management.
4Managing Consumption in Jobcentre Plus
Jobcentre Plus is an emerging organisation, created in 2001 from the merger of the
Benefits Agency and the Employment Service. In its rationale, structure, practices and
language, the organisation neatly fits the prevailing model of public sector reform
labelled ‘the new public management’ or ‘entrepreneurial government’ (for reviews of
this literature see Barzelay, 2001; du Gay, 2000; Hoggett, 1996; Kirkpatrick and
Martinez-Lucio, 1995). The rationale for Jobcentre Plus is the integration of benefit
administration with the promotion of work. As an executive agency of the Department
for Work and Pensions, it is structured to combine operational autonomy with centralised
(ministerial) control over performance objectives and targets. Management practices,
appropriate to the reform model, include customer charters and the pervasive use of
techniques of quality and performance management. The language adopted by the
agency is redolent of entrepreneurial government in its discourses of the customer and of
service quality. Overall, the Jobcentre Plus project strongly reflects neo-liberal concepts
of customer sovereignty and enterprise.
In one-stop shops, claimants can pursue business related to a range of welfare benefits
and access various types of employment services. Jobcentre Plus segments its customers
by categories of benefit. Different services and resources and requirements on users (for
information provision, to seek/accept employment or forfeit benefit) attach to different
categories. For example, the agency’s objectives lay particular emphasis on the
movement into work of those currently furthest from the labour market, including lone
parents and disabled people. These individuals are offered special services and support,
but are not required to accept these or to pursue employment. More generally, work is
promoted to all as “the best form of welfare” and the agency seeks to foster employability
and employment through various services, resources and methods.
The service interaction is an important vehicle for the achievement of this aim. We argue
that interactions between front-line staff and individual customers are designed to
encourage the consumption by customers of a complex range of values, all of which are
seen to facilitate enterprise and employability. We explore this below, but first consider
5how management seeks to frame customers, and by extension the agency itself, to
provide an enabling structure within which the interaction takes place.
Constructing Customers for the Service Interaction
Public administrators have devoted significant resources to the design and presentation of
Jobcentre Plus. There are dedicated divisions for Modernisation and Strategy,
Performance and Product Management and the Jobcentre Plus Project. The latter is
concerned with strategic and operational integration of the pre-merger entities. It includes
efforts such as the Internal Language Project, an explicit attempt to manage discourse
across the organisation. Communications, both internal and external, are produced to a
high professional standard. There has been significant investment in physical plant and
in information technology.
Through the careful design and presentation of the agency, we see management as
engaged in the business of transmitting messages to customers. These messages try to
tell customers something about themselves, the agency and the relationship between
them. In other words, Jobcentre Plus is seeking to frame the self-understanding and
behaviour of customers in such as way as to best facilitate the transaction of business and
the desired transformation into employment and independence.
In an effort to capture the customer as represented by the agency, we reviewed a range of
internal and public communications and observed six sites in Southeast England during
October – December 2002. Documents included the Business Plan (2002/3); the
Customer Charter and various informational pamphlets produced for customers; and four
issues of Plus, a magazine through which management communicates to staff. Our
analysis located a multi-layered and shifting conception of the customer. We attempt to
render this below before focusing on the service interaction as a site of consumption.
(For a more detailed discussion of the representation of the customer in the agency and
how this relates to academic constructions of the consumer, see Rosenthal and Peccei,
2003.)
6Jobcentre Plus customers are represented as being, simultaneously, sovereign and
controlled. They are obligatees, subject to regulation and surveillance by the agency on
behalf of the State. At the same time, they are offered images of sovereignty – the sense
of being a legitimate, choosing, enterprising individual engaged in a relationship with a
business (Korczynski, 2002, du Gay, 1996, Slater, 1997). The semiotic context of the
agency is designed to convey both these narratives.
Through the language used in various media, operational practices and features of the
physical environment, Jobcentre Plus users are represented as akin to the sovereign
consumer of popular understanding. They are referred to only and always as customers –
the terms unemployed, claimants or clients are never used. The language of service
quality and of flexible, individualised support pervades all internal and external
communications. The agency presents itself as a “business” that is “dynamic, responsive
and in tune with customers’ needs” (Business Plan 2002/3, p. 3). This is an organisation
dedicated to facilitating customers’ desires for “new beginnings” and transformation into
employability, as encapsulated in the agency’s motto, “the work you want, the help you
need”.
Users are assigned a range of commercial-like rights, communicated via a Customer
Charter and numerous other media. These service features include the right to an
appointment, to be seen quickly without one, to have speedy access to an interpreter, to
request a private space for discussions with staff and to have rapid resolution of queries
and complaints. Pamphlets and posters prominently displayed in public offices invite
complaints in cases of customer dissatisfaction (related say, to waiting times, impolite
treatment from any staff member, or inaccurate advice or information).
Considerable investment has been made in the redevelopment of Benefit Agency or
Employment Service sites, so that Jobcentre Plus users are served within an impressive
physical environment. Sites are decorated in a welcoming and professional manner and
all customer-facing staff wear name-badges and “business-like” attire. Visitors are
greeted on arrival and directed to the appropriate location for their particular business.
7Jobcentre Plus offices are non-screened environments. Staff and customers deal with
each other at desks in open plan offices. This signficant shift from Benefit Agency
practice casts users as respectable individuals, in contrast to potential threats and
aggressors, necessitating physical barriers for the protection of staff.
Thus, through the various media and methods discussed above, users are encouraged to
view themselves as akin to the sovereign customer– autonomous, choosing, enterprising,
and in charge. These images are foregrounded in the agency’s presentation. However, a
different representation of users, the agency and the relationship between them also is
discernible in the self-same media explored above. In this simultaneous narrative, the
nature/experience of being a customer in Jobcentre Plus is portrayed not as a state of
autonomy and choice, but as one of obligation, responsibility and regulation. This
representation often takes the form of specific rules and requirements (for say,
information provision, attendance at interviews, etc) that attach to different categories of
benefit, with continued receipt of benefit contingent on claimants’ compliance.
Elsewhere in documents, practices and features of the physical environment of offices,
customers are portrayed not so much as sovereigns, but as potential fraudsters, cheats and
aggressors. They are subject to explicit admonitions and warnings and to various
methods of surveillance and control. For example, the greeting and direction of visitors
to the agency’s public offices allows for vetting and surveillance as much as it does for
provision of quality service. Uniformed guards are present at all times, in case the
“calming” features discussed above (professional décor, minimisation of waiting times,
absence of screens, etc.) do not have their desired effect.
Regulation of customers also takes a more general form, in the explicit expectation
(published in the Customer Charter and elsewhere) to “look positively at your options for
work”. The pervasiveness of this message and the presentation of the agency as existing
“to ensure that people receiving working age benefits fulfil their responsibilities” hints
that the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ preference for enterprise (“the work you want”) may not be
present (or easily realised) in all customers. In other words, the agency seems to be
8suggesting that in some cases enterprise may need to be as much compelled as facilitated.
The latter half of the agency motto – “the help you need” – clearly refers to benefit
entitlement, but also may be related to ‘help needed’ in the development of the
desire/capacity for employment (ie some may need help towards the ‘normal’ state of
desiring/pursuing work).
Integration: The Enchanting Myth of Sovereignty
Users therefore are represented in shifting and paradoxical ways by the management of
Jobcentre Plus – now as sovereigns or figures of respect, exercising choice and
consuming the resources of the agency to facilitate their desire for work; now as
beneficiaries and obligatees (and potentially as aggressors or fraudsters) to be surveilled
and regulated by the agency. The agency foregrounds the sovereignty message, but the
control image is always close to hand.
We see Jobcentre Plus as encouraging what Korczynski (2002) and Korczynski and Ott
(2004) have termed the ‘enchanting myth of sovereignty’. This complex concept, which
the authors apply more or less universally to contemporary organisations, embodies a
number of ideas. It suggests that the sovereign status of customers is presented as natural
and obvious; that the experience of sovereignty is a pleasant and perhaps empowering
one; and that individuals actively participate in its construction, while not investing it
with belief in its literal truth.
The formulation does not suggest sovereignty is a sham, with no connection to material
reality. Rather the fundamental notion is that of fragility. The myth is at once powerful
and tenuous, because it exists to overcome the cultural contradiction between
consumption as a site of freedom and choice and the requirements on organisations to
rationalise production. In other words, contemporary organisations must appeal to
customers while simultaneously directing and controlling them (Leidner, 1993; Benson,
1986).
9Such a logic has a complex application to an organisation such as Jobcentre Plus. The
need within the public sector for rationalisation of production processes (and the
attendant need to control service recipients) is clear. The agency administers public
funds. It must process a large and complex user base, distribute benefit entitlement in a
correct and timely fashion, protect against fraud and error and deliver on a complex set of
highly specific performance targets. The autonomy/choice of beneficiaries thus must be
constrained and their behaviour regulated.
The emphasis on appeal alongside direction and control is an interesting one, given that
the agency could pursue both its fundamental objectives (payment of benefit and
promotion of work) without the investment and challenges associated with the
sovereignty/quality theme. The agency conceivably pursues this strategy for various,
possibly interrelated, reasons. These may include an attempt to structure an effective
social exchange through provision of private value to users (eg respect, individualised
support), better to facilitate their cooperation with agency objectives (Alford, 2002); the
legitimisation of increased control over claimants’ behaviour (Kirkpatrick and Martinez
Lucio, 1995); and as a tool in a project of ‘responsibilisation’ (Rose, 1996) wherein
problems such as unemployment are constituted as failures of the individual, as a way of
positioning and discipling subjects in an era of neo-liberalism and enterprise (Rose, 1996;
du Gay, 1996, 2000).
For these or other reasons, encouragement of the ‘enchanting myth of sovereignty’ may
be deemed to facilitate attainment of the complex objectives of the agency. In particular
it can be seen as a way of providing an enabling context within which effective service
interactions between users and agency staff can occur. We turn below to the service
interaction and consider how administrators seek to manage consumption at this second
and more individualised level of operations.
Consumption and the Service Interaction
Personal interactions between users and front-line staff are a key vehicle for achievement
of the core objective of moving individuals into work. Front-line roles in public offices
10take a variety of forms, including receptionist/greeters, floor supervisors, job brokers,
financial advisors and personal advisors. The most sustained interactions occur between
users and the latter two roles, which exist to provide information and analyses of benefits
and work options and for those receiving particular types of benefit, ongoing
involvement/support in the movement towards employment.
These interactions are designed to be highly individualised in their nature and content. In
the parlance of the agency,
“Our advisors will offer a wide range of help (through a network of partners and
suppliers) to create a flexible package that will meet customers’ individual needs,
including education, training, work experience and help with childcare.”
(Business Plan 2002/3, p. 13)
We have argued that management seeks to deliver individuals to these interactions having
consumed a particular sense of themselves in relation to the agency – as both sovereign
customers and objects of obligation and surveillance. Management may wish individuals
to lean to the sovereignty narrative, but not too far. Individual choice must of necessity
be constrained. Further, individual capacity for “competitiveness” and employability by
definition is deemed problematic (its development is one of the key rationales for the
existence of the agency). In this, producer authority is viewed as facilitative. Finally,
management of Jobcentre Plus no doubt understands that many individuals will
reject/ignore the sovereignty theme – they may not view themselves as embedded in a
social exchange (or at least not the kind touched upon above) and/or they may lack any
interest in the agency’s project of employability. For these, more direct control may be
viewed as the only option.
Somewhere in the space between sovereignty and control, advisors are to ‘work on’
individual users to encourage consumption of a complex range of resources and values,
all of which are assumed to facilitate the development of ‘enterprising selves’ (Rose,
1996; du Gay, 1996). These take a range of forms. Material value is involved, in the
11sense of monetary benefit and discretionary transfers that may be made in relation to, say,
transportation or childcare costs to allow individuals to attend interviews with agency
staff or prospective employers. Informational resources also are involved: advisors offer
explanation, analysis and advice tailored to individual cases. This includes provision of
information related to particular jobs and/or training opportunities. Advisors are
gatekeepers to formal and on-the-job training schemes, which can be related to the notion
of capacity resources.
Finally, advisors are to encourage the consumption of identity values, including a sense
of responsibility, self-knowledge, self-confidence and motivation. The states and
resources outlined above can be viewed as sign-values of employability. Their
consumption/display is seen to identify individuals who possess the motivation and
capacity for competitiveness and employment.
In terms of how they ‘work on’ customers, agency staff are both constrained and
empowered. The nature and extent of support that can/must be provided to individual
customers are, to some degree, linked to benefit categories. More generally, staff are
constrained in their dealings with users by agency policies, relating, for example, to
claimants’ entitlement to benefit and to customer service standards. However, the
emphasis on flexible and individualised service suggests that advisors must have a
reasonable degree of discretion. This pertains to the nature and extent of material and
capacity resources they may offer individual customers (eg whether to release
discretionary funds, whether to provide access to particular types of training). It relates
more generally to advisors’ style of engaging with customers and to the tactics they
utilise to encourage employability (for example, to the balance they strike between
encouragement and more direct control). Advisors may, for example, invoke ‘more
frequent attendance’ requirements in cases where customers persistently fail to attend
interviews on time and/or persistently refuse offers of employment or training. Overall,
as noted above, the advisor is charged with tailoring the interaction (or series of
interactions) to their assessment of individual cases, needs and capacities.
12The Jobcentre Plus project, like all strategies and tactics of organisational reformers, is
interpreted and rendered into a negotiated reality by the front-line staff charged with its
delivery (Shaw, 1995). In practice, this means that the extent to which the enchanting
myth of sovereignty promulgated by agency administrators actually is consumed by users
will depend importantly on how those users are viewed/treated by staff with whom they
come into contact. This is true at both the general and individualised levels of
consumption discussed above. Management can control the content/presentation of
written communications, the formulation of practices and the design of the physical
environment. But in practice, of course, any framing of users is not neatly separate/prior
to their encounters with front-line staff, but is ongoing and implicated in service
interactions themselves. Further, administrators may design these service interactions
along particular lines and to particular ends, but must rely on agency staff for their
delivery.
This raises the important question of how the front-line of Jobcentre Plus make sense of
their customers and how they experience interaction with them. It is to this issue that we
turn in the second part of the paper.
Front-line Staff and Consumption in Jobcentre Plus
Our general aim in this part of the study was to begin to build an understanding of the
role of boundary-spanning staff in consumption and the service interaction in Jobcentre
Plus. To this end, we carried out exploratory interviews with thirteen front-line staff in
four sites in a district in Southeast England. The interviews were conducted October –
December 2002 and lasted approximately thirty minutes. Both authors participated in all
interviews. Those interviewed operated in a range of front-line roles, however the
majority were financial advisors or personal advisors. Nine were female and four male.
Three main themes emerged in the interviews: front-line staff’s conceptions of their
customers; the behaviours or tactics utilised by workers in their dealings with users; and
staff views on the nature and value of customer consumption in the service interaction.
13The latter question touched upon workers’ wider evaluation of the ethos and objectives of
the Jobcentre Plus. We discuss each of these issues in turn.
Front-line Conceptions of the Customer
The first theme concerns the question of how workers conceptualise the service recipients
with whom they deal. We begin here at the level of language and labelling. Our data
suggest that the customer label is not widely used amongst staff – notwithstanding the
heavy emphasis laid by the agency on this language. The interviewees responded
comfortably to the use of the term in the interviews, but most reported that they normally
do not refer to service recipients in this manner.
The first two interview excerpts below illustrate the tendency to question the
appropriateness of the customer label, while the third reflects endorsement of its use,
albeit in somewhat ambiguous terms.
Customers here are different from what happens somewhere like Tesco. In Tesco,
customers know what they want. And they don’t have to fight for what they
want. Customers here are destitute. [Receptionist]
It is ‘customer’ in written communications and ‘client’ in face-to-face
communications. Why? Because ‘customer’ can be abbreviated to C/M.
Otherwise, ‘client’ sounds nicer. A customer is someone who is buying
something. ‘Clients’, though, can be expected to do something for you. You can
tell a client that there are rules. [Financial Advisor].
We used to call them clients. That is because we were providing a service. Now
they are called customers… ‘Customer’ suggests something more personal. Just
like what would happen in a shop. You should give service. You should not be
giving them a lesson. Even though they are not buying anything, they still
deserve good service. [Team Leader]
14In their fragmentary ways, each of the extracts echo the popular understanding of the
customer and its grounding in neo-classical economics, wherein the customer appears as
an individual embedded in a commercial exchange; with private preferences (knowing
what she wants); power over producers (not having to ‘fight’ for what she wants and not
subject to ‘rules’); and deserving of respectful and individualised service (‘something
more personal’) (for discussions see Gabriel and Lang, 1995; Slater, 1997; Rosenthal and
Peccei, 2003). Many interviewees appeared to question the fit between this idealised
figure and the ‘real’ role occupied by users of the agency. However this reflected more
of an implicit than an explicit resistance to the customer discourse and did not carry a
rejection of the broader ethos of the organisation with its emphasis on quality service - a
point to which we return below.
Beyond the issue of labelling, we were interested in the question of a more fundamental
conception or structuring of customers on the part of workers. Most insisted that there
were no customer ‘types’ – that users were viewed and treated as individuals. However
our data strongly identify a clear and pervasive categorisation of customers by workers.
The key interpretative category through which staff structure and valorise customers is, in
their own parlance, that of ‘job readiness’. Job readiness was linked with notions of
capacity (qualifications and experience), but was more strongly associated with concepts
of individual agency, self-knowledge and motivation. Agency, even when expressed
somewhat aggressively, was strongly valued over passivity.
[A good customer is] someone who has relevant qualifications and a good idea of
what they want. Someone who has been applying for jobs and jobs are available.
Someone who has motivation. This is rare. It’s not that people are lazy, but they
have given up. They think they cannot do things, that they are inadequate… The
worst customer is someone who does not want a future. Someone who does not
want a job. [Personal Advisor]
A good customer is a person who is willing to help themselves. You can tell the
ones who are ready and fired up. Others, who are not job ready, lack confidence.
15They lack eye contact. They are not really interested. They are looking out the
window while I’m doing a job search for them. [Personal Advisor]
Hard to say what is a ‘good customer’. Someone who comes in and just does
what he is told? Someone who is passive and quiet? Maybe it’s better if he had
said what he wanted. Not necessarily argue, but put his point across… A quiet
person is not necessarily good. [Floor Manager]
Staff interpretation and evaluation of users according to their perceived job readiness is
consistent with the work-focused objectives of the agency and perhaps more importantly,
reflects the structuring of their own work roles. The negative emphasis on passivity
amongst users likely is linked to the job effort entailed in moving such individuals away
from that state into one of job readiness. It may also reflect the more general power of
passivity in social interaction.
Linked to notions of job readiness, a somewhat more elaborate categorisation of
customers also emerged in staff accounts of service interactions. Below we outline the
main categories discernible in the data, identify how these map on to the agency’s
presentation of its customers and report on their relative frequency in the eyes of front-
line workers.
A first broad grouping we label Motivated/Active. These are users perceived by staff to
be actively desirous of employability/work and eager to consume the resources offered by
the agency in order to attain it. These individuals in turn are viewed as either Capable or
Not Capable, depending upon their possession of suitable aspirations, qualifications
and/or work experience. The Motivated/Active category clearly maps on to the
sovereignty narrative as conveyed by Jobcentre Plus administrators and analysed in the
first part of the paper. This is especially the case with reference to the Not Capable sub-
group. This conception coincides most closely with the standard customer as presented
by Jobcentre Plus administrators – an individual who is naturally desirous of
16employability and work, yet needs the support and resources of the agency to realise this
private preference. The interviews however suggested that the Motivated/Active
individual is not the standard customer experienced by staff, but instead, a comparative
rarity.
A second category of customer is perceived in stark contrast to notions of motivation and
enterprise. This group we label Recalcitrant/Unconvinced. These are individuals who
evince an active disinterest in the agency’s project of transformation and employability.
Some are Evasive and Benefit Focused, interested in consuming the material resources of
the organisation while evading the other values on offer. Others are more openly
Aggressive/Abusive in their dealings with staff. Individuals in the
Recalcitrant/Unconvinced grouping are viewed as being present in the service interaction
unwillingly and their resistance to the agency’s project is overt and explicit. This
conception maps closely on to the control narrative as presented by Jobcentre Plus,
wherein the character of the customer is conveyed as one of obligation and the role of the
agency is conveyed as ensuring “people of working age fulfil their responsibilities”
(Business Plan, 2001/2002). Our data suggest that in the eyes of staff, this category is
rather more populous than the first, but again, relatively rare – especially as compared to
the third and final customer grouping.
This third group represents the standard customer in the experience of staff and one we
label Passively Uncooperative. These are individuals who are seen to demonstrate
neither an active interest in employability nor an overt resistance to the goals and
resources of the agency. Rather their self-presentation and demeanour in the interaction
is one of passivity, indifference and social distance. Some of these are viewed as
Capable – they possess potentially useful abilities, qualifications and/or experience – but
lack motivation and enterprise. Others are perceived to lack both capacity and
motivation.
In summary, our data suggest that at one level, staff structure users according to a basic
criterion – their job readiness or lack thereof. A somewhat more elaborate typing also
17emerged - this linked again in the main to users’ perceived orientations to the service
interaction and its goals. Customers were viewed relatively rarely to correspond to the
two main narratives deployed by administrators. More usually, the customers as
conceived by staff were passively un-cooperative and socially distant. The boundaries
between these groupings of course are fuzzy rather than sharp and indeed, the service
interaction can be viewed as an attempt to ‘progress’ users through these boundaries
towards the desired state of Motivated/Active (or job readiness). We turn below to the
nature of worker efforts in this regard.
Construction Work – Tactics in the Interaction
The second broad theme to emerge from the interviews concerned the methods, tactics
and work behaviours staff deployed in their interactions with customers. Here, we view
staff as engaged in ‘construction work’ – the objective of their labour is to build (or co-
produce) enterprise and employability in the individual users with whom they interact.
Most of the interviewees reported that they sought to encourage consumption of the range
of material, informational, capacity and identity resources/values in all service
interactions. The data however suggest that staff importantly tailor their work behaviours
to their perception of users – in the sense that they emphasise particular resources and/or
methods depending upon their categorisation of individual customers.
Figure 1 shows this relationship between the customer typology outlined above and the
tactics emphasised by workers. Customers classified by staff as Motivated/Active tended
to be provided mainly with informational and capacity resources (eg access to data bases,
word processing equipment and training programmes). Customers perceived to be
Recalcitrant/Unconvinced were met mainly with tactics of regulation and control.
Interviewees spoke of favoured techniques to calm individuals and steer interactions so as
to defuse potential anger and aggression. In cases where recalcitrance was more overt,
techniques of more direct control were utilised. These might include for example,
invoking requirements for ‘more frequent attendance’ at meetings, referring cases for
fraud investigation, entering names on a list on a ‘potentially violent’ register and/or in
18extreme cases, calling for the physical removal and barring from offices of
Aggressive/Abusive individuals.
[Insert Figure 1 about here]
In their dealings with Passively Uncooperative customers, advisors appear to spend most
of their time and energy on ‘identity work’. In other words, the favoured method here
was encouragement of identity-values relating to enterprise and self-reliance. In their
accounts of these interactions, interviewees emphasised their attempts to ‘sell’ work (to
persuade individuals of the benefits associated with employment), to counsel (including
attempts to uncover aspirations and interests) and to boost self-confidence.
I try to get people to commit. It’s the basic aim of why I am in this job. Get them
back into work… It’s not just money they get from the job that’s good. There is
also the socialising, the morale boosting, the networks they build up. [Personal
Advisor]
I say to them, “this is a motorway – we are travelling together. I bet if I gave you
£5 grand you would on time [for a job interview]. But I am giving you something
better than that. I am giving you a future. [Personal Advisor]
I say to them, “what if I could wave a magic wand – what would you want to do?”
Then you see that the information they have given is wrong. They have indicated
not what they want to do, but what they think they can do. [Personal Advisor]
Some of the customers here are 2nd and 3rd generation on benefit. They are not
motivated. You must convince them that they are better off working. It is about
breaking them. Some are difficult to break, but if you can break them, they will
be better off. [Personal Advisor]
19Overall, the construction work undertaken by front-line staff in the interaction has a
common aim, but methods and tactics appear to be tailored to the self-presentation and
demeanour of individual users. Passivity is the most common state encountered by
workers. Our findings therefore suggest that identity work is given significant emphasis
in service interactions in Jobcentre Plus.
More generally, the findings underscore the nature of service interactions as jointly
produced. Service workers in Jobcentre Plus clearly hold the balance of power within the
service interaction. However, the nature and complexity of the core objective of
transformation/employability, as well as the service quality discourse at play within the
agency, give some power to individuals. In this sense, individual users appear to have
considerable influence in how the interaction plays out. And the implicit power of
passivity (expressed here as indifference towards the resources/values on offer rather than
overt resistance to them) may be reflected in the negative value attached to its experience
by front-line staff.
Customer Consumption in the Interaction
The final broad theme concerns the question of whether, in the eyes of staff, the
consumption encouraged by the agency occurs in practice and whether they view such a
project as worthwhile. The ‘standard’ customer experienced by the interviewees is
passively uncooperative - at least initially disinterested in the project of employability.
However there was a sense amongst many interviewees that they, as individuals, often do
successfully foster consumption of the agency’s resources and values. Further, this was
viewed as both a gratifying and worthwhile endeavour, linked to a broader endorsement
of the Jobcentre Plus project.
The nicest story concerns a lady who was being abused at home. She finally
revealed this to me. I got her into a shelter and got her onto a training course.
She rang in to say her life had changed because of what I had done… There was
another – a cocky little shit. I asked him what he wanted to do. He wanted to lay
bricks on top of skyscrapers. I found him a training place – it got his brain cells
20working. After that, he went into building services as an apprentice and now has
opened a building firm. [Personal Advisor]
This sense of individual and organisational effectiveness was not unanimous, as indicated
below by a Personal Advisor working in an area of high economic deprivation:
Trying to sell work to the disabled is futile… My job is to build a rapport, to
sympathise, to empathise, to convince them it is better to work. But they are not
well. They know about work. So then what they want to do is train. So, my job
is to sell training. But if anyone does ever say – ‘good idea, I’ll take you up on
that’ – I am shocked. Then, I have no places to offer – training places are not
available. They [management] want me to sell. But I’ve got nothing in my shop.
[Personal Advisor]
The more typical response was however one of endorsement of the agency. Jobcentre
Plus was viewed as more “glamorous and posh” and more “professional” in its physical
features and operations compared to erstwhile Social Security Offices and Jobcentres.
These new arrangements were seen to have produced a change in customers – to have
made them “calmer” and “nicer”.
One long term member of staff particularly endorsed the new arrangements - but appears
to view the ethos of the agency as separable from notions of customer sovereignty:
I have been waiting for this to happen since 1966. Before, in Benefit Offices,
there were fights, aggravation… The furniture was screwed to the floor. People
were seen from behind screens. Those screens were not always to keep customers
away from us as much as keeping us away from customers. You deal with people
– in this kind of work – stress goes up. Safe, behind a screen, I can be cocky. I
can feel dead safe and can behave as I please. Face to face is better. Customers?
Clients? This is how people should be treated. [Personal Advisor]
21Discussion and Conclusions
In this paper we have analysed how public administrators in Jobcentre Plus seek to
manage consumption and the service interaction and how this project is viewed and
experienced by the front-line staff responsible for its delivery. We have argued that the
case usefully can be read as the encouragement by administrators of the ‘enchanting myth
of sovereignty’ (Korczynski and Ott, 2004). The agency utilises language and practices
associated with customer sovereignty to appeal to customers while simultaneously
regulating and directing them. In the first part of the paper we discussed at a theoretical
level the complex application of the concept to Jobcentre Plus.
The interview data allow us to explore empirically the question of where the myth may
reside in the agency. In other words, the sovereignty myth may resonate at all levels of
the organisation, in that it has been taken on by workers and delivered more or less intact
to users. Or, at another extreme, it may be best understood to reside largely in the realm
of administrators, as a management construction/abstraction with little impact on the
conceptions and behaviours of workers (and therefore presumably on customers).
Our data suggest that the sovereignty narrative resides more strongly at the level of the
agency than the front-line. This is not to say that front-line staff reject the ethos of the
agency, with its emphasis on service quality and personalised treatment. Indeed the
interviews indicated a positive evaluation of the Jobcentre Plus project. Rather, the data
suggest considerable complexity and ambiguity regarding staff and customers roles, and
hence, their interactions. There was scant indication of the ‘sovereign customer’ as
presented by the agency. Staff appeared to tailor their approach to the (perceived)
orientation and demeanour of customers. In this sense, service recipients have influence
in the interaction and receive individualised treatment from the organisation.
Nevertheless, enactment of the sovereignty theme seemed undermined in a variety of
ways. The customer label was not widely used by interviewees – it seemed to many an
inappropriate term for the role occupied by users of the agency. Further, the individuals
encountered by staff typically did not often (in their eyes) display the characteristics
22associated with the sovereignty narrative (eg active preference and motivation for
employment). Rather, staff saw users typically as passively uncooperative and
disinterested in the resources/values on offer (or at least disengaged from the process),
and less often, as overtly resistant to the aims of the interaction/agency.
There was a rather more developed sense of the customer as ‘object of control’. Staff
reported drawing on a range of measures and sanctions in cases of recalcitrance and/or
aggression on the part of users. And, more pervasively, staff view the typical user as
being present in the interaction not out of a desire for employment, but because they are
obliged to be. The control narrative did not however emerge strongly in the interviews –
at least in explicit terms.
The most developed sense of the customer was that of ‘work object’. In this narrative,
staff work on customers in order to enhance both capacity and motivation for
employment. They see themselves as acting on mainly (at least initially) reluctant
consumers of the resources and values of employability. That is, they are aware that
often they are not responding to the preferences of their customers. Instead, they seek to
mould or re-shape these preferences. In so doing, they facilitate the work-focused aims
of the agency, which were widely regarded as legitimate. However, they also see
themselves as acting in the best interest of the individuals they serve (“I am giving you a
future”). Control is involved - along with persuasion and personalised support - however
it is control seen capable of benefiting the users of the agency, even as it may defy their
short-term preferences.
In sum, staff appear largely to endorse both the service ethos and the work-focus of
Jobcentre Plus. This makes for somewhat ambiguous conceptions and understandings of
the users with whom they interact. What emerges is not quite a ‘sovereign customer’ and
not quite an ‘object of control’. Rather, in the sensemaking of staff, users appear more as
individuals to be worked with – and often, worked ‘on’ - in order to encourage
consumption of resources and values which may not meet their ‘wants’ as much as their
‘needs’.
23The interview data reported here are exploratory and further research is needed to gauge
their typicality and their implications. One key implication concerns the nature of
‘customer orientation’ in a public sector context where users may often be reluctant
consumers. The agency may genuinely be attempting to ‘appeal’ to customers – that is,
to treat users with respect, to offer quality service and individualised support and to
provide for some meaningful redress when standards are not met. However, these means
are directed towards ends that may or may not be desired by the organisation’s
consumers. In other words, the study raises questions about the nature of customer
orientation in a context where it is deemed more important - for the organisation, the
collective citizenry and for individual users – to shape the preferences of customers than
to respond to them.
24References
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26FIGURE 1: CATEGORIES OF THE CUSTOMER/CONSTRUCTION WORK
Provision of information
Provision of material
resources
MOTIVATED/ACTIVE Training options
Capable
Not Capable
Counselling
PASSIVELY
RECALCITRANT/ UNCOOPERATIVE
Imposition UNCONVINCED
of Capable
regulation Not Capable Confidence building
Evasive/
Benefit focused
Aggressive/
Abusive Motivating/Selling work
Calming/
Steering
Constraining/
Sanctioning
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