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2 books match the query 'Public welfare administration'

cover of Teen Mothers--Citizens or Dependents?

Teen Mothers--Citizens or Dependents?

Ruth Horowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1994

In a book that speaks clearly and forcefully to the heart of the welfare debate in the United States, Ruth Horowitz examines one of the most critical questions of welfare policy: how can a United States government program help teen mothers—one of the most needful groups of all welfare recipients—move from welfare dependency to employment, independence, and responsible citizenship?

"Rich vignettes reveal the complexities of teenage mothers' lives, particularly the disjuncture between classroom and street identities, 'inside' and 'outside.' . . . Original and illuminating as well as timely."—Sharon Thompson, Women's Review of Books

"Horowitz offers insights that should be considered in the debate over welfare reform. . . . Teen Mothers . . . places Horowitz's results in the context of major theories about the role of welfare in the U.S. and offers a microlevel critique of the implicit assumptions and probable consequences of each theory's approach to welfare reform."—Booklist
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cover of The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform

The New Welfare Bureaucrats

Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform

Celeste Watkins-Hayes

University of Chicago Press, 2009

As the recession worsens, more and more Americans must turn to welfare to make ends meet. Once inside the agency, the newly jobless will face a bureaucracy that has undergone massive change since the advent of welfare reform in 1996. A behind-the-scenes look at bureaucracy’s human face, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a compelling study of welfare officers and how they navigate the increasingly tangled political and emotional terrain of their jobs.

Celeste Watkins-Hayes here reveals how welfare reform engendered a shift in focus for caseworkers from simply providing monetary aid to the much more complex process of helping recipients find work. Now both more intimately involved in their clients’ lives and wielding greater power over their well-being, welfare officers’ racial, class, and professional identities have become increasingly important factors in their work. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in two very different communities in the northeast, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a boon to anyone looking to understand the impact of the institutional and policy changes wrought by welfare reform as well as the subtle social dynamics that shape the way welfare is meted out at the individual level.

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