Workfare Oz-Style

Summary

Traditional approaches to the promotion of welfare have disappeared in Australia, replaced by a new institutional order represented by welfare-cum-workfare. This has impacted on social work—both as a collective entity and as a set of practices. This paper maps the shift to workfare in Australia and examines its impacts on and implications for social work. We briefly discuss the Australian model of social protection, illustrating our own brand of “exceptionalism,” and lay out what we have termed “Workfare Oz-style.” Drawing upon neo-institutional theory, we review and analyze two key contexts where “Workfare Oz-style” is operationalized—the Job Network and Centrelink. Some tentative conclusions are given and the dimensions of a research agenda, which will put any emerging propositions to empirical test, are proposed.     

Workfare Programs

Abstract

Workfare initially originated as an approach to guide welfare recipients towards self-sufficiency. Today, the same strategy is being utilized as a desperate means by the States to move welfare recipients into the workforce in order not to suffer further cuts in federal assistance.

This paper reviews many of the common barriers which participants experience as they attempt to move from being welfare recipients to employees. In addition, it presents effective workfare programs, identifies critically needed support services for workfare participants, and suggests policy recommendations for the future.     

Dignity Strategies in a Neoliberal Workfare Kitchen Training Program

Welfare-to-work training (workfare) programs are designed to technically and affectively prepare marginalized people for jobs that are often routinized and dirty. They are expected to accept personal responsibility for their situation and demonstrate submission to bosses as means of “working off” their “debt” to society. Ethnographic observation at workfare training sites has tended to emphasize the indignities that trainees suffer, with less attention to how workers maintain dignity in the face of these experiences. Using ethnographic observation and interviews in a Chicago workfare kitchen training program, we show that neoliberal kitchen training work encompasses paradoxical expectations for trainee-workers; they must demonstrate high levels of discretion and creativity required in professional kitchen work and demonstrate submission to charismatic authority as a means of getting kitchen work done and of affective compliance with the goals of the program. To combat the direct efforts of others to produce indignities, trainees developed two dignity strategies that are highly dependent on the structure of kitchen work: operating in a slipstream, and banking confidence that allows them to take liberties normally allowed for chef-trainers. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of workplace dignity, a privilege that has been especially elusive for the poor under welfare-to-work programs.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

From the Editor: From Scholarship to Practice

Sociological Forum -     

A personalised approach in activation. Workfare volunteers’ experiences with activation practitioners

ABSTRACT

In activation work – supporting jobless people to perform activities that are supposed to lead them back to paid work – a personalised approach is deemed crucial. What a personalised approach entails, however, remains unclear. In this article, we try to further develop the notion of a personalised approach in activation work, by analysing Dutch workfare volunteers’ experiences with activation. Our interviews show that a personalised approach appears as a process with three stages. In the first stage, personalised means paying attention to welfare clients’ personal histories, particularly their ‘violated life story’. In the second stage, personalised means being sensitive to the new reality of them being volunteers. In the third stage, personalised means paying attention to the future, especially to the prospect of paid work. Our findings contribute to the theorisation of a personalised approach in activation work to which time turns out to be a crucial dimension.     

From the Margins to the Center

Abstract

How can research data about gender role strain in gay fathers improve clinical work with all men? This article describes a qualitative research study of 25 primarily White, middle to upper middle class gay fathers who had children in the context of a heterosexual marriage, and later established a gay identity. The fathers were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire in a focus group format. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory methodology. The narrative data chronicles the men's efforts to integrate their fathering identity and their gay identity. The findings are discussed using the theoretical framework of gender role strain. The authors propose that research on gay fathers has the potential both to challenge stereotypes about gay men and also to expand the fathering role for all men. The authors use clinical examples to illustrate how research findings from minority groups can expand knowledge about mainstream populations.     

Independent Workers, Dependable Mothers: Discourse, Resistance, and AFDC Workfare Programs

In the late 1980s the United States demanded that all womenreceiving federal welfare payments begin efforts to move offof welfare and into wage work. Underlying these demands wasa discourse of dependency that opposed wage work to state benefits,men to women, white to people of color, and deserving to undeserving.This article examines the operation of dependency discoursein one city's welfare-to-work program, explicating the waysin which staff and welfare clients manipulated the discourse,creating some spaces for resistance by poor nonwhite women receivingwelfare.     

From Antiracism to Antiracisms

Although antiracism has existed as long as there has been racism, social scientists' attention to antiracism has increased in the past decade. In this essay, I argue that the body of scholarship on antiracism is characterized by three main strands: (1) a macro focus on the ideology and structure of antiracist social movement organizations, often attempting to distil 'the real' antiracism from others deemed not critical or radical enough to qualify; (2) a micro focus on what motivates individuals to become antiracist, usually concentrating more on whites and using an a priori assumption that people of colour are automatic antiracists; and (3) a more promising interest in the antiracisms of the racial middle (Latinos, Asians, multiracials). This latter focus is emerging with a handful of scholars largely outside the United States, questioning the assumptions of the previous two strands, and offering interesting potential for the future of the field.     

From delusion to play

Winnicott suggested that delusions are a failed form of play. Using Winnicott's theories of the play space, this paper illustrates through clinical material how the therapist can join a delusion and convert it into an area of play. Discussion includes an analysis of the use of play in working with the transference and countertransference as well as the therapist's resistances to engaging in play.     

From Rules to Prototypes

Summary

Traditional expert systems attempt to represent logically the complex decision rules used by experts. This approach has some defined successes but has been less effective with multi-dimensional problems such as characterize clinical situations. Research suggests that effective expertise is based more on memory than on analysis and logic. The article discusses the nature of memory-based expertise and questions the feasibility of capturing it through expert systems.

Training based on computerized case simulations is suggested as an alternative. The paper also discusses the need for knowledge on the specific impact interventions have on distinct subgroups of consumers. This knowledge can be used to guide training and assist consumers in making key decisions.     

From Destruction to Reconciliation

SUMMARY

Daniel Johnson discusses how the application of “restorative justice” in his own life and in the life of the victim of his criminal offense contributed to his personal regeneration and healing for his victim. Mr. Johnson challenges criminal justice policy-makers to create conditions where “restorative justice” can be employed in the broadest sense in order to do what contemporary, punitive, retributive criminal justice systems are largely incapable of doing, that is, facilitate lasting offender rehabilitation and healing for crime victims and communities, and to offer opportunities for victim-offender reconciliations.     

From Otherness to Alliance

Abstract

The first part of this article presents the epistemological evolution of the therapeutic frameworks regarding the treatment of transgender individuals and their partners. It outlines a medical approach and two others-the developmental approach and the deconstructive approach, ones not based on the conception of transgender identity as pathological. Two case studies of couples presenting with gender identity-related issues illustrate their application with particular emphasis on the relational process of gender identity formation and on partners of transgender-identified persons.     

From consensus to credibility

The development of consensual science has greatly influenced the international environmental negotiation processes. This is not least the case for the Convention on Long‐range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Negotiators as well as regime analysts regard CLRTAP as a successful example of how scientists have succeeded in influencing international policy making through consensus‐building strategies. Drawing on Ulrich Beck's work on reflexive scientization and the concept of ‘stage management’ from the field of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), this paper critically analyzes the role of science in the regulation of transboundary air pollution. It discusses the consensus‐building strategies developed by scientists as well as contemporary strategies for making science matter in regulative work. It is argued that scientific credibility is crucial for attracting political and public attention, but that credibility does not necessarily have to be based on scientific consensus. The challenge for science is not so much to create consensus but to strengthen its credibility by elaborating new relations with its stakeholders.     

From commands to conversations

With the rapid and ever accelerating pace of global change, the traditional command and control organization becomes less effective. When we understand the organization not as a rationally constructed machine, but a sea of conversation, the door is opened to new and more effective forms of practice. No longer is individual identity based on one’s role in the machine, but on one’s participation in the conversation. Ideally this will enable the individual to give expression to the multiplicities he or she brings to the organization. Identity will not be circumscribed.     

From Pupa to Butterfly

IN front of me is the Floating Stone, an autobiography-like novel written by a farmer writer. With a not very eye-catching cover and a somewhat baffling name, the book is not quite interesting to me. Care-freely, I took up the book and scanned it. Unexpectedly, I was attracted and finished reading the