Belgian and Swiss service providers faced with the challenge of jobseekers guidance: predominance of stakeholder games or of the collaborative framework?
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852317748200 |
| Author | Céline Remy |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Belgian and Swiss service
providers faced with the
challenge of jobseekers
guidance: predominance
of stakeholder games or
of the collaborative
framework?
Ce
´line Remy
University of Lie
`ge, Belgium
Abstract
The public employment services have contracted out their jobseeker guidance role to
service providers. The article focuses on how the collaboration between the public
services and private employment operators is organised in Belgium and Switzerland.
These partnerships have to contend with two challenges, which are the recruitment of
candidates for training projects and the measurement of the results of the service. Our
initial hypothesis supports the idea that stakeholder games are more effective in solving
critical situations than the collaborative framework. The international comparison
allows us to vary the partnership creation methods and to show a particular articula-
tion between the stakeholder games and collaborative framework.
Points for practitioners
The model of cooperation between public and private operators influences the quality
of the relationship. Some partnership models are more likely to inspire trust between
partners because they leave more room for expression and negotiation than others.
Faced with the difficulties that arise in the course of a collaboration, the private
operators will adopt opportunistic attitudes when the initial frame of the collaboration
Corresponding author:
Ce
´line Remy, Faculte
´des Sciences Sociales (Universite
´de Lie
`ge), Quartier Agora (B31), Place des orateurs 3,
Sart-Tilman – 4000 Lie
`ge, Belgium.
Email: celineremy9@gmail.com
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2019, Vol. 85(4) 692–707
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852317748200
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is narrower and accompanied by a relational asymmetry in order to somehow coun-
teract the lack of a margin of manoeuvre for negotiation.
Keywords
collaborative framework, jobseekers guidance, partnerships, private service providers,
public employment services, stakeholder games
Introduction
At the end of the 1990s, the European Commission
1
encouraged Public Employment
Services (PESs) to contract out part of their jobseeker guidance mission to private
operators (Divay, 2009).
2
PESs do not have enough resources (financial, human,
material) to meet the demands of their diverse audiences. This prompts them to hand
over a part of their mission to private operators who will set up guidance and train-
ing projects.
3
These collaborations are ‘symbiotic’ public–private partnerships
(PPPs) as, in the main, the partners share the same values, missions and objectives
when it comes to managing the unemployed (Mazouz, 2012). The objective of the
projects is either the job placement or skills training of individuals who have good
chances of finding employment, or the development of a skills report or an action
plan for those who have some way to go before getting a foot on the job ladder.
These PPPs constitute a ‘community of practices’ (Belhocine et al., 2005: 7) in
the sense that they are:
a public body [the PES], usually linking private non-profit [or private commercial]
organisations, through projects targeting specific social groups ...who depend essen-
tially on the government for their funding while the government depends on the
organisations to implement its public policies. (Belhocine et al., 2005: 9–10)
Through this type of collaboration, the public and private partners essentially seek
to serve a ‘cause’ (Mazouz, 2012), that is, the public interest, by implementing
‘services intended for specific audiences or responding to changing situations or
emerging needs’ (Lister, 2000).
The PES themselves define the model of collaboration with the service providers
through the development of public contracts. Our study focuses on how public and
private operators manage the difficulties (relational, financial, administrative, etc.)
that undermine trust between them. Two major ‘challenges’ particularly affecting
the private sector have been identified: the first concerns the recruitment of job-
seekers for the projects set up by external operators; and the second concerns the
assessment of their performance.
The hypothesis is that in the face of these challenges, the stakeholders develop
strategies or rely on the collaborative framework to solve them. Two types of
Remy 693
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