Gendering Israel's outsourcing: The erasure of employees’ caring skills

Orly Benjamin Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 207 pp., £82.00, ISBN: 978-3-319-40726-5 (Print) 978-3-319-40727-2 (Online)

Calls for nuanced accounts of neoliberalism, both as a discourse and a form of governmentality, have encouraged quite a few authors in the area of social policy and administration to consider managerialism as a multi-faceted force that drives reforms in the provision of services in democratic welfare states. One question that recent research has raised in this context concerns the way managerialism and marketization have affected the norms of professional service delivery. More specifically, this question directs attention to the extent to which current service delivery relies upon people with specific training and expertise. The preference for cheap and effective services has too often had the effect of overloading professionals with administrative work in ways that reduce their paid time in the health, education and welfare services, alongside the allocation of increasingly more work to uncertified employees.

Rather than engaging in the question of how neoliberalization shapes the provision of services, Orly Benjamin's book utilizes the process in its Israeli form as an opportunity to deal with several theoretical questions that are drawn from the methodology of institutional ethnography. How do the power relations between managerial professionalism and occupational professionalism reflect a gendered power struggle for and against the right to care? How does the caring self embedded within the outsourcing of social services interact with the historical struggle for and against appropriate remuneration for skilled work? How do claims for recognition made by those employed by outsourced services interact with the struggle over social citizenship based on the entitlement to redistribution, recognition and representation? And, finally, how should entitlement be analysed as we transition from a social welfare model that recognizes the skills of street-level workers such as teachers, nurses, social workers and other social service employees to a model whose goal is to keep state expenses for social services at a minimum?

The questions raised in this book are a good illustration of the possibilities of contradiction, contestations, forms of refusal and resistance that coincide with the accommodation of managerialism. The major contradiction indicated by Benjamin's responses to the theoretical questions arises from the discussion of the right to care. Israeli public administration is committed to equality and diversity in women's employment, and gender neutrality is generally maintained with regard to promotions and salaries. However, exclusion is not considered a gendered issue. Therefore, when it comes to those excluded from public types of employment, the form that this gender neutrality takes is similar to the denial of workers’ rights. Benjamin's findings present three sources of contestation: (1) the new unionism, which reinforces employees’ refusal to cooperate with the terms of their employment; (2) the entitlements of the older regimes; and (3) social comparisons with counterparts still employed based on collective agreements.

In her search for forms of resistance and accommodation, Benjamin's main contribution is by conceptualizing the notion of ‘privatized entitlement’ in which the employee's sense of entitlement becomes a secret. Based on Jacobson's understandings of job insecurity as a secret, here the sense of entitlement is the secret. Employees who lack significant social resources validating their entitlement to the recognition of their skills perceive themselves as highly skilled but are unable to find a language through which their own definition of the situation can be voiced. Job insecurity plays a major role in Benjamin's account of this privatized entitlement. Her findings show that the status of the entitlement as a secret is resolved once those who dare to voice by demanding an improvement in their remuneration hear their employers or superiors telling them to leave if they are unhappy, because there are others waiting to take their jobs. The notion of ‘privatized entitlement’ then is Benjamin's answer to Clarke's resistance and accommodation aspect. On the inner, personal level, employees resist by holding on to a sense of entitlement as part of their self-definition. On the social and political level, they often prefer to be accommodating, because labour struggles have not always proved to have positive outcomes.

Semi-structured interviews with employees of contracted out services serve as Benjamin's database for the analysis, but this is just the starting point. She also uses Smith's institutional ethnography to map bureaucratic procedures. To follow the procedure through which the contracts with non-governmental service operators are designed, more interviews were conducted with two types of administrators in the Israeli welfare, health and education ministry: those in charge of budgeting and those in charge of occupational standards. Each interviewee indicated which administrator was next in the process, so, for example, when the occupational standards administrators were interviewed, they pointed to the budgeting administrators involved in the procedure. These interviews facilitated the analysis of the power relations that emerged in the process of designing a contract. Mapping these power struggles illustrates how neoliberal ideas become practical instructions, and how managerialism becomes the ‘organizational glue’ that marginalizes most aspects of occupational professionalism. The vivid descriptions of the negotiations in the ministries certainly provide an idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ that managerialism is leading in these institutional spaces.

An original vantage point in this analysis are the discussions of emotionality among each category of participants. Most powerful perhaps are the emotions of the occupational standards administrators, who are not usually perceived as ‘victims’ of precarious employment in privatized services. However, here they appear to experience shame and humiliation in their encounters with budgeting administrators who undertake to ‘re-educate’ them, wanting them to become more rational and concerned about the costs of their requirements for a more professional, and costly, workforce.

Of the seven quite engaging chapters in this book, one major weakness appears in chapter three, where the author attempts to bring together the issue of ‘doing gender’ as a mechanism for operating cheap services and a brief historical analysis of local managerialism as the dominant form of governmentality. The chapter has too many goals, so its various parts do not connect to each other, and the chapter is long and a bit tedious. In addition, the actual mechanism through which managerialism-based governmentality has dominated Israeli public administration remains somewhat vague, lost in the attempt to link the local administration with global government procurement codes and agreements. At the same time, the chapter certainly provides some basic understanding in this area, an understanding that could benefit novice readers on trade agreements and public administration. Moreover, while some public policy and administration scholars may criticize the lack of public policy and administration theories, many others will find Benjamin's analysis an excellent source for new potential theoretical developments in our field. Many of the discussions and claims in this book can be adopted by and developed for public administration and policy theories including issues involving the interactions between politicians and bureaucrats, street-level bureaucrats, and public privatization and reforms.

Hence, reading Benjamin's book reminds us of the real need for better integration between social policy scholars and public policy and administration scholars, who are often telling the same stories in different languages. Such integration would be advantageous for scholars from both fields. This point brings me to the question of who would benefit from the book. Public administration scholars would benefit particularly from chapters three and five. Feminists in general and researchers studying the role of women in the labour market in particular would benefit from chapters one, two, four (dealing with the importance of unionization) and six in which the author proposes a political strategy she defines as a bridge between social forces that can promote services that are both feminist and democratic, leading to a caring democracy. Those interested in the more theoretical issues of professionalization, citizenship and the association between emotions and social change would enjoy the concluding chapter. I found many sections of the book suitable for teaching as well.