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Introduction
A meeting between an adviser and a claimant lies at the heart of many welfare-to-work programmes. The adviser interview has increased in importance as more and more welfare regimes have adopted activation policies in the years since the release of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 1994) Jobs Study. Activation, also called welfare-to-work or workfare, is often packaged as a form of conditionality in which social security beneficiaries are required to engage in work-oriented activities such as job search, training and employment. This approach has seen a shift of responsibility for employment from the state to the individual, with some attempt to accommodate individual needs and preferences (Taylor-Gooby, Reference Taylor-Gooby2011). At the same time, service delivery was redesigned to make an interview between an adviser and a claimant central to activation policy implementation (van Berkel, Reference van Berkel2010). It is at the adviser interview that an individual's obligations and needs are negotiated (Considine, Reference Considine2001; Evans et al., Reference Evans, Eyre, Millar and Sarre2003; van Berkel, Reference van Berkel, Betzelt and Bothfeld2011). In a number of countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the work-focused interview is compulsory for many categories of income support claimants: unemployed people, young people, disabled people and parents (Karagiannaki, Reference Karagiannaki2007; OECD, 2006).
The role out of welfare-to-work policies for lone and partnered parents has been the subject of much research (Cleaveland, Reference Cleaveland2005; Duncan and Edwards, Reference Duncan and Rosalind1999; Naples, Reference Naples1998; Roy et al., Reference Roy, Tubbs and Burton2004; Wright, Reference Wright and Betzelt2011). These studies have shown that mothers act according to rationalities which do not necessarily align with welfare policy, that mothers spend considerable effort maintaining and balancing different aspects of their lives and that beneficiaries care about their dignity in their engagements with the state.
The adviser meetings are the location for important flows of information: from the adviser, information regarding the programme and employment and training opportunities; and from the parent, information regarding their circumstances, history and future plans (van Berkel, Reference van Berkel, Betzelt and Bothfeld2011). However, large workloads and heavy time pressures lead staff to adhere to set procedures which eliminate all but what they regarded as the most essential aspects of the jobs (Howard, C., Reference Howard, Henman and Fenger2006; Wright, Reference Wright and Clasen2002). One staff member described the consequences of limited time, saying they had to concentrate on ‘processing cases rather than assisting people’ (Wright, Reference Wright and Clasen2002: 242). While parents often face difficulties in taking up employment or other work-related activities, they do not always discuss these in adviser meetings (Alexander et al., Reference Alexander, Baxter, Hughes and Renda2005; Social Research Centre, 2005a). In addition, claimants can leave the meeting with an exaggerated sense of their obligations (Alexander et al., Reference Alexander, Baxter, Hughes and Renda2005). An evaluation of the New Deal for Lone Parents in the United Kingdom found that: ‘The quality of fit between the lone parent's needs and the nature and extent of support provided by the adviser appears to be important in explaining its effectiveness’ (Lewis et al. Reference Lewis, Mitchell, Sanderson, O'Connor and Clayden2000: 81).
Yet despite the policy significance of the work focused interview and the importance it holds for claimants, little research has focused on this aspect of the social security experience. When parents sit down with their advisers they are at the hub of welfare-to-work implementation. This paper examines the ‘fit’ of the adviser interview for mothers under the Australian welfare-to-work policy, Australians Working Together, a policy which was implemented and mediated by advisers in conversation with parents. Through interpersonal interactions, workers attempt to transform claimants into particular kinds of workers and citizens (Korteweg, Reference Korteweg2003: 446). Louis Althusser's notion of ‘interpellation’ provides a key to interpreting these interactions. Althusser (Reference Althusser2001), in his essay, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, and later Judith Butler (Reference Butler1997), explain how, through interpellation, subjects come into being. Interpellation offers analysis of street-level bureaucracy a tool for understanding the interface between policy implementers and their target groups.
In this paper, I explore the idea of interpellation in street-level encounters by focusing on the Australians Working Together adviser interviews of three Australian women: Caroline,Footnote 1 for whom the meeting and its results were very positive; Erica, for whom the meeting was a mixed experience; and Ana, for whom the meeting was largely negative and very worrying.
Policy context
The ‘street-level’ interactions between clients and staff, or ‘personal advisers’, have been critical to the implementation of Australian welfare-to-work policy. Parents claiming income support were among the first groups in Australia to experience welfare-to-work programmes. They were preceded by young unemployed people who faced mandatory work and work-related activity requirements under the ‘Work for the Dole’ programme. Parents and people with disabilities were the next groups targeted under the policy called Australians Working Together. Later developments packaged under welfare-to-work policy significantly increased compulsory activity requirements and the groups of claimants to which they applied.
It was in 2003 that, for the first time, parents, whether lone or partnered, were required to engage in employment-related activities in order to remain eligible for support. This marked a significant new policy direction in Australian income support for parents: previously parents on benefits could elect to care for their children full-time until their child reached sixteen years. For most Parenting Payment recipients this did not change. Under Australians Working Together it was only those with the oldest children, those whose youngest child was aged between 13 and 15, who were compelled to participate in an employment-oriented activity (DEWR, 2005).
When the policy was introduced in 2003, 685,000 parents claimed Parenting Payment; 71 per cent were single and 29 per cent partnered (FACSIA, 2006). Nearly all of these were mothers: women made up 92 per cent of single claimants and 90 per cent of partnered claimants. Many parents combined income from employment with their Parenting Payment, nearly half engaging in employment at some time in the twelve months leading up to June 2004 (Blaxland, Reference Blaxland2008: 67).
In the year to June 2004, 58,109 Parenting Payment single claimants and 15,534 partnered claimants were required to sign Participation Agreements which detailed the activities to which they would commit (DEWR, 2005: 30). These activities could include paid work, searching for a job, vocationally oriented voluntary work, training and education. Parents were to be occupied for at least 150 hours every six months, or around six hours per week. Very few parents received an exemption to signing an agreement, just 316 single claimants and 122 partnered (DEWR, 2005: 30). Failure to attend a meeting with a personal adviser or to comply with participation requirements could result in a substantial financial penalty in which payments were reduced by 18 per cent for twenty-six weeks for the first infringement, 24 per cent for twenty-six weeks for the second infringement or stopped completely for eight weeks for the third infringement (National Welfare Rights Network, 2004: 2).
In arguing for the need to introduce compulsory activity requirements for parents, Australian government representatives invoked specific conceptions of welfare recipients, workers, parents and mothers (Blaxland, Reference Blaxland, Goodwin and Huppatz2010). The key issues for government were, as it termed them, ‘welfare dependency’ and ‘mutual obligation’ (see, for example, Centrelink, 2002; Howard, J., Reference Howard1997; Newman, Reference Newman1999). ‘Welfare dependency’ conflates multiple meanings of dependency, so that by being financially dependent on income support claimants are also regarded as psychologically dependent, exhibiting excessive neediness and a lack of will (Fraser and Gordon, Reference Fraser and Gordon1994). Of particular concern was ‘intergenerational dependency’, in which feckless mothers rear feckless children (raised by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, for example, in Australia, House of Representatives, 2002). It was argued that without intervention by government, parents would not act in their own best interests and so not engage in employment, as all good citizens, all good parents, should (Shaver, Reference Shaver2001). The solution was ‘mutual obligation’ a system which compelled parents claiming benefits to seek and take employment – in this way parents would fulfil their citizenship obligation to work. It is notable that these concerns focus on the failings of claimants rather than those of the labour market or government employment programs. They also ignore the unpaid work of parenting as a social contribution.
Methodology
When I interviewed mothers claiming Parenting Payment, it was clear that contact with bureaucrats lay at the centre of their experience of Australians Working Together. I conducted thirty-three interviews with sixteen mothers whose youngest child was aged between twelve and fifteen years old – those subject (or about to be subject) to the new participation requirements. I met with most women several times, both before and after their first contact with an adviser. All women except one were based in Sydney in the inner, southern or western suburbs; the other lived in regional New South Wales. Only one mother was married. The remainder were living in one-parent families, and of these two mothers were widowed.
I contacted potential research participants through a range of indirect methods using a passive sampling technique. I approached a diverse group of organisations for assistance and with their permission promoted the research to their members or service users. Low-income parents of teenage children proved difficult to find. They appeared not to be linked into services like parents of younger children so I also spread word through friends, colleagues and family. Most mothers who took part in the research did so after a trusted person told them about the study.
The interviews were loosely structured and conversational. While guiding the direction of our conversation across the range of topics I anticipated I would need to explore, I also tried to allow the participants to lead the discussion and raise aspects of their experience I had not previously considered. Where I had permission from the respondents, I made audio recordings of the interviews, which were later transcribed. Three women preferred that the interview be conducted in Arabic, so I spoke to them with the aid of an interpreter.
I selected the themes through which I analysed the data by immersing myself in the interviews and the transcripts to determine which issues were most important to mothers as ‘expert practitioners of their everyday worlds’ and which also spoke to key aspects of welfare policy (Smith Reference Smith1987: 161). In analysing the interviews I was seeking to understand how small daily acts fit within a complex of social relations (Smith Reference Smith1987: 167); that is, how the elements of everyday life for a woman claiming Parenting Payment are organised by and contribute to a web of interacting family, policy, social, educational and economic relations.
In this paper, I focus on just three cases: Caroline, Erica and Ana. The experience of these three women is representative of the range of experiences of the other mothers in my study. I selected Caroline, Erica and Ana because they most clearly illustrated the interpellation of their street-level encounters.
Interpellation on the policy front line
The meaning of Australians Working Together more fully materialised for the mothers in this study when they attended their adviser meetings. It is through these street-level bureaucrats that citizens encounter government and, therefore, government policy (Lipsky, Reference Lipsky1980). When mothers discussed what it is like to claim Parenting Payment, they talked not about the fortnightly receipt of money into their bank account, or how it helps them to support their families, although these elements do feature, but of going to the office and dealing with staff. These interpersonal interactions constitute a large part of parents’ experience of welfare policy. So, as Anna Korteweg (Reference Korteweg2003: 452) explains, ‘“welfare-reliant” women's citizenship is constructed in the moments when they meet representatives of the welfare state face-to-face’.
The notion of interpellation is useful for interpreting mothers’ experiences in adviser meetings. Althusser (Reference Althusser2001: 118) characterises interpellation using the example of a police officer hailing someone, ‘Hey, you there!’. The subject who thinks ‘Oh, that's me’, and turns to the police officer in response, has recognised themselves in the call and behaved accordingly. In doing so, they simultaneously recognise that they are the subject of the summons and that they are subject to the person or institution that so summoned them. That is, they recognise themselves in the ideological framework that addresses them. This discussion focuses on that moment of recognition.
Claimants already know they are subject to the welfare office and to government; that is reinforced for them all the time. But in welfare-to-work adviser interviews, they are addressed as subjects of a particular type. Althusser (Reference Althusser2001: 119) writes that ‘individuals are always-already subjects’. Butler explains this by arguing that interpellation inaugurates a subject while simultaneously citing convention (Butler, Reference Butler1997: 33). It is inaugurating when a subject recognises themselves, the interpellation is ‘introduc[ing] a reality, rather than report[ing] on an existing one’. This is achieved by drawing upon convention so that, in responding to the hail, the subject thinks: ‘That's me, I am one of those kinds of people.’
Claimants are not just passive subjects in these exchanges. The police officer might call and instead the subject protests, ‘That is not me, you must be mistaken!’ (Butler, Reference Butler1997: 33). So, too, do claimants act and direct and shape the proceedings. The mothers I interviewed believed that they had to manage relations with social security staff strategically so as to attain a good outcome. One of the mothers described the interaction as involving a performance – a performance that she said was ‘Academy Award winning’. Other mothers spoke of monitoring themselves and their behaviour to maximise positive outcomes. In this they were ‘presenting themselves’, as Goffman (Reference Goffman1959) termed it. The adviser interviews were critical occasions for performance because:
often the interviewer will have to make decisions of far-reaching importance for the interviewee on the sole basis of information gained from the applicant's interview-performance. (Goffman, Reference Goffman1959: 225)
Here Goffman was referring to job interviews, but such a description applies equally to interactions between income support claimants and with advisers. Despite encountering resistance, the police officer may continue to call because describing someone is not the primary purpose of interpellation, it is to establish her as a subject, something which is done through reiteration (Butler, Reference Butler1997). This is not to say that there are few possibilities for resistance, or that resistance is always worn down, but that interpellation is persistent and persuasive.
Working at Centrelink
Before detailing the experience of Caroline, Erica and Ana, I provide some context for the work of the advisers with whom they met. The way advisers did their job was shaped by their local office culture, policy rules, quotas and targets, workloads and time pressures. The meetings between Parenting Payment claimants and their advisers took place in the local Centrelink office. Centrelink was a statutory authority which administered Commonwealth income support payments on behalf of government departments (Centrelink, 2005). The personal advisers who conducted the annual interviews with parents were employed by Centrelink.
Centrelink staff have high case loads. In his ethnographic study of Centrelink offices, Cosmo Howard (Reference Howard, Henman and Fenger2006) found individual staff members were commonly responsible for over 1,000 clients. This was in a service delivery system that was intended to match each client with a particular staff member in order for the service to be more tailored to the individual. Even if the advisers who met with Parenting Payment recipients with teenaged children had fewer clients due to the expectation that they were to engage more intensively with the people they met, it seems likely that they were nonetheless responsible for hundreds of claimants each. A few of the staff in Howard's (Reference Howard, Henman and Fenger2006) study said they felt that they were able to develop a rapport with some clients, but most felt the large caseloads and infrequency of meetings made such a relationship impossible. In addition, many advisers were solely responsible for parents from multiple Centrelink offices: 100 advisers serviced over 300 Centrelink offices (Centrelink, 2005; Social Research Centre, Reference Taylor-Gooby2005b). The extent of these responsibilities put heavy time pressure on advisers (Howard, C., Reference Howard, Henman and Fenger2006).
The advisers were provided with a computer-directed script that led them through a series of questions about parents’ employment, education, care-responsibilities and plans for the future. While the advisers did not need to follow the script, they did need to complete each section of the form on the computer screen. The questions focused heavily on employment, giving much less opportunity to the advisers and parents to discuss care (Blaxland, Reference Blaxland2008). This reflects the strong concern with employment and limited recognition of care in government arguments for welfare reform discussed above. In addition, staff were required to meet performance targets, such as referring a number of parents to a particular type of service. This kind of mechanism can affect the way that staff operate and the kind of service that claimants receive (van Berkel, Reference van Berkel, Betzelt and Bothfeld2011). For example, after several years of increasing numbers of penalties being applied to income support claimants, Centrelink policy changed, and as a result staff felt encouraged to thoroughly investigate a possible breach, rather than feeling pressured to apply penalties. As a result, the number of penalties fell (Pearce et al., Reference Pearce, Disney and Ridout2002). Here we can see evidence of the state acting ‘through these representatives whose discourse are proscribed but not completely determined by the policies they implement’ (Korteweg, Reference Korteweg2003: 253).
Nearly all the sixteen mothers I interviewed had kind words to say about advisers personally. At the very least, most felt that the advisers were just doing their job. A Social Research Centre (2005a) survey of this group of Parenting Payment claimants also found high levels of positive reporting about the adviser role in the interviews. The detail of mothers’ experience varied widely though, as Caroline, Erica and Ana's stories demonstrate.
Caroline
Caroline lived in a regional town in New South Wales with two teenage boys, the youngest of her four sons. Caroline said the adviser interview was designed to help her plan for future employment and financial self-sufficiency. She explained:
I had to go for an interview one time, that was late last year, and because they asked me what I was going to do and what my plans were and that sort of thing. I did tell her that I was doing part-time work with [a] home nursing service, because I was just doing domestic work with them. And then she said, ‘There is a nursing course coming up next year, would you like to do that sort of thing?’ We discussed it and, well, actually, it was Centrelink that put me on to it, yes. So then . . . when I saw the enrolments in the paper, well I thought I would go up and enrol in the course. [my emphasis]
Having discussed Caroline's current activities, the Centrelink adviser suggested that she might like to expand her skills by enrolling in a nursing course. The idea appealed to Caroline and she later began that training. A number of elements aligned to make the interview work for Caroline. She had had a few different jobs over the past five or six years and was committed to her employment. Her youngest son would reach his sixteenth birthday six months after we met and she wanted to establish herself so that she could manage solely on her employment income once her Parenting Payment eligibility ceased. Caroline was already employed in work that she enjoyed and her adviser suggested training which would extend her skills in that area, taking her from a cleaner in a nursing home to a nursing assistant.
I started TAFE this year because I knew I was coming off the pension next year and I thought, ‘Well I've got this opportunity to do it.’ And also Centrelink paid for the course for me, which was $360 or something. So I thought, ‘Well I had better get in and get it done.’ I did work experience a few weeks back and they liked me that much they employed me.
Caroline found studying challenging, but she persisted and was proud to be near to completion and to have found employment already.
Caroline's circumstances, her sense of herself and her plans for the future were well aligned with the purpose of the interview, the adviser's overall approach and the adviser's specific suggestion. Reading Caroline's description of her decision to enrol in nursing training, we see that the advice about the course accorded so closely with Caroline's own interests, that at first she did not remember that the suggestion had come from her adviser. She said, ‘actually it was Centrelink that put me onto it, yes’. This was an effect of an interpellation in which Caroline was ‘steered’ in the ‘right direction’. It worked because Caroline could recognise herself as the subject that her adviser addressed. The personal adviser mediated the interpellation by the state, hailing Caroline with a call that fitted precisely – as a worker with potential. For Caroline, the interview was a great success. She undertook training in a new area; she proved herself capable of meeting a new challenge; she found she was a good student and a valuable employee; and she was confident she would be able to support herself once she could no longer claim Parenting Payment.
Erica
Erica's experience with her adviser was not so positive. Mediated by a different adviser, the hail was different, as was Erica's response. When she first mentioned the interview to me, she said, ‘I have been annoyed when I have come out of Centrelink before, but this time I went away feeling I needed a shower.’
Erica lived in Sydney with the younger of her two sons, aged fourteen. Erica's employment was very important to her. She took a great deal of pride in her work and was close to her employers. She had worked part-time with the same very small firm for more than ten years, but at the time of her adviser interview the business was barely operating because of her employer's ill health. As a result, Erica had been without paid work for about three months. Like many without work, Erica was deeply uncomfortable about it, so she bridled when asked:
‘What have you done since you left school?’ Here's this twenty years younger than me woman asking, at that stage a fifty-year-old woman . . . who's lived in other states and been involved in running her own businesses, who has lived, I feel sometimes, ten lives. She showed me the sheet and there was, you know, one or two lines. [allocated for the answer]
Erica said she was expected to summarise her life since high school into just a few sentences. She felt this question, and the space allowed for the answer, assumed she had done very little since leaving school, that she had little employment experience and/or was very young. Erica felt the overall interview implied that she was not committed to employment.
Maybe I was supersensitive and ridiculous but I don't think so. I just felt insulted. I think there was a presumption in some of them [the questions] that you are not wanting to do anything, you're a lazy person or you're a dole bludger . . . And like I said, there was not one question that you could pull out of there and say, ‘Look this is atrocious.’ . . . It's a sequence of questions that can give you that impression, not just one question in isolation . . . As I said, I came away really, really angry. [her emphasis]
Erica describes being interpellated: ‘you're a lazy person’, ‘you're a dole bludger’. Unlike Caroline, Erica did not want to recognise herself in the call. She said, ‘I felt cornered. And this is when I was unemployed.’ Erica confronted her socially constituted self (Butler, Reference Butler1997: 31); that is, she could see that since she was not in paid work at the time, she would be regarded as unemployed. Backed into a corner, Erica felt she had to ‘keep justifying myself all the time’, but since she was out of work, she felt that her defence carried little weight. She could not even detail her long work history, because the questionnaire did not allow room for it. Erica protests, but she is not, herself, really convinced, she knows she is unemployed and so feels unable to avoid the ‘bludger’ and ‘lazy’ stereotypes which accompany that status.
In contrast, it was with complete conviction that Erica protested the characterisation of her parenting. Her son has a disability and very early in his life she ‘decided to be hands on . . . With that Centrelink were part of my life.’ For Erica, claiming Parenting Payment was a necessity because of her commitment to good mothering. Prioritising her son's care precluded full-time employment. Erica felt that the adviser interview, by stressing the importance of employment, devalued her parenting.
I don't think my parenting now is valued as much and it's probably the same with any parent, I guess, whether they've got a child with a disability or not . . . But somehow it is legitimate when you have got a child under five, but when you have got an older child then your parenting input isn't as valuable. And that was being emphasised by this . . . by a lot of the underlying assumptions, I think, of the interview and what it's aiming to do.
Erica faced a hail which sought to interpellate her as someone for whom parenting had receded in importance in comparison with paid employment, and Erica demurred.
However, while Erica did make some protest during her interview and made sure that the adviser knew her son had a disability, she did not describe his care needs in detail. ‘I insinuated, I made sure that the officer knew at least a reasonable context of my son's life and mine.’ Erica is a private person and would not have been comfortable discussing her personal life with a stranger, telling me, ‘I actually never discuss my private situation with most people.’ Nor did she disclose her ongoing health problems at the adviser interview.
For the same reason, it was not until the adviser sought to register Erica for voluntary work to learn basic office skills that Erica revealed that she was dedicating more than the required six hours each week to unpaid work maintaining her employer's business. Here Erica was most pleased with what she saw as her collaboration with the adviser:
She was reasonable, she was very reasonable. So, now what did she write in there? She accepted that, she personally accepted that. But I could tell, because in fact she asked, staring at the computer, ‘How will we get this?’ was her comment. ‘How will we put this?’ So I got the feeling that unless she did put it in a certain way it wouldn't be regarded as valid. [her emphasis]
Here, the adviser, prompted by Erica, communicated quite a different message: one of a joint effort to manage bureaucratic requirements. This Erica could recognise herself in. It was the approach she had adopted with Centrelink officers in the past as a way of coping with administrative requirements. She invited them to help her find a better way. The risk in this strategy, which Erica acknowledged, was that officers might not be amenable – if they were sticklers for process, for example. In this case, Erica was fortunate and they developed a Participation Agreement she was happy with.
It is possible that with a different adviser, Erica may have developed the same agreement anyway, as her unpaid work met the activity requirements. However, by feeling that she was collaborating with the adviser to reach a mutually satisfactory result, Erica felt that she and the adviser had a mutual understanding. Both recognised that the other needed to find a way to fulfil requirements. In doing so, they developed a degree of mutual respect. Despite this, overall, Erica said: ‘that wasn't me when I looked at it. Because of the type of questions that I had to be asked.’ Erica felt that Australians Working Together addressed her wrongly. The policy, as it unfolded through the adviser interview structure, could not recognise her.
Ana
Ana had five children and lived with the youngest two, aged fifteen and eighteen. She migrated to Australia before her children were born and has been a lone mother for around twenty years. With her attention focused on raising her children, Ana had learnt only a little English. Her eighteen-year-old daughter required particular care and had difficulties with learning and communication.
Ana had been to two adviser meetings. She was very worried about the end of her entitlement to Parenting Payment. Ana told me that the adviser said, ‘You need to be prepared to look for a job. The payment will change and it will be less.’
Like Erica, Ana protested. She told the adviser that she was sick and would not be able to hold down a job:
I can't walk properly. I have heart problems, a disk in my back causes pain. I get migraines. I get dizzy. I fall. I have been taken to hospital . . . I took my medicine with me to show them, but they didn't look at it. I took a medical certificate; they said, ‘Everyone is giving us these. It doesn't mean anything.’
I said to them, ‘Who's going to give me a job? With my age, language barriers?’ . . . ‘I can't even finish my housework, so how can I do tasks at work?’ . . . I told them about problems reading and writing. I felt they didn't care . . . I told them I need to care for my daughter.
Faced with the activity requirement, Ana exposed the details of her life to Centrelink. Ana revealed her ill-health, showing her medicines and doctor's certificate as proof; she exposed her limited English, her literacy problems and the care needs of her daughter. Ana's strategy was to present herself as earnest and willing to take employment but faced with barriers which made it impossible. But she felt that her description of her circumstances was not believed or that these problems were not regarded as significant.
When Ana's medical certificate was dismissed with an ‘it doesn't mean anything’, the Centrelink officer was reflecting a trend in government policy. In 2004, the rate at which medical certificates were rejected had more than doubled since the previous year. The then Acting Minister for Family and Community Services explained why:
This represents a deliberate government approach to ensure that, instead of where the old (system) just accepted a medical certificate as gospel and didn't take into account any other individual circumstances, under the new system an individual's case is looked at more closely. (Andrews, cited in Karvelas, Reference Karvelas2004: 1–2)
While it might have seemed that Andrews was arguing for a holistic approach to individuals’ circumstances, it is not necessary to reject a medical certificate in order to take other aspects of people's lives into account when determining whether or not they might be able to seek employment. Many people who engage in paid work have disabilities or illnesses, but this remains an element of their lives that should be considered. Instead, Andrews rejected the validity of medical certificates as a ‘deliberate government approach’. Staff were working in an environment in which they were instructed to disbelieve claimants. Even a medical certificate was not taken as sufficient evidence that someone had a genuine health problem.
It was not clear to me if Ana entered into a Participation Agreement at her adviser appointment. She had no knowledge of Australians Working Together, only that her Parenting Payment would cease when her son turned sixteen. However, she was attending English language classes and a flower-arranging course, either of which could have qualified as agreement activities. So it is difficult to know if she signed a contract agreeing to undertake or continue with these activities or if her adviser waived the activity requirement. Very few exemptions were granted, only 438 were given out of 73,600 agreements signed in 2004 (DEWR, 2005: 30). So it seems likely that Ana did sign an agreement, but she had no sense that she had entered into a contractual arrangement and so no understanding that she could be penalised for ceasing or changing her activities.
I wasn't at Ana's adviser meeting, so I don't know what was said, but if the adviser addressed Ana in the terms of the policy, as a worker or as dependent, for example, Ana didn't recognise it. She neither recognised herself as that subject nor recognised that that subject was someone she was not. She just saw that they didn't care.
Conclusion
In its restated Jobs Strategy of 2006, the OECD recognised the importance of adviser interviews and advocated for expanded use of these interviews in income support policy (OECD, 2006: 21). Work-focused interviews have grown in significance and require greater research attention as they are a critical element of beneficiaries’ experience. The policy implementation interface, in which the claimant meets and negotiates with an adviser, is highly important because it is commonly at that meeting that workfare obligations are explained and agreed upon. Moreover, it is at the adviser interview that the citizen encounters the state – in this case, the income-support-claiming citizen meets the welfare-to-work policy of the state. Her experience of this meeting influences her experience of the policy. Althusser's concept of interpellation offers a tool with which to investigate this street-level interaction.
Caroline, Erica and Ana each had different experiences of the same welfare-to-work programme. While the meeting with the adviser formed the core of their participation in the programme, each was interpellated in a different way. The combination of the way the policy was mediated by the adviser, and so the kind of hail they made, with the response of the mother, made each adviser interview different. Despite this, most of the women I interviewed had experiences similar to that of one of these three women.
On the ground, policy does not quite create the subjects described by government: those welfare-dependent women needing compulsion to work. Nevertheless, the interpellation at the adviser interviews fitted within the general scope of activation policy. Caroline responded with total recognition, as Althusser would put it, saying, ‘That's obvious! That's right! That's true!’ (Althusser, Reference Althusser2001: 116). Erica, in contrast, responded as Butler (Reference Butler1997: 33) suggested one might, by recognising ‘those types of people’ but disputing that she was one of them. Finally, and importantly, Ana's experience shows that if there is no recognition of the convention which interpellation cites, then that policy subject is not made – because she neither accepts nor rejects the hail.
Caroline, Erica and Ana's experience show the complexity of subject-making in welfare-to-work policy when it is put into action. The interaction between the mother, the adviser and the policy create the ‘fit’ that makes an interpellated subject. Bringing the concept of interpellation to the analysis of street-level bureaucracy illuminates the interplay of ideology, policy, front-line worker and citizen on the front line.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Natasha Cortis, Phillip Mar, Bettina Cass and Deborah Brennan for their insightful comments on this article. This research was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award and a British Council Chevening Scholarship.
