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The purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of two social investment strategies (labour activation and governance coordination) targeted to social assistance clients within three different welfare-system coordination cases, with focus on social and economic inclusion.

The authors focus on the impact of reform at micro (individually experienced impact), meso (impact across settings) and macro (socio-structural impact) levels.

While social investment reform has given some clients new opportunities, in no study case were clients fully able to use the incentive-driven strategies. Reforms have led to a “Matthew effect”: the better resourced reap the largest benefit from new services on offer while the less resourced have their marginal socioeconomic position reinforced. Clients may internalise their relative activation success. Intimate connections between macro- and micro-impacts may have heightened the sense of social and economic exclusion, stigma and shame experienced by those who are most vulnerable.

Social investment reform (labour activation) may not be a model that reduces social and economic exclusion and it may, instead, reify socioeconomic marginalisation, enhancing sense of stigma and shame and reducing self-efficacy.

Scholars have assessed social investment according to its economic performance, but there has been a lack of research considering impact of reform on socioeconomic inclusion.

Concerning the decision-making of frontline bureaucrats, research has suggested that caseworkers take into account a broader range of legal, organisational, professional and personal aspects. Their decision-making can offset social rights, when it neglects policy goals, but it can support social rights if the decisions consider clients' perspective.

Based on a factorial survey experiment with 197 Viennese caseworkers of the employment service, the caseworkers were asked how likely they would be to refer nine different typical clients to the introductory session for the programme “Women into Technical and Craft Professions”, whereby different dimensions were altered to grasp regulations and clients' perspective.

In the multilevel analysis, the interest of the clients in a technical-educational programme demonstrates the strongest positive effect, which complies with the programme's political intention. Other pertinent criteria may support clients' interests and the organizational performance goals, but neglect clients' position, when they counteract performance goals. Primarily, caseworkers do what they must and follow mandatory and performance criteria.

On the caseworker's level, further research should aim to reach larger samples. Furthermore, the impact of performance goals on caseworker's decision making has to regard different professional groups beside personnel and labour market experts.

The findings suggest that a focus on the micro-level is needed to evaluate the impact of social policies. The practitioner's position is crucial to juggling legal goals and client's need.

Performance goals ought to better reflect social rights on a broader scale.

This article provides new evidence on the level of discretion caseworkers execute.

Social policy tries to foster (re)integration into the labour market and social inclusion via specific programmes. The purpose of this article is to expand knowledge about the common experiences of people in such schemes.

A total of four group discussions were conducted in four different Austrian cities. The added collective dimension is at least as important to the understanding of the felt experience of labour activation recipients as their individualised views.

Collectively, activation is not something that is experienced as promoting lasting inclusion; rather, participants express a common line of argument towards a situation of “permanent entry”. Activation programmes allow for a certain form of support but do that in a specific and restricted way.

The authors could only obtain an explorative analysis by contrasting four discussions which rely only on the opinion of participants and not of caseworkers.

One has to define how to implement activation policies in reality so that they do not foster “permanent entry” which becomes a societal norm for specific groups.

Social policy needs to be discussed including the perspective of participants in reforms.

The paper contributes to the debate on inclusion and exclusion. Instead of the dominant logic of achieving social inclusion via activation, it treats the issue of “permanent entry” to programmes.

The administration of social assistance benefits is devolved to local agencies in Belgium, which raises questions about how much variation in spell lengths of benefit receipt is associated with differences across agencies. We address this issue by analysing the monthly hazard of benefit exit using administrative record data for 14,270 individuals in 574 welfare agencies. Our random-effects model allows for differences in both the observed and unobserved characteristics of beneficiaries and of local agencies. There are large differences in median benefit duration for individuals serviced by different welfare agencies: the range is from two months to more than 24 months. We find strong associations between beneficiary characteristics (sex, age, foreign nationality, citizenship acquisition, work history and being a student) and spell length. The estimates show higher odds of exiting social assistance receipt in bigger municipalities and in agencies which provide more generous supplementary assistance, and also strong evidence of shorter episodes in agencies where active labour market programme participation rates are higher.

Re-abling care of frail older people is highly on the agenda in several countries. The purpose of this paper is to have a closer look at the argumentation used for its establishment by local policy actors in the field and the kind of expectations towards the behaviour of frail older people it entails.

The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 17 local policy actors in two Danish municipalities. The interviews have been analysed with the help of argumentative discourse analysis.

The most important argument for re-abling care appears to be grounded in economic reasons. However, a second, moral argument was found revolving around the older peoples’ activity, which contributes to the establishment of moral expectations towards frail older people to be active.

As the goal of the study was to analyse understandings and values of key local actors, the implementation of re-ablement programmes and the users’ perspective were not studied.

The paper contributes to the investigation of the shift from universal entitlement as a right to towards market rationalities in Danish elder care.