Journal article
Can Robots Understand Welfare? Exploring Machine Bureaucracies in Welfare-to-Work
M Considine, M McGann, S Ball, P Nguyen
Journal of Social Policy | Published : 2022
Open access
Abstract
The exercise of administrative discretion by street-level workers plays a key role in shaping citizens' access to welfare and employment services. Governance reforms of social services delivery, such as performance-based contracting, have often been driven by attempts to discipline this discretion. In several countries, these forms of market governance are now being eclipsed by new modes of digital governance that seek to reshape the delivery of services using algorithms and machine learning. Australia, a pioneer of marketisation, is one example, proposing to deploy digitalisation to fully automate most of its employment services rather than as a supplement to face-to-face case management. W..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
A This work was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (GA85559), supported by our industry partners the National Employment Services Association, and Westgate Community Initiatives Group. The authors thank the ARC and our industry partners for their support. Part of the research undertaken for this paper also received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 841477. The views expressed are those of the authors alone. Neither the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, Maynooth University, the European Commission nor the Australian Research Council are responsible for any use that may be made of the information in this article.