Employer engagement with government employment and skills initiatives

This PhD thesis is a critical realist multiple case study of employers in England, to establish why employers engage in Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP). The policy background is government employment policies designed to help at the margins of the labour market where job entry barriers are high. State employment policies in most OECD countries are ALMP, in which conditionality rules for receipt of welfare are focused on labour market entry. Policymakers are intrigued to know the characteristics of the five percent of employers associated with a tolerant disposition towards hiring “activated” disadvantaged candidates, so they can look for employers with similar characteristics. The study viewed the topic from an organisational perspective, which meant trying to understand and explain a range of structures, powers and mechanisms that influence employers to engage. The conclusion from analysing demi-regularities in the empirical data of 30 employers is that the employer ALMP engagement cycle preserves structural barriers to the labour market for vulnerable groups. Umney et al., (2018) reached a similar conclusion about the ineffectiveness of ALMP to rectify employer recruitment discrimination, but from a critical theory perspective. The study’s contributions to literature are (a) an empirical description of engaged employers in their settings in the context of England and a single ALMP programme; (b) an empirically based interpretation of the cues participant employers utilised during their ALMP engagement to determine whether to engage in recruiting workers with employment disadvantages ahead of those at the front of the job queue; and (c) a tentative Mid-Range Theory of variations between employers, grounded in these experiences. The study broadens our understanding of the intentions of employers who recruit disadvantaged labour from state employment agencies. The study also highlights the potential usefulness of a critical realist multi-case analysis to employer engagement research, in accord with methodological encouragement from Kessler and Bach (2014).

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Greenwich

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Meredith, Richard

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• McGurk, Patrick

• HD Industries. Land use. Labor

Language dc:language

en