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The specification of categories (for example, unemployment, old age, disability) is a well-established feature of social security. However, disability categories are problematic: the evidence on which decisions have to be made is complex, and understandings of the nature of disability are highly contested. Disability categories could be reformed by unification with other categories used in the same policy area (for example, unemployment) or by fragmentation into new, smaller categories, particularly through the use of casework.
Welfare-to-work schemes operate through two main channels: they monitor compliance with work-related conditions for receiving benefits, and they support people into work with job search assistance and training. This article examines how the privatisation of employment service provision affects the balance between compliance and support. It is suggested that private providers working under contracts which reward employment results have little incentive to monitor compliance. This hypothesis is supported by evidence from Australia, where contracts with providers now spell out monitoring procedures and do not heavily reward results. In the Netherlands, approaches to private contracting differ between the social insurance system (which is more oriented to results than compliance) and the social assistance system, where the municipalities are strongly compliance-oriented. The implication is that privatisation does not necessarily contribute towards enforcing benefit recipients’ compliance with work-focused activity conditions.
Categorisation is one of the basic techniques or practices of social policy. We have argued elsewhere that ‘social policy allocates, distributes and delivers benefits and services to households and individuals on the basis of need which people are deemed to have by virtue of belonging to a category’ (Bolderson and Mabbett 199 1 : 15). If we think optimistically of social policy as developing progressively towards a wider and deeper sense of social obligation, we might expect that the development of categories for identifying needs would advance with improvements in social knowledge and the development of social research. It is one reflection of problems facing social policy that categories which might be thought to have long established their usefulness and legitimacy have become highly contested.
This contest is particularly striking in the area of disability, where the definition of the category is challenged fkom several directions. We have suggested elsewhere that disability scores poorly on most indicators of a ‘successfull’ category. The indicators we proposed were ‘the ease with which categories or cases are identified, the viability of the exclusions which must be made in the process, legitimacy (whether members of the category are seen to deserve their membership) and the perceived “fit” between need and membership’ (Bolderson and Mabbett 199 1 : 15). We argued that disability scored high on legitimacy, but low on ease of identification.
Arguably, the rise in numbers of people classified as disabled even jeopardises the legitimacy of the category. Rising numbers on the ‘rolls’ and increasing expenditure on invalidity/iicapacity benefits may be attributed to failures, sometimes thought to be deliberate, on the part of individuals to seek and obtain work.
