Opening the Black Box: Promoting Employer Engagement at the Street Level of Employment Services

This chapter analyses how the public authorities involve employers in the work of hiring unemployed individuals who have social, mental and physical challenges and, in doing so, interact with employers and their organizations. To do this, it elaborates on existing conceptualizations of employer engagement and links employer engagement to the aims of strengthening the ability of the disadvantaged unemployed to work. The analysis shows how employer engagement is not set and stable but continually created, developed and maintained at the street level – local employment services. Empirically, the analysis in this chapter is based on a study of the day-to-day work of the staff in Danish public employment services collaborating with employers on workplace-based employment policies for disadvantaged groups of unemployed. The qualitative dataset consists of interviews with job consultants, ethnographic observations of municipal employer engagement staff, interviews with unemployed individuals and, to some extent, observations within actual workplaces.