New Article: Benjamin, Contracting-Out Israeli Social Services

Benjamin, Orly. “Gendered Corrosion of Occupational Knowledge: Contracting-Out Israeli Social Services.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 5.3 (2016).
 
URL: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/EDI-05-2015-0035
 
Abstract

When public agencies seek to privatize a service, a commissioning process begins wherein public sector budgeters must decide how generous the funding will be while taking occupational standards into account so that the quality of service is assured. One important area of occupational standards is the required personnel and job sizes of certified employees. Not enough attention has been directed to how occupational standards’ related knowledge is treated in the process. Purpose: Firstly, investigating how the commissioning process is experienced by Israeli, often female, occupational standards administrators. Secondly, proposing a gendered perspective on Sennett’s corrosion of character thesis. As part of an institutional ethnography project, 16 interviews were conducted with (14 female and 2 male) occupational standards administrators at the Israeli Welfare, Education and Health Ministries. The routine of commissioning involves a stage of using occupational standards’ knowledge and experience, and a stage of dismissing it. The ‘corrosion of character’ embedded in the dismissal stage undermines historical achievements in the area of recognizing caring work and skills. While Sennett’s thesis has already been found plausible for understanding public servants’ experiences of the “new public management”, until recently, not enough attention has been devoted to the commissioning processes’ gendered implications for contract-based delivery of services. This paper examines these implications for the power struggle between the feminist achievements protecting skill recognition in caring occupations, and policy makers.

 

 

 

New Article: Benjamin, Negotiating Job Quality in Contracted-Out Services

Benjamin, Orly. “Negotiating Job Quality in Contracted-Out Services: An Israeli Institutional Ethnography.” In The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency (ed. Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever; Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 149-69.

 

 

Extract

I forward an analysis of the process of preparing contracts themselves prior to service operation, and the negotiations between various public sector administrators that shape employees’ job quality. I make use of Dorothy Smith’s (2005) methodology of institutional ethnography for the purpose of understanding how job quality is shaped for both certified and uncertified employees in the social services commissioned by the Israeli Welfare, Education, and Health ministries.