Roger Burrows and Brian Loader
Restructuring Welfare Organisation in the Information Age

Whilst the pervasive role of the new ICTs as a means of changing the management of liberal democratic welfare states has sometimes been recognised the prospect of their intrinsic catalytic qualities facilitating entirely new social relations of welfare delivery has, hitherto, been largely ignored. The advent of Internet represents an as yet little understood challenge to dominant post-war models of social policy. In this note we speculate that embryonic cyberspatial social forms might be underpinning a quite fundamental shift away from a conception of welfare based upon rationally administered state provision coupled with paternalistic professionally determined needs and bureaucratic organisational delivery systems towards one more characterised by fragmentation, diversity and a range of individualisation processes.

The increasing role of informatics in the provision and delivery of welfare services is becoming more noticeable. Much of the organisational restructuring occurring in the British welfare state can, indeed, be said to be predicated upon the alleged potential of ICTs to create flexible and decentralised organisational forms. The introduction of quasi-market mechanisms into the NHS and Community Care programmes, for example, is heavily dependant upon the development of highly sophisticated information networks between a range of statutory, voluntary and private sector agencies. So too in local government, discussion has focussed upon the potential of computer networks to facilitate organisational forms responsive to 'customer' demands. Undoubtedly an increasing pressure for utilising ICTs in the public domain has been the growing financial pressures upon the welfare state and the prospect held out for technological solutions to increase productivity and control public expenditure.

For the most part the Petri dish for the growth of the new ICTs has been the private sector. The importance of the profit making sector for developing models which are often later absorbed by the public domain has been observed by several writers. Such prospective transformations are often associated with a broad range of literature which might collectively be term post Fordist and which have been responsible for emphasising significant changes in both production processes and the nature of consumption patterns on the basis of technological innovation. Supposedly information technologies from library stock control systems and touch screen kiosks are able to meet the differentiated and increasingly informed and articulated demands of welfare 'customers'.

Welfare services have of course always been heavily information based and arguably a defining characteristic of the modern welfare organisation, be it a hospital, school or benefits office, has been its tendency to transform people into information before processing them through the system. As a consequence perhaps we should be little surprised that the new ICTs should be eagerly adopted for use with their promise of faster and more reliable processing capacity.

Certainly it may be fair to suggest that the rhetoric of the transforming qualities of the ICTs has yet to be matched by practice in many of the new quasi-markets in the UK. In health care the example of Wessex Regional Health Authority is usually raised fairly early in any discussions of computer systems failure. Closely followed by Birmingham health authority and the London Ambulance. In education also the highly complex information systems underpinning modular programmes are seldom matched by the software required to run them.

When one considers the reasons for such technological unfulfilment however a significant gulf may be discerned between the culture and structures of the organisations within which the ICTs are implanted and the social and economic context within which the technologies are developed. It is instructive to consider the most common reasons given for the limited success of such initiatives.

• lack of understanding of the complexity of the public domain by computer companies keen to sell their products in a large market.
• a gap in the 'language' of computer specialists and those responsible for service delivery.
• resistance from professionals to informatics designed to reduce their traditional freedoms.
• fear from employees of job losses.
• too much emphasis upon technology and insufficient attention to information systems.

Any explanation of such failure must take account of the complex social relations which mitigate the simple transfer of post-Fordist flexible firm models into the welfare domain. The notion of public service organisations becoming 'Bennetonised' implies something more fundamental than merely seeing ICTs as an appendage to improving the efficiency of existing welfare organisations. It suggests a 'new public management' strategy devoted to introducing information systems which challenge the heterogeneous and contested organisational cultures of welfare institutions. The NHS Information Network, for example, has faced considerable opposition from interested parties such as professional groups, trade unions, and citizens rights groups over issues such as clinical autonomy, patient confidentiality, and privacy.

In this context information is not an independent organisational resource the shape of which all will be agreed upon. Rather it is a negotiated and contested construct which may be designed with a purpose and used in such a way as to impact significantly upon the social relations of welfare. So too the shape and style of the communications network which conveys such information will act to influence the nature of social control mechanisms. Any information system must therefore act to influence power relations between competing agents and be regarded as an important tool in such social and economic struggle. It may be used to decide who is included and excluded; to reinforce existing patterns of inequality; or to define the terms of engagement.

Since computer mediated information systems cannot be regarded as 'value-neutral' they may be seen as an important sites for studying the inter-relationship between the state, the economy and civil society and its consequences for social relations of welfare. If the limitations of new public management to introduce post-Fordist organisational forms into welfare state are regarded as merely a 'flawed' version of the real thing this may point not only to the theoretical looseness of the model but also its inability to incorporate resistance from welfare professionals from within the system and opposition to welfare regimes from groups who have continually felt marginalised by its class based, white, male, able-bodied orientation.

What makes the new ICTs such a catalyst for change is their potential to radically change the power relationships between welfare organisations, subjects and nation-states. That is, they may alter the focus from internal organisational information systems based upon bureaucratic control mechanisms to one where new control patterns transform the interstices between the service deliverer and recipient. In particular they may act to transform the way people consume welfare and the way they may perceive their own needs.

Blackburn and his colleagues (1985) have discussed the way that information technologies in the service sector can be used to increase profitability by what they term the 'externalisation of service labour'. That is, "rather than provide the service 'in full', service production takes the form of providing the users with the means to provide the service, to varying degrees, for themselves. The user contributes some of the labour, unpaid, whilst capital provides the means of production.". This form of self-help is now fairly wide-spread in the retail sector with perhaps the supermarket being the most common manifestation. Consumers effectively enter a warehouse of goods and with the use of a shopping trolley contribute their own unpaid labour to the collection and transportation of goods to their own homes. This process is augmented by a computerised stock control system which ensures that consumer demand for particular products and their replacement on the shelves is accurately recorded and executed. Until recently the only significant block to increasing labour productivity through self service was the need to employ people on the check out. The development of portable bar-code readers enabling consumers to input their own purchasing data into the system and thereby keep a check on the running total which is currently being introduced into some supermarkets may increase the scope of self service still further.

The potential for externalisation of welfare service labour through the adoption of appropriate technologies has only more recently been considered. Thus public information kiosks and electronic village halls act to enable clients to access some public services for themselves. Such initiatives have tended to be driven by the desire to improve the quality of public services, increase democratic participation, provide greater freedom of access to public information and raise productivity. The degree to which such projects represent a significant change of control is limited. Typically the extent of externalisation has been restricted by the kinds of social and political resistance which we considered above. These include such factors as:

• confidentiality of public information
• the lack of interactively and a tendency for standardised information to be provided to the public rather than welfare agencies responding to requests from the public
• public information defined by public service organisations
• professional control over expertise and knowledge

We can see from the post-1987 welfare reforms in the UK that ICTs have been limited in their impact upon traditional modernist welfare institutions and that even patterns of externalisation to be found in the private sector have not made much impression on public welfare services. There is however an alternative form of self-serving technology identified by Gershuny and Miles (1983) which they describe as 'social innovation' a process which requires the transformation of the service such that it is almost completely produced by the consumer in their own home, locality or community. One of the most significant impacts of ICTs in service delivery in the private sector has been the rise of direct banking and insurance businesses which enable a high degree of self-service consumption using telephony. The consequence of this technology has been a rapid closure of many high street branches and the laying off of thousands of employees: a trend which has no doubt a lot further to go.

The technology required for social innovation is developing at a very fast rate. Whilst not including all citizens most European countries have a high level of telephone connection and cable companies are rapidly connecting millions of urban households to a range of digital communications services. Together with smart card technology and the global communications network of the Internet these ICTs constitute the infrastructure which may provide the setting for the re-negotiation of social relations of welfare.

For such social innovation to lead to a welfare direct model the technology does not only need to be available but the nature of welfare consumption would need to be significantly transformed from one based upon dependency and standardisation. As with the post-Fordist thesis we must however be cautious about assuming a simple transplantation of technology developed in the private sector into the welfare domain without recourse to the complex social relations which will mitigate its development. At the present time there does indeed appear to be a growing consensus emerging across a large section of the political spectrum in the UK that welfare provision should be directed at helping recipients to help themselves. Exhortations to self-help provide an important context within which the new ICTs may be used to attempt to hardwire the perceptions of welfare recipients but they do not guarantee the outcome.

In part technological development becomes embedded in the political and social deliberations of 'empowerment', 'citizenship' and 'consumerism' as well as driven by financial restraints. For many citizens the message may be read that if they don't look after themselves then the state ain't going to be there, at least not all the way to the grave. Thus an increasing market may emerge for insurance, pensions and other financial forms of direct self-service which will further provide opportunities for technological development.

A different dimension to the drive towards a self-service welfare system comes from the privatisation of government information systems such as the IT section of the Department of Transport (DVOIT) and the IT Office of the Inland Revenue. Both these tenders were won by the US company Electronic Data Systems (EDS). This process of 'outsourcing' gives a clear indication that public information systems represent a significant market for the small number of private sector international data processing companies. It is not unreasonable to assume that company like EDS will be keen to utilise ICTs to maximise their profitability through social innovation.

The primary characteristics of emerging forms of self-service welfare may be summarised as:

• the transformation of the welfare service commodity to enable it to be produced in the home or local community
• the recipient is responsible for taking on almost all the labour costs for the service
• the system may facilitate the transfer of capital costs to individuals, voluntary organisations or teleworkers
• the system is built upon highly sophisticated informatics applications
• the recipient may (at least in appearance) be empowered to contest the authority of professionals

A number of recent initiatives would suggest that the conditions for social innovation to usher in a further stage in the restructuring of the welfare state may be about to happen. The introduction of voluntary identity cards is but a short step from the more widespread use of smart cards containing personal information which can be used for identification, health care, education or benefits transactions. Large bureaucratic organisations such as the Benefits Agency seem about to embark upon the 'downsizing' experienced in the private sector service industries. Indeed, the privatisation of government information systems may well include those for the Child Support Agency, the DSS, the NHS and the administration of the Home Office's National Identity Card Scheme to add to the Inland Revenue and DVOIT mentioned above.

The application of self-service welfare to particular policy areas is not difficult to speculate about. Community care by its nature is based upon the notion of supporting people to live in their own homes. Distance learning technologies may facilitate educational opportunities for those unable or not wishing to attend traditional time and space constrained educational institutions. In health care also there is the potential benefits of enabling people to challenge the 'medical model' and assume responsibility for their own health.

The movement towards a self-service welfare system is not likely to go uncontested. At its very heart is a reconstitution of power relationships between consumers, professionals and the state. Foucault has argued that in the past much information was constructed by governments for the administrative control of increasingly large populations. Self-service welfare implies a strategy of 'remote control' whereby individuals take on the responsibility for controlling their own actions. The empowerment achieved through the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge has an implied corresponding responsibility to solve one's own problems. Aspects of health promotion may provide an illustration of how so- called informed and responsible citizens take care of themselves through exercise and watching what they eat and thus avoid becoming a burden upon others in the community.

As I have been at pains to stress the precise configuration of social relations will be less the product of technological development and more the outcome of social contestation. The sentiment is captured best by Carolyn Marvin who states that the development of ICTs "is less the evolution of technical efficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed."

What might be the factors which contribute to the shaping of a self-service welfare model? First it is important to realise that welfare direct is not a uniform phenomenon. By its very nature it is likely to be fragmentary and take diverse forms which may act to reinforce existing inequalities. Some individuals and localities may be better placed to take advantage of the potential opportunities for empowerment and advancement afforded by some ICTs. Other technological applications, such as the use of CCTV, electronic tagging, and ID cards may have more potential for social control and be perceived as excluding more disadvantaged members of society. Moreover, the possible trend towards 'direct welfare' may have significant consequences for women where 'the home' is considered as a female domain. In this context technology which provides flexible part-time teleworking to enable predominantly women to both earn an income and care for dependents can be regarded as a means of 'keeping women in their place' rather than giving them access to 'cyber-space'. A similar 'social imprisonment' may be the consequence of heralding the advantages of ICTs for disabled people as empowerment through home shopping, distance learning, or teleworking.

Yet secondly it is necessary to recognise that the advent of 'welfare direct' is not simply a neo-liberal desire to return to Samual Smile's Victorian values of self-help. The institutions and practices of the welfare state have been much criticised by those championing a recognition of difference and diversity on grounds of gender, race, disability and sexuality. Here the new ICTs may be adopted as a means for groups to break free from state imposed identification and seek alternative forms of expression, and support through computer-mediated-communication. The feeling of anonymity experienced by using the Internet has led some women and black people to remark on the non-discriminatory nature of discourse and social interaction in remote networked communications.

Last and relatedly a growing number of self-help groups are beginning to utilise the Internet as a means to provide computer mediated social support networks. Here we may be seeing the spontaneous development of social action whereby individuals and groups form themselves into loose associations which we might describe as 'virtual community care'. These CMSS networks are global in nature and enable the voluntary interaction of people clustered around a range of possible areas of support such as a particular diseases (e.g. MS, HIV, etc.), a common experience (alcoholism, child abuse, etc.) or state of mind (depression, shyness, etc). As sites of exchange for 'lay knowledge' CMSS may also act as an example of how ICTs may be used by welfare recipients as a means to challenge the dominant professional discourses of health and welfare.

Roger Burrows and Brian Loader 30/03/98