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Social service providers are increasingly encouraged by their funders to help fashion the poor into neoliberal citizens, and this study investigates how this situation may affect the ways in which service users present themselves to service providers when seeking assistance. We suggest that our interview participants, drawn from vulnerable and marginalized populations of Winnipeg, Manitoba, are attuned to the characteristics of neoliberal citizenship that are increasingly valued among social service providers in Winnipeg. Indeed, just as neoliberal policies pressure social service agencies to embrace accountable, business-like, and individualizing models of service, so too are service users encouraged to adapt themselves to the demands of neoliberalism. In this context, our respondents represented themselves as active, prudent, autonomous, responsible, and entrepreneurial in an attempt to fashion an identity worthy of care within the contemporary bureaucratic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes factors associated with transitions into and out of disconnectedness,which is defined as being disconnected from the labor market, welfare, and other substantial financial supports. Findings are based on discrete-time hazard models estimated with a sample of New Jersey welfare recipients followed for 5 years. Work history, human capital, policy environment, and economic conditions are found to be the factors most strongly associated with the dynamics of disconnectedness. More work history and human capital are associated with a lower probability of becoming disconnected and a higher probability of leaving disconnected status for employment. Individuals relying on unemployment insurance benefits are at high risk of becoming disconnected. This suggests that the expiration of such benefits often leads to disconnectedness. Receipt of sanctions for noncompliance with welfare's work requirements are found to triple the risk of becoming disconnected. Finally, transitions into disconnectedness increase sharply with increases in the unemployment rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses population-level administrative data from Rhode Island's Food Stamp Program to examine exits from the Food Stamp Program by elders. Multivariate event history models estimate the relations of multiple program participation and the timing of eligibility reviews to the probability of exiting food stamps. Results suggest that elders who are age 65 or older and who receive both Supplemental Security Income and food stamps have a higher probability of exiting the Food Stamp Program than do elders who receive only food stamps. The timing of eligibility reviews is also found to be positively associated with the probability of exit from food stamps. This article is argued to extend conceptual models of the determinants of food stamp exits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the duration and effect of child-care subsidy use among low-income working mothers in Wisconsin. Using an event-history model, the study finds that mothers are likely to cycle on and off subsidy systems and that their subsidy spells tend to end relatively quickly. Results from a Tobit model with a lagged dependent variable suggest that long-term use of child-care subsidies is associated with increases in mothers' earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1996 welfare reform legislation expanded the use of sanctions under the assumption that welfare recipients can comply with work requirements and that they can calculate the costs and benefits of compliance. This research tests the validity of these assumptions through a record- and survey-based study of California welfare recipients. The article questions the validity of the assumptions, finding that, compared to nonsanctioned recipients, sanctioned recipients face greater barriers to meeting the work requirements. A significant proportion say that they were not informed about the sanctioning rules. Almost half of sanctioned recipients were not aware that they were sanctioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare rolls have declined substantially since 1994. However, little is known about the coping strategies that poor mothers use to manage the competing demands of rearing and supporting their children under the new welfare regime. This article uses data from the national Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to describe the sources of support and child-care arrangements upon which unwed mothers relied, as well as the difficulties they faced, approximately 5 years after welfare reform. Findings suggest that levels of hardship among unwed mothers are high and that cohabitation and employment are not associated with improved material conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organization of provider-client relations in helping processes within urban, poor communities has shifted in accordance with structural shifts in large, American inner cities in the last 30 years. I argue that this set of relations is best understood as a three-tier structure, with each tier composed of networks of individuals, organizations, and social groups that can be differentiated by various factors, including size and capacity and community relations. The three-tier model is a useful heuristic both to understand contemporary patterns of service delivery and to design social policies to strengthen the social fabric of urban, poor communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of public relief practice and policy in Lafayette, Indiana from 1896 to 1897. It informs that historians view, the national depression in the 1890s as changing the perception of the cause of poverty from one of individual fault to one that recognized social factors and, therefore, as altering poor relief practices and policies. It informs that long-held, cherished beliefs about America as a land of limitless opportunity with jobs for anyone willing to work influenced the general attitude toward poor relief in the 1890s. The view that being poor was one's own fault, caused by character defects like laziness, improvidence, and intemperance, followed from this faith in the potency of the individual. The article examines local relief practices in a small Indiana city in 1896-97, the last year of the depression, within the larger context of the policy-setting Indiana Board of State Charities. It focuses on both public and private relief efforts and resident and transient recipients.

Though sharing a concern for the well-being of the poor, recent books on welfare reform have failed to produce a convergent view of appropriate public policies for preventing poverty and alleviating its consequences. None of the authors is exceptionally acute in being able to work backward from the human problem of poverty in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles to the design of policies that might work there. Improvement in the life chances of poor people cannot occur unless labor markets offer much more abundant and attractive job prospects—direct routes into the mainstream—to ordinary, unremarkable citizens who are otherwise likely to fall into chronic dependency on welfare and the underground economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]