Theorising ‘best practice’ for supporting those furthest from the market into work or self-employment in France and England

Abstract

Mainstream/statutory Micro-Enterprise-and-Employment-Support-Services (MEESS) have delivered poor outcomes for disadvantaged individuals and deprived areas. In contrast, alternative third-sector socially-orientated MEESS show promising results but their well-recognised repertoire of ‘best practice’ remains under-theorised. This study addresses that gap using qualitative data from an innovative MEESS programme in deprived areas of England and France. Drawing on key-informant interviews and client ‘voices’, we explore how and why these alternative MEESS better engage disadvantaged people. Through a process-philosophy and life-course lens, we find that practitioners operate with a strength-building logic – emphasising responsive, place-embedded and long-term support that helps individuals reconnect with their aspirations. Our analysis highlights the importance of relational, tailored support in advancing inclusive enterprise/employment outcomes.

Introduction

There have been longstanding difficulties in designing and sustaining interventions to effectively support those furthest from the market (Muñoz and Kimmit, 2018). Mainstream and statutory Micro-Enterprise-and-Employment-Support-Services (MEESS) have been orientated towards enabling individuals to ‘move out of’ poverty (Newman, 2011) and have typically emphasised that support for work re-entry needs to overcome the disadvantages associated with social origins, social exclusion, and deprived places (Lee et al., 2011; Rouse and Jayawarma, 2006; Sutter et al., 2019). Getting into work or micro-enterprise is especially hard in deprived areas because weak economic demand, cycles of low achievement, cultures of low aspirations, and extensive social exclusion are place-based (Martinelli, 2012; Slack, 2005). However, it is widely acknowledged that the outcomes and effective outreach of these ‘deficit-based’ MEESS has generally been meagre in deprived areas and that those ‘furthest from the market’ are inaccessible (Bonoli and Liechti, 2018) and poorly served particularly by statutory MEESS (Blackburn and Ram, 2006; Greer et al., 2018; Shane, 2009). Simultaneously, policymakers across different countries champion a punitive work-first/‘workfare’ welfare regime that portrays out-of-work benefit claimants “as a drain on public resources” (Redman and Fletcher, 2022: 313) and emphasise the need for “a low skilled and low paid labour market to service the interests of employers” (Bredgaard, 2015: 440).

Nevertheless, alternative MEESS offered with/by third-sector organisations in designated areas of deprivation and/or targeting specific disadvantaged groups offer more promising results (Damm, 2012; Gibb et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2023; Tomlinson and Egan, 2002). Despite being severely limited by funding cycles of project, programmes or schemes, they have informed a shift towards advocating for integrated MEESS that are closer to those in need (Judge, 2019; Wilson et al., 2015) and which work on soft skills (such as confidence, goal motivation, aspiration), offer more role modelling, mentoring, and follow-up as well as helping to overcome complex barriers (such as childcare, mental health problems, addiction, homelessness) (Liu et al., 2014; Šverko et al., 2008). However, there has been little progress evidencing and theorising what constitutes ‘best practice’ for alternative MEESS or how it works to support those who are ‘hard-to-reach’. This disconnect from critical research on social mobility represents a gap in evidence-based research for informing policy.

We define ‘alternative MEESS’ as project-funded non-sanction based services that are offered by locally-embedded third-sector labour market intermediaries on a voluntary basis focused on helping clients become (more) ready for work/enterprise rather than on getting (any) job available. This article contributes to theorising ‘best practice’ by focusing on the ‘practice-based’ knowledge of alternative MEESS professionals/frontline workers about what works (Osburn et al., 2011: 21) and how it relates to the ‘preferred practice’ of statutory policymakers advocating for quasi-marketized ‘work-first’ MEESS linked to conditionality in jobless benefits (Carter and Whitworth, 2017; Samaluk, 2021). We explore the components of ‘best practice’ for alternative MEESS by asking: what are the deeper processes at work behind alternative MEESS and how do they enable those who are ‘hard-to-reach’ to make and sustain change in their lives?

We use in-depth interviews with key-informants who deliver MEESS to those ‘furthest from the market’ in deprived neighbourhoods as part of an innovative collaboration between housing associations in the comparative contexts of France and England. Our in-depth interviews at ‘the interface’ of this intervention explore what practitioners ‘know’ about how alternative MEESS work in practice and seek to do on an everyday basis. To supplement their views, we offer ‘voices’ of programme participants whose experiences resonate with key-informant perspectives. We discuss the implications of our evidence for underlying approaches to MEESS.

What do we know about how MEESS ‘work’ for those who are ‘hard-to-reach’?

Although MEESS for those furthest from the market have been an important component of social policy since the 1970s (Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012; Jurik, 2005), research on how they work for these groups and/or in deprived areas is not robust or coherent (Muñoz and Kimmit, 2018) and the related literatures are rarely synthesised. Despite broad agreement that ‘best practice’ in targeting this group involves alternative MEESS, there is little theorisation of which components are critical, how they foster inclusion, or what the underlying processes are that help people make change in their lives. Although ‘best practice’ is widely understood as ‘knowledge about what works’, it is contentious and may variously reflect what has become the ‘industry/sector standard’, ‘evidence-based’ practices, or practices that are ideologically ‘preferred’ as ‘best’, often without input from those on the receiving end (Osburn et al., 2011). Consequently, we refer to alternative MEESS practitioners’ knowledge about what works as ‘best practice’ (in inverted commas).

General policy understandings concur that deprived areas are particularly challenging for MEESS (Liu et al., 2014; Williams and Williams, 2011). While it is understood that social/institutional level factors (e.g., infrastructure, finance, norms) mediate their impact, little is known about how, or what, micro-level interventions (e.g., homelessness support, responsible drinking, or regeneration initiatives) can do to counteract this (Lettice and Parekh, 2010). While many integrated MEESS claim a wide range of individual, family, and community wellbeing impacts beyond increasing economic activity (Hulshof et al., 2020; Spera et al., 1994), there is little research to support this. The research that does exist mostly focuses on the impact of statutory-funded ‘active labour market policies’ (ALMPs), including MEESS, on job seekers’ mental health (Wang et al., 2021) and wellbeing, including that arising from participation in activation and from finding a job (Carter and Whitworth, 2017; Payne and Butler, 2023). Moreover, alternative MEESS, and much of their learning, end with the ‘start-stop’/project-based external funding cycle, often with detrimental effects on both clients’ and practitioners’ career prospects (Samaluk, 2021). Their vision of ‘best practice’ has also failed to gain wider traction because of political-ideological objections, lack of political will, financial investment, and institutional feasibility (Damm, 2012; Dromey et al., 2018; Hansen, 2020; Lakey et al., 2001; Wilding et al., 2019). The end result is that despite some promising pointers, not enough is known about how MEESS can contribute to improving social mobility of disadvantaged individuals or deprived areas in a meaningful and lasting way (Muñoz and Kimmit, 2018).

Critical social research suggests useful theoretical lenses for looking at social change and work transitions in the lives of disadvantaged people and communities. We deploy two – process-philosophy (Chia, 2017; Cloutier and Langley, 2020; Nayak, 2008; Nayak and Chia, 2011) and life-course thinking (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2003; Shuey and Willson, 2021). They enable us to make sense of practitioners’ views on how interventions that interact with life transitions work long-term by directing attention to their deeper logics and the temporal ‘flow’ of experiences. Process-philosophy has primarily been concerned with organisational change (Nayak and Chia, 2011) whilst life-course thinking has explored how to study individual lives across different age phases (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2003). Both understand change as a continuous process made up of multiple dynamics without a clearly defined endpoint (as “time never stops”) and abstain from explaining change in terms of before/after a fixed point in time or predefined outcomes (e.g., finding ‘a’ job) (Cloutier and Langley, 2020: 5). Process-philosophy focuses on “everyday practical coping and sense-making interactions”: individuals change their lives through a process of ‘iterative wayfinding’ (Nayak and Chia, 2011: 289) as they go, in which luck as well as intentionality matter (Suddaby et al., 2015) and where transformations occur as “an indivisible movement” in which past identities and experiences are “immanent in the present” (Nayak and Chia 2011: 295). Similarly, life-course research emphasises how individuals make change through “a series of interconnected transitions … across multiple life domains … over time” (Shuey and Willson, 2021: 175) and how transitions are processes always in a state of becoming, so must be constantly maintained or else become subject to reversals (Johnson-Hanks, 2002).

Underlying most MEESS and its evaluation research (Card et al., 2018), is the idea that those out-of-work in disadvantaged areas face obstacles produced by a combination of their social origins, social exclusion, and place disadvantage. However, many MEESS either aim to discourage venture emergence that is not considered viable (Laukkanen and Tornikoski, 2018) or try to help individuals overcome these obstacles (Lee and Cowling, 2013) and “make clients job-ready as quickly as possible” (Johnson et al., 2023: 705). This ‘deficit-based’ approach looks for what is absent, lacking or failing (Fogarty et al., 2018): where you are from, who you are and where you live are problems holding you back and which MEESS intend to counteract or solve in some way. The challenge mainstream MEESS therefore think they are addressing is that of ‘creating discontinuities’ (in other words turning points) (Nayak and Chia, 2011) to interrupt the negative impacts of social origins, exclusion, and place on the process of getting work/self-employment. Correspondingly, the kinds of ‘means-ends thinking’ (Nayak and Chia 2011: 287) that dominate most MEESS assumes that the long-term unemployed lack certain things (such as self-presentation skills) that they need to get work/self-employment, and that once these are delivered to them (through training/advice), they will act on them to achieve the desired outcome (because the obstacles have been overcome). These logics are not however borne out by research into either the impacts of MEESS (Card et al., 2018; Vooren et al., 2019) or people’s experience of them (Blackburn and Ram, 2006). They also risk ‘blaming the victim’ (Ryan, 1976) – because they ignore labour market conditions and underestimate structural barriers (Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012; Martinelli, 2012; Slack, 2005) – and contradict research showing that: (1) disadvantage accumulates, and lifelong learning (further education/training) serves to maintain but not narrow inequalities attached to social origins (Bukodi, 2017); (2) venturing is a process of ‘effectuation’ that starts with what you already have and can afford to lose (Sarasvathy, 2008), ‘knowing as you go’ rather than ‘knowing before you go’, and requires an opening of “imagination to ‘think beyond’ how things are and to point towards … new lines of flight” (Nayak and Chia, 2011: 304).

Using a process-philosophy perspective, we stress that ‘iterative wayfinding’ is the antidote that alternative MEESS offer to the means-ends MEESS logic. Economic inclusion for those furthest from market, is not a discrete event that is achieved when ‘a’ job is won or ‘a’ business started. Rather, it is a non-linear holistic process that involves a multi-faceted transition from being unemployed to becoming – and sustaining being – economically productive: as such involves a move from ‘the possible to the actual’ (Nayak and Chia 2011: 282). This is in tandem with life-course thinking about work transitions, particularly around young people ‘not in education, employment or training’ (NEETs), which is also critical of the overly dualistic and simplistic understanding within policy of a predictable movement from education to work and of career as a coherent pathway. Roberts (2011: 21) argues that ‘ordinary’ young people’s pathways are increasingly fragmentated and discontinuous rather than ‘NEET’ or ‘tidy’. Indeed, research, mostly from developing countries, suggests that young people’s pathways in adverse contexts include delayed/extended transitions and are heavily influenced by the necessity of negotiating contingencies while making incremental steps towards better futures (Ansell, 2004; Johnson-Hanks, 2002; Keiselbach, 2013). This echoes changing career patterns across generations too (Lyons et al., 2015) with older workers disproportionately affected by long-term unemployment with detrimental and lasting effects on their life satisfaction (Voss et al., 2017).

To sum up, the ‘means-ends’ logic underpinning mainstream MEESS is incompatible with what we know from process-philosophy and life-course research about how people make change in their lives, and this disconnect explains why they so often fail to reach those who are ‘furthest from the market’. Whilst alternative MEESS appear better able to reach disadvantaged people (Damm, 2012; Gibb et al., 2020), there has been a lack of research on what constitutes ‘best practice’ and how it works, including little theorisation of their underlying processes and how these engage with the lives of their clients in deprived contexts. This study uses the twin lenses of process-philosophy and life-course thinking to ask what the practitioners’ perspectives are on the deeper-level workings of alternative MEESS, how their support fits into clients’ wider lives and the ‘distance’ they ‘travel’ towards work integration. We ask these questions in England and France to explore how economic context, policy environment and institutional landscape matters for practitioners’ perspectives on how alternative MEESS work for the most vulnerable.

Methods

Our evidence draws on the experience of a five-year EU-funded/Housing Association-led project (2018-2023) developing MEESS in deprived neighbourhoods in Northwest-France and Southeast-England in which we were partners providing academic evaluation. Our evaluation focused on the MEESS impact on clients’ lives and compared MEESS approaches in different institutional contexts, whilst a monitoring plan led by the Housing Association (HA) partners tracked the numbers of people engaged/trained which were reported to the funder. By 2022, more than 4500 adults who were ‘furthest from the market’ (either economically inactive or out-of-work, in insecure jobs, at risk of redundancy, or with enterprises that have failed) completed at least 12 hours of training. Of the 6259 clients who began training, 16% started a business, 18% had a new job, and 7% had enrolled in further education.

HA partners focused alternative MEESS on neighbourhoods where they had significant housing stock and where deprivation was high. In England, they focused loosely on Lower Super Output Areas (census areas of up to 1500 households) ranked as most deprived, while in France they targeted government-designated ‘priority neighbourhoods’ (Quartiers Prioritaires de la Politique de la Ville – QPVs). The latter designation reflects the national emphasis of French policymaking since the 1990s on urban regeneration delivered in collaboration with local stakeholders (Chaline, 2023). This approach includes employment-support that is localised and non-marketized, endorsing alternative MEESS with a non-profit “ethos of addressing needs beyond job outcomes”, and only weakly integrated with the Pôle Emploi (Schulte et al., 2018: 327). By contrast, the UK has been dominated by quasi-marketized payment-by-results employment interventions featuring large outsourced for-profit commercial providers with strong links to the Job Centre. Since the 1990s, these have increasingly focused on (job) outcomes and conditionality requirements (Carter and Whitworth, 2017).

The consortium shared a broad intervention logic (Supplemental-Figure 1) in which effective diagnosis of client needs and neighbourhood challenges fed into delivering high-quality tailor-made integrated services, resulting in clients becoming (more) ready to start a business or get a (better and more secure) job, and building legacy through client ambassadors sharing their learning with others in their neighbourhoods. The dual focus on employment and micro-enterprise responded to the increasingly blurry line between employment/self-employment and the reality that most existing micro-enterprise support presumes higher entrepreneurial literacy, initial capital investment, and volumes of economic activity than feasible for this group. HA partners were encouraged to evolve different approaches that actively responded to the places they were targeting and to share learning across the consortium. The HA emphasis was on ‘the distance travelled’ by clients in the process of becoming employable through support that interacts with work transitions in their life-course. This perspective was incorporated into service statistics that differentiated between ‘engaged clients’ and those who ‘started/completed training’, and between ‘hard’ (e.g., business registration) and ‘soft’ (e.g., sales receipt) evidence of start-up/self-employment.

Here, we focus on four [out of seven] HA partners selected for their comparable size in terms of staff and housing stock within each country, and for having developed services that most closely approximated the ‘best practice’ advocated for alternative MEESS. Of the three HAs not considered, in France, one focused on fostering social inclusion at the community level and another faced considerable delays in starting MEESS delivery; in England, one offered more traditional employment-support services. The two English HAs under consideration were large/well-established social housing providers in Kent/Sussex (HA1) and Hampshire (HA2) who integrated new support for self-employment/micro-enterprise into their employment-support services. They delivered both services in parallel either in-house or in collaboration with third-sector organisations/training providers. Interestingly, the other two French HAs are smaller and provide housing for people on very low incomes in Rennes Métropole (HA3) and rural areas in Ille-et-Vilaine (HA4). Both these French HAs maintain strong reputations for fostering close relationships with social tenants and collaborate closely with existing statutory employment-support services to connect them effectively with vulnerable clients. HAs in both countries kept MEESS staffing/provision entirely separate from housing services to avoid conflicts of interest and build trust relationships. Importantly, they extended MEESS beyond social tenants/funded-referrals (from Job Centres) to others in deprived neighbourhoods (Supplemental-Table 1), becoming more involved in community investment.

Within the consortium, we were perceived as ‘insider-outsiders’ – partners but not HA employees. We assured key-informants of confidentiality/anonymity and reaffirmed the academic nature of our evaluation to encourage frank reflection on the realities of practice. We asked probing questions to understand client experiences of MEESS (including requests for clarification and examples of what worked well or less well), but also wrote short notes after interviews on the interpersonal dynamics and how respondents curated their narratives for us as ‘outsiders’.

We interviewed forty-three key-informants (in their native language) across four sites in 2019-2020: twenty-three were directly employed by HAs, sixteen worked for project partners providing MEESS, whilst four worked for non-partner organisations including local government and the French/English statutory employment-services. Twenty-one were frontline staff, three combined frontline with managerial roles, and the rest were managers. Just over half were female. Process-philosophy and life-course thinking influenced our interview guide (Supplemental-Table 2) informing what we asked/probed and our analysis of the resultant narratives to uncover their deeper logics. Additionally, we have presented ‘voices’ of seventeen participants (Supplemental-Table 3) whose experiences resonate with the key-informant narratives. These are drawn from seventy-eight in-depth/face-to-face client interviews in public spaces in 2020-2022 which were booked independently from HA partners to ensure confidentiality.

All recordings were transcribed and thematically analysed using both deductive codes for themes identified a priori and probed in the interviews alongside inductive codes for themes emerging from the narratives. We used unique identifiers ¹ denoting interviewees’ organisation/location to contextualise their perspectives without compromising their anonymity. In selecting direct quotations, we struck a balance between citing those that expressed concerns well and the need to ensure that confidentiality was properly preserved alongside anonymity.

Findings

Our findings evidence the process-philosophy underlying practitioners’ understandings of how alternative MEESS are better able to engage with the life-course of those ‘hard-to-reach’, which are structured into two subsections. The first begins with practitioners’ explanations about how alternative MEESS (re)connect with those furthest from the market and the realities of their deprived localities. The second explores the deeper logics of their alternative approach which values clients’ experience/self-defined priorities and sees practitioners’ roles as supporting clients in their ‘iterative wayfinding’ so that they can start/sustain transitions towards work integration.

(Re)Connecting with those furthest from the market in their local areas

Practitioners emphasised that the ‘hard-to-reach’ are drawn ‘from a mixture of backgrounds’ (HA2-24HAMa/FLW), face complex barriers to work, and often describe them as “invisible”/‘les invisibles’ and “disconnected”/‘désengagés’ (WeKer-26 R/FLW). The English HAs distanced their MEESS support from their ‘transactional’ roles as social landlords (HA1-2KS/M) with MEESS officers working in different teams from housing officers and capitalising on their track records for high-quality client-centred employment-support for tenants/funded-referrals. Importantly, these key-informants emphasise that ‘when we speak to [clients] it’s different to how a Job Centre might speak to them’ such that ‘we’re asking, not telling’ (HA1-2KS/M). Their MEESS are voluntary and centred on helping clients construct an ‘employment journey … based around their wants and needs’ (HA1-14KS/FLW&M). HA1 provides ‘friendship, signposting and support’ (HA1-15KS/FLW) to clients emphasising that ‘if they don’t find a job, you know, it doesn’t change anything for us, but we’d like them to be able to find work, support themselves and reach their potential’ (HA1-2KS/M). Clients confirmed that DWP and HA approaches are ‘absolute poles apart’ (RI08KS). A Rennes client highlighted that participating is ‘a completely voluntary process’ whereas ‘everything is forced with Pôle Emploi’ (RI35 R). A Hampshire client noted that ‘HA [staff] treat me like I’m an adult … accepted me for who I am … but with the Job Centre [it is] as [if] I was there as a kid’ (RI60HAM).

The English HAs found that recruiting those furthest from the market typically required sensitive and sustained follow-up: awareness of MEESS was not sufficient. These clients need ‘that extra push that it is for them … sort of … friendly face first and … support … before they’d go into a group environment and feel comfortable’ (HA1-4KS/FLW). Unlike the statutory services, HA support is neither one-off, time-limited, nor conditional, and includes sustained follow-up by the same mentor. Key-informants argue that these life-coaching elements are vital because ‘the reason that they’re not in employment is because they are the hardest-to-reach’ (BC-19HAM/M). Client experiences testify to the importance of these relationships. A Kent client explained how the project’s MEESS ‘really builds your confidence’, creates ‘a safe, secure’ [environment], where ‘they give constructive advice’ which is ‘very honest, but it’s not brutal’ (RI16KS).

The French HAs had little track record on work integration with tenants or local people but had established reputations for social support of their residents. HA3 and HA4 privilege proximity/‘proximité’ to their residents which is brokered by live-in ‘gardiens’ who combine responsibility for maintenance/cleaning with social support. ‘Gardiens’ are known by residents, often with their children attending the same schools. In contrast to statutory agencies, these HAs ‘see’ the ‘invisibles’ and HA4 is one of the few organisations with a rural presence. Providing mentoring-support/‘accompagnement’ to ‘the invisibles’ is intrinsic: ‘gardiens’ engage with isolated, often young, people ‘on the streets, in the tower blocks, and on the doorsteps’, appreciate their cultural values/‘leurs codes’, listen properly to them (WeKer-31 R/FLW), and avoid opening the conversation with the topic of ‘getting a job’ (WeKer-31 R/FLW). Accordingly, WeKer with HA4 combine trainings that ‘would make people want to come’(WeKer-26 R/FLW) before introducing material more orientated towards work integration. Clients echoed the importance of the project actively seeking them out (‘I came across the [HA4] team on the street’ (RI32 R)) and believing in their potential (‘They say that everyone has a talent and that together, with all our talents, we can change the world…completely different from what we are used to, at least my generation’ (RI35 R)).

By virtue of HAs’ long-term investment in the future of deprived areas, key-informants were acutely aware of the risk of coming off benefits to take low-level work where contracts were short/uncertain and in-work poverty was common. Safeguarding their clients’ best interests meant ensuring that clients received individual advice on the implications of their work/business/training plans for their personal/household finances. The HAs also supported clients financially as they transitioned into work (by advancing funds before their first pay packet or providing work clothing) and followed-up on their progress (by helping them complete probationary periods, assisting them to address emerging problems at work, and advising on managing new financial arrangements): ‘[N]ot only do we support them into work, we make sure we carry on working with them to make sure they are sustaining’ (HA1-14KS/FLW&M). In both countries, key-informants recognised the riskier nature of leaving benefits/work to start a business: while for some this could represent an avenue for greater autonomy/work satisfaction, they emphasised the imperative of safeguarding their low-level economic stability on benefits and advised against strategies that involved taking on debt risk via loans/leases.

Clients valued these responses to the realities of disadvantage. A Hampshire client emphasised ‘they create an environment where…you don’t have to worry about having money’ (RI56HAM). In Ille-et-Vilaine, a single mother starting a plant-based food business received childcare support: ‘(my) child can go [to the community centre she reconnected with through HA4] during school term time to do their homework … three days a week. And in the holidays, they have activities … [and] because I’m not working ... I get help with [homework/holiday club fees]’ (RI37 R). A Kent client praised the starting point of the HA’s business support which advised ‘do not get into debt, [instead do] testing to see if something works [first]’ (RI12KS). A first-time entrepreneur in Hampshire valued the ongoing nature of support (‘just feeling there were people there that would support you and hold your hand as you go through’ (RI68HAM)).

Key-informants also felt that connecting with those furthest from the market required forging close relations within the local economy to meet place-based deprivations since ‘the neighbourhood itself is part of the individual client’s problems’ (WeKer-43 R/FLW; WeKer-38 R/FLW) and wider HA activities are also neighbourhood-focused. Thus HAs were involved in brokering local links and partnerships with potential employers, regeneration opportunities, accredited training providers, colleges, and employment agencies and building on existing structures/resources to redirect them to the target group and deprived areas. The English HAs were particularly effective at working with retailers/employers where new stores/factories (hence jobs) opened locally. In the most successful cases, employers guaranteed interviews for specified numbers of local MEESS clients who completed training for these positions: HAs selected the client, coached them, and supported required training, (such as security/food hygiene certificates). Developing these agreements created concrete local opportunities that HAs disseminated. For example, a Kent client was offered three-days’ work experience at a heating company: ‘I said yes, because I’d been applying for admin jobs, but [employers] wanted up-to-date experience; on the last day, [the company] offered me a four-month contract’ (RI01KS).

Similarly, the French HAs turned a struggle with a high turnover of ‘gardiens’ for its properties into a concrete opportunity to generate local work for its MEESS clients in Rennes and improve neighbourhood relations in more troubled blocks. Working with local partners, French HA3 created a community college/‘école-de-la-proximité’ in the QPV to offer high-quality, certified ‘gardiennage’ training that is widely recognised in the labour market and gives priority to QPV residents. The first ‘class’ of twelve trainees were guaranteed interviews for seven gardien jobs open with the HA: seven were appointed, and three more found jobs at another HA shortly afterwards. Crucially, these alternative MEESS delivered “pre-recruitment training linked to job opportunities” (Newman, 2011: 105) locally.

Starting and sustaining transitions towards work or self-employment

While key-informants supported the widely recognised need to develop soft skills (including raising aspirations, encouraging a work ethic, building self-efficacy), they did so by reflecting with clients on what they could do (such as being good with people), what skills/experiences they already had (whether in employment relationships or not) and by encouraging them to dig down to what motivated them. Their approach was about ‘working with what [is] strong rather than what’s wrong’ (ES2-17KS/M) to improve clients’ confidence in their abilities (BC-19HAM/M; HA2-21HAM/M) and ‘recognise the work people do even when it isn’t familiar to them’ (HA3-32 R/M). This approach mobilises clients’ intrinsic capabilities starting from where they are and consolidating iterative wayfinding gains. It contrasts with the usual deficit-based approach which ‘adds on’ what is perceived as missing.

This understanding of process resonates closely with the narratives of clients who are making progress with their businesses. A Hampshire client explains: ‘there wasn’t really a turning point; it was the long process and hard work to get there’ (RI58HAM) and another describes their strategy of taking on salaried employment to keep the business afloat as ‘just gathering the crumbs until we can get the deal or not’ (RI62HAM). Similarly, a Rennes client says: ‘No turning point … even when I was at school, I was also working … [today] I’m trying to work at the same time to create my business’ (RI46 R).

The HA workshops are ‘more collaborative’ (HA1-2KS/M) than other trainings; flexible, tailor-made, and participant-orientated so clients feel ‘like they’re owning that journey’ (HA1-16KS/FLW) and to kickstart their sense of motivation/aspiration and self-belief. Similarly, the HAs’ training partners do not give clients ‘ready-to-use advice’, but rather ‘help them come up with an answer by themselves’ (WeKer-26 R/FLW). The ‘signs of growth’ in clients participating in highly-interactive workshops (to share experiences, problem-solve, give peer feedback), were immediately evident and remobilised participants to work individually and together on long-term goals (HA1-15KS/FLW).

Client experiences reflected these collective learning dynamics. A Kent client describes how ‘challenges crop-up that you didn’t think of’ in training but that clients were able to solve these challenges using each other’s ‘local knowledge and local support’ (RI12KS). A Hampshire client’s cohort used monthly WhatsApp calls to talk about ‘any things anyone’s struggling with, any tips to help them with those’ (RI68HAM). A Portsmouth client learnt through the project that ‘you’ve got to own your successes and failures’ (RI56HAM). Clients in Rennes felt that the training ‘enabled [them] to move forward’ in part because ‘it allowed us to take a step back [and] see the points where things were a little bit off’ (RI34 R) and learn from seeing other participants’ thinking ‘evolve’ (RI40 R).

The shared principle of HA key-informants was ‘for us to join them on that employment journey instead of creating one [job] for them’ (HA1-14KS/FLW&M). As such, varying degrees of personal social development (not orientated towards work integration, especially for French HAs) were prerequisites and ensured that when/if clients were ready to engage over work integration, they had full ownership of their journey. These transitions involved opening the door to a new mindset. Cultures of low aspiration engrain ‘lack of motivation’ (BC-19HAM/M) such that it becomes ‘more acceptable not to work’ (HA1-15KS/FLW) and ‘very easy’ to ‘let go or to be disrespectful’ (HA1-16KS/FLW). Significantly, ‘opening-up’ clients’ mindsets was not predicated on MEESS severing connections with the ‘problematic’ local culture – as portrayed by the post-2008 UK political discourse (Redman and Fletcher, 2022) – but instead relied on reconnecting clients with their hopes for themselves and their families. Their approach is to create ‘a moment where you can allow them to open a door to the world … otherwise one will stay locked-up’ (WeKer-43 R/FLW).

Initiating these steps sometimes had to overcome deep resistance. Some clients’ past experiences meant that ‘trust was broken’ (HA3-33 R/FLW) and consequently they ‘feel that there isn’t anything really for them’ (BS-22HAM/FLW). A WeKer key-informant reported that Black unemployed youth resist involvement because, they say, ‘It’s a project only for the French … white people’ (WeKer-38 R/FLW). In these cases, encouraging people to ‘try to have a different outlook on life’ (BC-19HAM/M) is hard. Whilst the French HAs typically responded by deepening territorial proximity, the English HAs preferred individual mentoring. Key-informants acknowledged that these tensions were not always resolvable but saw their job as keeping that door open for everyone and making it as easy to walk through as possible at the right time. They concurred that reaching this group required initiating a deep transition which could only be achieved by MEESS connecting with them on ‘more human’/‘assez humaine’) (HA3-34 R/M) level.

Client experiences testify to the feeling that the MEESS ‘had their back’ when things went wrong, or they lost confidence/momentum. A Rennes client praises her WeKer counsellor for keeping her motivated even during lockdowns (RI34 R). A Hampshire client said that she had ‘been in a place of mistrust from a previous job, friends, home life, not working out’ but felt that she ‘can trust … this community to have your back’ (RI56HAM).

Key-informants shared a conviction that initiating and sustaining journeys towards economic integration required valuing ‘distance travelled’ that may, or may not, lead to a job/self-employment in the short-term. A WeKer key-informant stressed that the key thing is to ‘work towards a … professional or personal project … that … enabled a remobilisation’ (WeKer-35 R/M). A key-informant from English HA1 stresses that ‘if somebody has moved into the mindset of working from being on benefits, it is important that we … keep them there because it is a difficult transition’ (HA1-2KS/M). The focus is on ‘trying to promote a positive interest among tenants in their own work integration’ (HA3-34 R/M), on fostering and sustaining a desire to ‘want to work’ (WeKer-43 R/FLW), and ‘changing the position that they’re in’ (HA1-14KS/FLW&M). Working sensitively to reconnect clients with their aspirations is vital to ensuring that: ‘ultimately, they will have the confidence to do it [job search/self-employment] themselves’ (HA1-8KS/FLW) while also recognising that for some clients ‘employment makes no sense’ (WeKer-26 R/FLW) if this is only entry-level work and/or contradicts caring obligations. HAs in both contexts found that many older out-of-work clients were seeking a new purpose, more flexible working and/or to work for themselves after a lifetime of precarious, low-paid and physically demanding jobs.

This sense that clients were reconnecting with their aspirations and preserving them even when their realities required them to moderate their goals, is evident in client narratives. A Kent client illustrates: ‘[Before MEESS] I’d given reflexology sessions … for free to help people out … [trainers] made me stop and … put some value on my skill’ (RI06KS). Although she is ‘not well enough’ to ‘build the business to its full capacity’ and move off benefits, she operates it at a level she can sustain (RI06KS). Similarly, a Rennes client says that after going ‘through a difficult period’ the project workshops ‘helped me to regain my confidence … become aware of my skills … see the best in myself’ (RI50 R).

Key-informants emphasised that MEESS needed to construct credible and accessible pathways back to work that their clients could use. French HA3 noted that many didn’t understand work culture (HA3-32 R/M), had often disengaged from WeKer because ‘there was a gap between what they wanted and the support they were offered’, and did not ‘understand how to work up to what they want’ (WeKer-43 R/FLW). These clients needed support to understand their work integration as an iterative wayfinding process that includes elements of personal development, further training/certification, and work experience. The English HAs similarly understood that the traditional start-up route is ‘not accessible to most people because people can’t afford it [and] it’s dangerous’ (BS1-3KS/FLW). Instead, they encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to ‘go and make a sale and learn from it’ (HA1-2KS/M) or to begin by ‘having somebody else being the boss first’ (HA1-2KS/M) and then slowly build on where they are starting from.

Discussion and conclusions

Our key-informants firmly reject the deficit-based approach to MEESS, their means-ends logic of creating discontinuities between those furthest from the market and their experiences of economic exclusion, and their conviction that skills provision translates unproblematically into work integration. Although varied, the alternative MEESS approaches that they argue for can be conceptualised as strength-building and as underpinned by a logic of promoting ongoing economic and social inclusion for those furthest from the market by embracing their social origins, varied experiences, and excluded places where they live. This conviction echoes Furlong’s (2006) objection that categories like NEET (or long-term unemployed) are not useful for guiding interventions because they do not reliably recognise the nature of problematic transitions that often pile-up and lead to exit decisions (including early retirement). It also critiques the underlying theory of poorly-performing deficit-based approaches to ‘moving out of’ poverty (Newman, 2011). Not only do the latter see those who ‘fail’ as “unable to move forward because of some missing feature” (Cloutier and Langley, 2020: 8), but they also see those who ‘succeed’ as ‘moving on’, intrinsically undermining the potential for interventions to impact place deprivation.

Key-informants replace the means-ends thinking and the MEESS logic of consequentiality with that of appropriateness (Chia, 2017; Nayak, 2008) mobilising and matching the invisibles’ skills to concrete local opportunities for personal development as a prelude to constructing their own self/employment journey iteratively and over a sustained time frame. Key-informants’ accounts of how they reach more disadvantaged individuals confirms the “significance of doubt, hesitation and wayfinding” (Nayak and Chia 2011: 303-304) emphasised by process-philosophy and life-course thinking as being central to starting and sustaining a transition towards economic activity in deprived contexts. Rather than creating turning points and discontinuities for clients in the way that mainstream MEESS do (to ‘overcome’ who they are and where they come from), our key-informants safeguarded clients’ interests by embracing who they are, where they live, their relationships/priorities and offering responsive support that is client-led and locally-embedded. Their logic is consistent with life-course thinking about how individuals – embedded in specific times/places and within the linked lives of family/friends (Elder et al. in Mortimer and Shanahan, 2003) – make change and it chimes closely with process-philosophy that advocates “sensitivity to what a specific environment affords” and the “intimate coupling of stimulus with response” (Chia, 2017: 112) in the face of setbacks. Accordingly, alternative MEESS do not discount near misses in an employment journey but include them in the temporal flow of experiences as part of the ‘distance travelled’ by clients towards becoming more ready for work/enterprise. In contrast to mainstream MEESS, this journey is conceived as continuous, mirroring Chia’s (1999) observation from process-philosophy that transition as “an ultimate fact” emerges from (and is only sustained by) a process of “non-linear ceaseless change”.

Key-informants’ perspectives also engage closely with the recursive linkages between being ‘furthest from the market’ and living in ‘deprived areas’. These are well recognised in existing literatures on poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion (MacDonald et al., 2005; Wenham, 2020) but their implications are not followed through to policy. Much policy aiming at reversing ‘social housing earnings gaps’ or regenerating deprived areas does not engage adequately with the reasons why people become social tenants and/or live in deprived areas (Gibb et al., 2020) and mainstream MEESS pay little attention to how “transitions in one person’s life often entail transitions for other people as well” (Elder Jr et al., 2003: 13). These key-informants recognised that deprived areas were part of the problem (Newman, 2011), but also saw them as integral to delivering effective social inclusion through place-based recoveries involving varied local employers as strategic partners (Jones and Carson, 2023). Their aim is not to dislocate clients (from their social origins) but rather to enrich them and the places in which they live. HAs, as ‘anchor institutions’ whose futures are locally invested, are well-motivated to take on this role in partnership with other local/national actors (Dromey et al., 2018; Gibb et al., 2020; Wilding et al., 2019; Wilson et al., 2015) to create ‘inclusive regeneration’ through interlocking interventions focusing on excluded individuals in excluded places (MacDonald, 2004; McGregor et al., 2003).

In France, successive governments have upheld a decades-long discourse of “solidarity”/‘solidarité’ emphasising rights-based benefits for the unemployed as citizens in a state-influenced/regulated economy, however this has not prevented the introduction of conditionality requirements at national-level (Clasen and Clegg, 2003). Counter-balancing this ‘workfarist’ turn are social inclusion/‘insertion’ schemes led by local statutory/non-profit organisations (Schulte et al., 2018). By collaborating with these organizations and supporting alternative MEESS grounded in a strong territorial approach, HAs – traditionally not involved in work integration support – have become part of local stakeholder networks that resist national ‘workfarist’ employment-support policies (Schulte et al., 2018) extending non-profits’ capacity to support vulnerable clients. In QPVs, HAs can additionally align with government-led urban regeneration investments to access additional resources. In England, a deregulated, market-oriented economy combined with a centrally-driven ‘workfarist’ approach has increasingly emphasised the individual responsibility of benefit claimants as autonomous jobseekers. Since the 1990s, employment-support has been outsourced to payment-by-results providers operating under strict Job Centre conditionality (Carter and Whitworth, 2017). This weakened local policymakers and providers, and small-scale schemes (Greer et al., 2018) and, in the absence of enabling social policy and/or substantial government-led investments in deprived areas, HAs developed MEESS in-house with local private/third-sector partners, offering an alternative to “creaming and parking”, often adopted by marketized providers to “make ends meet” (Greer et al., 2018: 1440) thus contributing to a more socially inclusive approach at the street level (Johnson et al., 2023). Both experiences illustrate the crucial role ‘co-investment’ by the HAs can play in institutionalising services that employ a more ‘positive’, embedded, continuous, and comprehensive, though costly, MEESS approach.

Our contributions are three-fold. Firstly, our work adds to an emerging small body of qualitative research about social support programmes (Eleveld, 2021; Richey et al., 2022), a field which has been led by quantitative studies on ‘what works’ (Payne and Butler, 2023) and the effectiveness of interventions to end unemployment (Card et al., 2018). We go beyond this focus to probe key-informants’ understandings of how/why alternative MEESS work for those who are ‘furthest from the market’. This is significant because this group is commonly neglected or ‘parked’ in favour of those more ‘job-ready’ (Greer et al., 2018) by payment-by-results employment interventions which only count rapid transitions into paid work (Carter and Whitworth, 2017). In so doing, we contribute to the literature on different types of ‘activation’ (Vlandas, 2013), and their more qualitative aspects, through deepening our understanding of the processes underlying alternative MEESS. In particular, we conceptualise ‘distance travelled’ as a better measure of the iterative wayfinding (Nayak and Chia, 2011) that underpins the employment journey of clients both internally (improvement in capabilities, confidence and learning) and externally (job entry, retention, progression) (see Supplemental-Table 4 for how HAs operationalise alternative MEESS). Such an approach engages better with the multitude of ‘intermediate labour market statuses’ (Carter and Whitworth, 2017) that clients experience and advocates that alternative MEESS providers be instead rewarded by payments-by-distance-travelled. Moreover, we have theorised the process-philosophy underpinning key-informants’ understanding of MEESS ‘best practice’ for the hard-to-reach as strength-building and have shown how credibly this theorisation both engages with life-course research about how disadvantaged people living in deprived areas make change and resonates with client experiences.

Secondly, we have highlighted that those ‘furthest from the market’ require a different kind of assistance, not one that pushes people to employment as fast as possible, but which instead emphasises sustainability and the importance of a more comprehensive, tailor-made, and locally-embedded approach. This calls for a territorial policy orientation for social support programmes which engage with place-based deprivation and for treating the unemployed as people with different journeys towards economic integration. This is significant for social policy because most support programmes for those furthest from the market fail to foster any significant re-integration, even when evaluated against a purely economic, binary understanding of social inclusion (Vooren et al., 2019) in which the unemployed are seen as “fixed entities with variable attributes” (Emirbayer, 1997: 286) who are either earning (economically-included) or unemployed (economically-excluded). Realising such a responsive territorial orientation requires space for service-providers to innovate and would be jeopardised by ‘policy-closure’ around the usual focus on swift labour market insertion (Johnson et al., 2023). Embedded third-sector organisations with long-term local presence, intrinsic reliance on hard-to-reach individuals, and commitment to learning and adaptability such as HAs, are thus well-suited to delivering alternative MEESS. This insight is timely given the recent revival of interest in ALMPs (and MEESS) as part of social investment for COVID recovery in Europe and the US and confirms the support of researchers for ‘enabling’ rather than ‘workfare’ approaches (Dingeldey, 2007; Gibb et al., 2020). It also advocates for a process-driven lens for measuring pathways from unemployment that does not “reduce motion and change into static states” (Chia, 1999: 212) but more effectively captures the ‘distance travelled’ by those who are out-of-work and has the potential to evidence the positive value of the more costly alternative MEESS support needed for ‘the invisibles’.

Thirdly, our theorisation of ‘best practice’ in alternative MEESS contributes to the viewpoint that it is not useful to conceptualise tackling social inequality in deprived areas as about delivering discrete (and decontextualised) turning points so that disadvantaged people can break free from their past. Instead, tackling it is better conceptualised as developing locally-embedded support for disadvantaged people that builds on where they are now to foster their iterative wayfinding along new pathways over extended timeframes. Such theorisation does not generalise the possibilities of reflexive agency but rather recognises the actualities of mediated agency that engages with collective resources (MacKenzie and Marks, 2019). This is particularly pertinent for Carter and Whitworth’s (2017) call for greater attention to how employment activation affects ‘process wellbeing’ rather than just ‘outcome wellbeing’. Further longitudinal research is needed, however, of both individual experiences of alternative MEESS and the socioeconomic pathways of the deprived areas that they target. These need to reflect multiple metrics of worth (Stark, 2009), assess clients’ felt ownership over the process (Nielsen and Miraglia, 2017), include place considerations, and to avoid the pitfall of profiling of job readiness as the pre-established goal. Studies of the ‘distance travelled’ that link an individual’s transitions together across time would offer a deeper understanding of social exclusion/inclusion as a multi-faceted process. Policy-wise, our research makes space for HAs and similar ‘anchor organisations’ to take up alternative MEESS that are highly-adaptable to local needs/contexts (Bika and Gaskell, 2024; Gibb et al., 2020). ALMPs might contribute to this not just in terms of making money available but also by refocusing on ‘distance travelled’ process outcomes and embracing long-term frames of commitment.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Theorising ‘best practice’ for supporting those furthest from the market into work or self-employment in France and England

Supplemental Material for Theorising ‘best practice’ for supporting those furthest from the market into work or self-employment in France and England by Zografia Bika, Catherine Locke, Caterina M Orlandi and Benjamin Valcke in Journal of European Social Policy