Marketisation and Regulatory Labour in Frontline Disability Work

Abstract

In many liberal welfare states, market-based reforms aimed at enhancing competition and choice in disability services have necessitated extensive regulatory reforms to ensure quality service provision. This article explores how the changing regulatory environment surrounding an individualised funding scheme is transforming frontline disability work. Drawing on data from a survey of 2341 Australian disability support workers, the article contributes to sociological understandings of market regulation by foregrounding the importance of frontline workers’ labour to the regulation of social service markets. Various regulation-related tasks and duties are identified which, while practically embedded among the client-focused components of care work previously documented, are analytically distinct from them. This category of undertheorised, unrecognised, often unpaid work is referred to as ‘regulatory labour’. The article illuminates the mechanisms through which workers enact and resist regulatory processes and help absorb market risks and failures in ways previously underexplored in theories of marketised social care.