Labour Market Experts and Their Professional Practices: Technologies of Self-Control of Job Placement Professionals

In the past 20 years the trend towards New Public Management became prominent in labour market reforms all around Europe and had a deep impact on the transformation of welfare states. In Germany the Public Employment Service (PES) as the central actor was transformed from a traditional bureaucratic institution to a managerial service provider which had an enduring effect on job-oriented placement activities and the placement professionals. The introduction of controlling, management by objectives, computer-supported placement activities, service orientation, customer segmentation, and action programs are typical features of an administrative managerial organization that follows business routines to increase efficiency and formal rationalization in the era of neo-liberalism. Under the New Public Management regime the work of the placement personnel is structured differently: On the one hand the job placement professionals are labour market experts with an extended scope of action. In counselling interviews the job placement officers interact with job seekers and provide advice and monitor the individual behaviour of job seekers. On the other hand all decisions of the placement professionals are checked by a close meshed accounting system and revised if they contradict the organizational business logic. Today, these professionals emerge as „transparent job placement officers“, and their authority and expert status is called into question because of conflicting relations between professional and managerial interests. The placement professionals are exposed to a systematic self-control which assesses the counselling and the placement of job seekers not only by technical and professional criteria, but always by the success of specific strategies along the internal organizational accounting system. The contradictory effects of extensive accounting practices on job-placement officers and the organisation we will show in our paper.