Policy & Politics Journal Blog

by Janna Goijaerts, Natascha van der Zwan, Jet Bussemaker

Policies often set ambitious goals for social services, envisioning a welfare system that is preventative, tailored, and complementary. Yet, as middle managers in street-level organisations know all too well, reality frequently falls short of these ideals. In our recent research article, just published in Policy & Politics, we explore the discrepancy between policy goals and actual service delivery, shedding light on the role of middle managers within this gap.

To examine this issue, we conducted a vignette study with middle managers from various welfare organisations in the Netherlands. Instead of focusing on a single service type, the study explored multiple services targeted at individuals facing lifelong socio-economic and health challenges. The vignettes, based on real-life stories, provided a concrete lens through which managers articulated their perceptions of service delivery.

The middle managers in our study identified a clear disconnect between what policies prescribe and what frontline services can realistically achieve. The welfare state’s operational constraints mean that services often lack the preventative, tailored, and complementary qualities they are supposed to have. This tension is not unique to any one country—it reflects broader governance challenges in aligning policy intent with real-world implementation.

The findings reveal that the three preconditions of service delivery—prevention, tailoring, and complementarity—are only partially or not at all present in practice. Middle managers navigate this ambiguous space in three key ways:

• Equating prevention with early identification and accessibility – Managers articulate prevention in their work in terms of making services more available at an earlier stage.
• Internalising a discourse of customisation – The focus on tailoring services to individual needs dominates discussions, sometimes at the expense of broader systemic change.
• Substituting complementarity with collaboration – Rather than ensuring services are complementary within the broader system, middle managers tend to frame complementarity as cooperation at the individual level.

These articulations reveal a concerning pattern: middle managers perceive their influence to be at the individual rather than organisational or structural level. This perception reinforces an overemphasis on tailoring services while diminishing focus on prevention and complementarity. Over time, this imbalance could further entrench the very gaps in service delivery that policies aim to address. Addressing this issue requires rethinking how middle managers are positioned within the system, ensuring they have the capacity to influence not just individual cases but also broader service structures.

Despite the growing importance of service delivery for the welfare state, research on this topic within welfare state scholarship is relatively sparse. To address this gap, our findings contribute to existing scholarship by opening the “black box” of street-level organisations that deliver the services, and form a fundamental part of social investment policies. Following our exploration of how middle managers bridge the discrepancies between goals and practice, we suggest that our research findings summarised above are likely to be context specific. Therefore we propose that more research is recommended to academically conceptualise prevention, tailoring and complementarity, for instance by distinguishing tailoring from customisation and personalisation and exploring the relation with the current paternalistic framing of services.

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You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at

Goijaerts, J., van der Zwan, N., and Bussemaker, J. (2025). How middle managers perceive and articulate the discrepancy between socio-health service delivery goals and practice. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2025), available from: < https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2025D000000066>

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