Selling Welfare Reform : : Work-First and the New Common Sense of Employment / / Frank Ridzi.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Ridzi, Frank,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act promised to end welfare as we knew it. In Selling Welfare Reform, Frank Ridzi uses rich ethnographic detail to examine how new welfare-to-work policies, time limits, and citizenship documentation radically changed welfare, revealing what really goes on at the front lines of the reformed welfare system. Selling Welfare Reform chronicles how entrepreneurial efforts ranging from front-line caseworkers to high-level administrators set the pace for restructuring a resistant bureaucracy. At the heart of this remarkable institutional transformation is a market-centered approach to human services that re-framed the definition of success to include diversion from the present system, de-emphasis of legal protections and behavioral conditioning of poor parents to accommodate employers. Ridzi draws a compelling portrait of how welfare staff and their clients negotiate the complexities of the low wage labor market in an age of global competition, exposing the realities of how the new "common sense" of poverty is affecting the lives of poor and vulnerable Americans.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 “Selling Work-First” -- 2 “You’re All Doing the Wrong Thing” -- 3 “A New Way of Doing Business” -- 4 New Technology and New Customers -- 5 “We Are a Thorn in the Side of Those Who Won’t Change” -- 6 “Not Everybody Fits into Their Box” -- 7 “Don’t Blame Me, It Wasn’t Up to Me!” -- 8 Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author