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This document provides a list of new and upcoming titles of interest to social work and social welfare scholars. The titles cover a wide range of topics, including Asian Americans in an anti-Black world, the experiences of Black children with incarcerated parents, gendered racism and queer life, and the legacy of poverty in America. The books explore issues such as mental health, immigration, education, and racial justice. The list includes titles from various publishers and offers diverse perspectives on social issues. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a list of new and upcoming titles of interest to social work and social welfare scholars. The titles cover a wide range of topics, including disability, aging, race, LGBTQ+ issues, incarceration, mental health, and public policy. The books offer diverse perspectives and aim to challenge existing norms and promote social justice. The summaries include information about the authors, publishers, page counts, and prices of each book. [Extracted from the article]

B The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality. b By Céline Bessière and Sibylle Golac, translated by Juliette Rogers. B The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health. b By Katherine Mason. B Social Work during COVID-19: Glocal Perspectives and Implications for the Future of Social Work. b Edited by Timo Harrikari, Joseph Mooney, Malathi Adusumalli, Paula McFadden, and Tuomas Leppiaho. B The Myth of the Community Fix: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Punishment. b By Sarah D. Cate. [Extracted from the article]

B Inequality across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States. b By Kaitlin Sidorsky and Wendy J. Schiller. B Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy. b By Sigal R. Ben-Porath. B Applied Arts and Health: Building Bridges across Art, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community. b Edited by Ross W. Prior, Mitchell Kossak, and Teresa A. Fisher. B A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris: A History of the Discourse on Social Welfare in the United States. b By Phillip Dybicz. [Extracted from the article]

Research characterizes public assistance programs as stigmatizing and stressful (e.g., psychological costs) but obscures differences across programs or the features of policy design that contribute to varied bureaucratic encounters. Using 83 interviews with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Medicaid beneficiaries, and 60 interviews with staff from those programs, we examine how people differentiate their experiences across programs. We find that WIC staff members describe the program as facilitating, rather than constraining, personal interactions with clients. In contrast, SNAP and Medicaid workers report pressure to process clients expeditiously and accurately, leading several caseworkers to express frustration and suspicion of the information provided by recipients. WIC participants in all three programs described positive, supportive interactions with WIC staff and viewed the program as a source of social support. In contrast, participants reported stigmatizing encounters with SNAP and Medicaid staff and inaccessible caseworkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Challenge of Right-Wing Nationalist Populism for Social Work: A Human Rights Approach. b Edited by Carolyn Noble and Goetz Ottmann. B The Commercial Determinants of Health. b Edited by Nason Maani, Mark Petticrew, and Sandro Galea. B Allies and Obstacles: Disability Activism and Parents of Children with Disabilities. b By Alison C. Carey, Pamela Block, and Richard K. Scotch. B All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health. b By Merlin Chowkwanyun. [Extracted from the article]

B Social Work Education in Europe: Traditions and Transformations. b By Marion Laging and Nino Zganec. B Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety. b By Laura Harrison. B Rethinking Feminist Theories for Social Work Practice. b By Christine Crocker and Trish Hafford-Letchfield. B Work Matters: How Parents' Jobs Shape Children's Well-Being. b By Maureen Perry-Jenkins. [Extracted from the article]

The number of families receiving public cash assistance has decreased since welfare reform and the establishment of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996, with only a few short-lived increases. The early decline was related to caseload exits; the recent decline is attributed to fewer eligible families participating. Using New Jersey TANF data from 2018, we conduct an equity analysis of TANF applications, denials, and the reasons for such denials. Multilevel and multinomial models examine risk factors that may impede access by identity or geography. Findings reveal statistically significant relationships between household characteristics and application outcomes, but no county-level variables were significant. Applicants with prior TANF receipt were less likely to be denied. Noncitizens, applicants with prior sanctions, and those over the TANF time limit were more likely to be denied. We discuss differences in access by race and ethnicity, along with policy implications, in the context of need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life. b By Steven Epstein. B The Walls Around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education. b By Gary Orfield. B The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today. b By Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder. B The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City. b By Christopher Bonastia. [Extracted from the article]

B Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State. b By Calla Hummel. B Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb. b By Sean J. Drake. B Chicago's Reckoning: Racism, Politics, and the Deep History of Policing in an American City. b By John Hagan, Bill McCarthy, and Daniel Herda. B Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada. b Edited by Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen. [Extracted from the article]

B The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath. b By Paige Sweet. B Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. b By Mark R. Warren. The New Politics of Insecurity. b Edited by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir. B Counterrevolution: The Crusade to Roll Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Movement. b By Stephen Steinberg. [Extracted from the article]

Given the concurrent phenomena of mass incarceration and neoliberal evolutions in the welfare state, it is inevitable that criminalized women will encounter social workers in their everyday lives. Under the conceptual lens of governmentality, social workers play a central role in reinforcing and interrupting processes of criminalization. This critical discourse analysis examines knowledge production in social work as an important site of engagement with criminalized women. Findings indicate that social work privileges a psychological discourse and that the logic of risk has supplanted holistic approaches to understanding criminalized women. This, I conclude, reflects a neoliberal political climate and aligns social work with carceral institutions in troubling ways. Although the discourse of risk seems firmly entrenched in the contemporary social work lexicon, it should not be treated as infallible or inevitable. This analysis propels a shift in emphasis toward discourses that invite political and ethical engagement with the carceral state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing public cash assistance as a time-limited benefit was a key and controversial feature of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Many advocates and practitioners consider the formalization of program flexibility through time-limit exemptions and extensions to be critical in helping the most vulnerable families. Despite these options, including states' ability to exempt up to 20 percent of their caseloads due to hardships without penalty from the federal government, uptake varies considerably over time and across states. Using multiple data sources, including federal caseload data and the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, we examine time-limit extensions and exemptions in the 50 US states from fiscal years 2002–16. Fixed-effects, negative binomial models test four theoretical models: state need and capacity, state politics, policy implementation strategies, and federal incentives. Findings indicate that states strategically respond to federal incentives and that implementation strategies matter, particularly for time-limit extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of dominant thinkers, social welfare leaders, and popular authors who asserted that public aid stimulates recipients' biological reproduction. This idea was first systematized by political economist Thomas Robert Malthus during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthusian ideas on public aid and reproduction then influenced policy in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The ideas also provided a rationale for attacks on public aid programs in the mid-twentieth century and throughout the era of so-called welfare reform, typified by policies such as the family cap and other provisions initiated to regulate welfare recipients' reproduction. These measures were influenced substantially by the work of political scientist Charles Murray. After presenting this history, the article explores implications of these ideas for current and future policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macro-level policy changes in the US welfare system can shift the boundaries of existing organizational welfare service funding arrangements. This in-depth archival case study examines the organizational boundary work of philanthropic actors at the United Foundation of Detroit during the War on Poverty era (1964–74). The study finds that the United Foundation responded to social and welfare changes by protecting and expanding its power and authority in its welfare organizational ecosystem. It used specific mechanisms, including managerial tools and ideologies, to exert greater control over nonprofit funding and service provision in this ecosystem, which altered the power dynamics and relationships between funding and nonprofit service organizations. Applying a boundary work lens to this historical period can assist social workers in building more equitable relationships with funders in the dynamic, frequently market-driven welfare system of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Artificial Intelligence and Social Work. b Edited by Milind Tambe and Eric Rice. B The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments. b By Gary Alan Fine. B The Trump Paradox: Migration, Trade, and Racial Politics in US-Mexico Integration. b By Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda and Edward Telles. [Extracted from the article]

Workfare, the conditioning of public assistance on work, was first institutionalized into US policy via refugee resettlement policy, thus arguably laying the groundwork for the 1996 welfare reforms. Refugee scholars have examined how implementing agents respond to the mandates of workfare as well as other delimitations of policy structures, but the ensuing influence on refugees is less examined. Drawing from 40 interviews and four focus groups with organizational leaders and worker-volunteers of a refugee community as a case study, this article examines how self-sufficiency as a resettlement policy goal manifests at the end of the policy line. We argue that diminution of self-sufficiency into job placement reflects a work-first, time-limited focus, while deindividualization conveys neglect for individual circumstances. We also argue that the implementation of self-sufficiency as a policy goal, even as it is diminished and deindividualized, manifests with valuation, denoting how acts of implementation carry value-laden expressions that idealize the refugee-worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Social Service Review acknowledges the 100th anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the National Conference of Social Work in 1917 by inviting scholars to reflect on the state of scholarship, and the profession itself, in the core areas of social work—social welfare policy development and analysis; administration of social services; community organization; and direct practice with individuals, families, and groups. To frame that discussion, this introduction describes the symposium that initiated work on these articles, identifies themes emerging from the special issue, and highlights the need for additional research on the state of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural service providers often struggle to meet the needs of low- income residents, given the constraints of geography and facets of local culture that stigmatize seeking and receiving help. Although the challenges faced by low-income, rural families are well studied, less is known about how service providers structure programs to serve rural residents. Here, we use qualitative data from two rural New England counties to explore how characteristics of specific communities shape the challenges of their social service systems and the strategies employed to overcome them. We find many common challenges across place and time, including distrust of outsiders and insufficient program funds. However, in the more remote county of the two, service providers have developed synergistic relationships to support vulnerable residents, whereas in the other, politics and town boundaries have impeded this collective approach. We conclude with a review of service delivery strategies, acknowledging the heterogeneity of rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration. b By Aya Gruber. B State-Sanctioned Violence: Advancing a Social Work Social Justice Agenda. b By Melvin Delgado. B Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century. b By A. Naomi Paik. [Extracted from the article]

Modern-day conceptions of American childhood and family situate children, and the labor required to rear them, outside of the wage labor market. This ethnographic study of a foster care adoption program shows how board payments elicit commodification anxiety at this local site, and in American culture more broadly. In using board payments as a litmus test to weed out parents with profiteering motives, workers inadvertently play into a model that devalues care work- which is disproportionately done by women and minorities. This study places everyday casework into the context of welfare state history and the history of foster care, and describes troubling similarities between the profiteering parent of foster care and the stereotype of the welfare queen used to garner public support for the 1996 welfare reforms. I argue that a socially just approach to caregiving must abandon the fiction that sentiments and markets operate in separate spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we examine cross-state inequality in social safety net provision from 1994 to 2014. We ask whether programs that are more decentralized in terms of policy design are more variable across states in terms of the generosity of benefits and inclusiveness of receipt and whether there has been convergence or divergence in programs affected by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) as well as in those that were not. We find substantial cross-state inequality in provision, with greater cross-state inequality in programs with more state discretion. In examining change over time, we find remarkable consistency in the levels of cross-state inequality; however, we also find that the devolution of authority under PRWORA increased cross-state inequality in programs affected by this legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family support obligations (termed responsible relative laws) were employed by states to control escalating costs in public assistance programs in the post-World War II era. California's pension movement, organized to benefit Old Age Security (OAS) recipients, fueled some of the most generous benefits in the country, but efforts to repeal relatives' support obligations were largely futile until 1975. This article argues that debates surrounding responsible relative laws in California centered on fiscal conservatism as well as whether the family or the state should provide support for the needy. Both opponents and proponents of support obligations invoked the need to limit the role of government, either for taxpayers who funded OAS or for recipients who resented an intrusive public assistance bureaucracy. These debates focused on the intersection between the goal of security for the elderly, benefiting the aged recipient and her or his adult children, and fiscal responsibility, which protected the taxpayer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various forms of housing exclusion are a reality for millions of people across the globe. For people who are homeless in advanced industrialized economies, housing exclusion often co-exists with social service engagement. This essay reviews three books about how homelessness is conceptualized and caused, and how we, as social service providers and social scientists, respond to homelessness: Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives, by Deborah Padgett, Benjamin Henwood, and Sam Tsemberis; Women Rough Sleepers in Europe: Homelessness and Victims of Domestic Abuse, by Kate Moss and Paramjit Singh; and The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States, by Craig Willse. It concludes that Housing First achieves justice for deeply marginalized individuals but that the effectiveness of Housing First represents a disturbing reminder of our failed welfare states and public institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White presence within welfare bureaucracies in the United States has historically been associated with discriminatory practices against welfare recipients. Despite considerable qualitative evidence, there has been limited empirical work examining how the presence of white caseworkers actually affects recipient outcomes. This article takes a first step in addressing this question. By matching county-level data on eligibility workers in government programs with individual-level data on welfare recipients, I show that the racial composition of welfare bureaucracies does matter for recipients. First, when work requirements are involved, a stronger presence of white eligibility workers is associated with a higher probability of exiting welfare due to a sanction for all recipients. Second, in the case of nonwork requirements, the presence of white eligibility workers increases the likelihood of a sanction termination only for black recipients. I discuss how the racial gap in welfare attitudes and racial discrimination could explain the empirical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the factors shaping longitudinal patterns of housing insecurity in the wake of the Great Recession, with a focus on whether housing assistance helped renters who received it. We use data from the first two waves (2009-10 and 2011) of the Michigan Recession and Recovery Study, a population-representative sample of working-age adults from Southeast Michigan. We use detailed reports from renters and other nonhomeowners to construct measures of instability and cost-related housing problems at both waves, and we compare the changes in these over follow up between housing assistance recipients and their income-eligible but nonrecipient counterparts. Our findings suggest that receiving housing assistance reduced the chance of experiencing housing insecurity problems over follow up regardless of baseline housing insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Western countries have introduced welfare reforms that limit public assistance for the long-term unemployed and that spur rapid movement into the labor market. The work-first nature of these new policies means that the success of welfare recipients depends greatly on demand-side constraints, more particularly on local labor market conditions. Based on longitudinal administrative data of all single mothers who received cash benefits when the Israeli welfare reform was implemented (N = 45,000), this study focuses on the role of the local labor market in explaining single mothers' long-term employment and earnings patterns. The results indicate notable diversity in employment and earnings patterns. Some mothers showed stable or improved attachment to the labor force, while others showed a much less stable pattern and about a quarter had a very weak attachment to paid employment. Local labor market conditions and their change over time play an important part in explaining these various patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the increased use of choice-based management strategies in social services influence the behavior of street-level workers? In this article, we provide an analytical framework for understanding street-level logic in choicebased environments. We then turn to the case of home-nursing care in Israel to examine how choice plays out in street-level workers' day-to-day practices. By relying on 34 interviews with social workers working in home-care agencies, we illustrate how street-level workers' jobs have expanded beyond implementing public policy to include the "new job" of recruiting and retaining clients. The article shows how a choice-based environment gives higher priority to clients' preferences, while at the same time these preferences are subordinated to the economic interest of the providers. It also demonstrates how market pressures may push street-level workers to develop new practices and coping strategies that go beyond, but often also counter to, formal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago has awarded the 2019 Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize to Sarah K. Bruch, Marcia K. Meyers and Janet C. Gornick for their article "The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality in Safety Net Provision in the Post-Welfare Reform Era."

B The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal. b By Ethan Blue. B Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America. b By Caley Horan. B The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. b By Adam Goodman. [Extracted from the article]

B Research Exposed: How Empirical Social Science Gets Done in the Digital Age. b Edited by Eszter Hargittai. B Aging Behind Prison Walls: Studies in Trauma and Resilience. b By Tina Maschi and Keith Morgen. B The Settlement House Movement Revisited: A Transnational History. b Edited by John Gal, Stefan Köngeter, and Sarah Vicary. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the effect of financial sanctions for noncompliance on the earnings of TANF clients. Current research on TANF sanctioning is descriptive, and few studies estimate the effect of sanctions on client outcomes. To estimate the causal effect of sanctioning, we utilize longitudinal data from Florida and a difference-in-difference propensity-score matching estimator. We compare the growth in earnings of sanctioned clients to a comparable sample of nonsanctioned clients four quarters after exiting TANF and find that sanctioning has a statistically significant negative effect on earnings among TANF clients. The effect is consistent across racial groups, larger among clients with at least 12 years of schooling, and generally increases with the frequency of sanctioning. The finding that sanctioned clients exhibit significantly lower growth in earnings than similar nonsanctioned clients suggests that sanctioning may serve to undermine TANF's goals of reducing welfare use and improving earnings in severely disadvantaged families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on race and welfare focuses largely on characterizations of black and white welfare recipients. Few studies examine racialized welfare discourse beyond the black-white divide. Employing media and archival data from four states during the 1996 welfare reforms, this study finds variation in welfare discourse depending on the perceived race of the beneficiaries. While existing work emphasizes the prevalence of a morality discourse about lazy and hyper-fertile black recipients, and which this study indeed finds predominant in Alabama and Georgia, in California and Arizona, debates centered on Hispanic, Asian, or Native American recipients, and discourse about law-and-order and economic opportunity prevailed. These types of discourse varied in racial character and in their claims about the causes of and solutions for welfare participation. Policy makers used the morality discourse to demand punitive welfare regulations, while law and order and economic opportunity discourses were used to promote immigration enforcement and economic development, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common proposition in welfare state research is that programs financed through dedicated payroll taxes tend to be more durable. This article examines American unemployment insurance (UI) as an exception to this proposition. UI is a self-financed social insurance program whose benefits have been dismantled over time because of an inability to maintain a constant revenue base. The study first examines the long-run decline in UI finances and concludes that changes in UI taxes are associated with the largest declines in state finances. It then examines why more states have not pursued reforms to strengthen UI finances and finds that opponents of more generous UI benefits have generally succeeded in preventing such measures, thus constricting UI finances and gradually retrenching benefits. These findings have implications for those seeking to improve UI solvency, as well as for the study of welfare state retrenchment more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 6 million children were reported to the child welfare system as being at risk of child abuse or neglect in the United States in 2010. Researchers and policy makers have long recognized that children living in families with limited economic resources are at higher risk for maltreatment than children from higher socioeconomic strata, but the causal effect of income, and particularly child support, on maltreatment risk has been challenging to establish; many of the same factors are associated with child support payment levels, poverty, and child maltreatment risk. Using a random assignment experiment that led to exogenous differences in child support received, the present analysis explores the causal role of a full pass through and disregard of child support on the risk of child maltreatment. We find that a full child support pass through, as compared to a partial pass through, reduces the risk of child maltreatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the processes, mechanisms, and outcomes of tie-based village life in W Township in north China through an ethnographic lens and explores how bonding in community networks influences villagers in the context of the emerging Chinese market economy and increasing social stratification in their home villages. While responsive village communities, based on family and personal ties, protect villagers in the postsocialist political economy and provide some public welfare programs, they limit the means and scope of villager resistance to the powerful in the countryside in search of social justice. This article suggests that the rights-based perspective that focuses on institutional equality and democratic participation needs to be integrated into the decentralized community-based approach to welfare, which has gained in popularity in both academic writing and social policy practices since the late twentieth century, to fulfill the potential of communities in building a just world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Publicly funded social services are an increasingly important component of social provision spending, accounting for approximately one-fifth of today's welfare state expenditures. These funds are often allocated through purchase of service contracts between state and municipal agencies and third-party providers, usually nonprofit organizations. This study uses a unique dataset of government contracts with nonprofit organizations in New York City between 1997 and 2001 to study the relationship between the allocation of social services funding across neighborhoods and neighborhood need. We distinguish between local organizations serving their immediate neighborhoods and distributive organizations serving multiple neighborhoods. Overall, contract dollars allocated to both organizational types are positively associated with socioeconomic disadvantage, although distributive organizations are less likely to be physically located in needy neighborhoods. However, contract dollars for services targeted to specific populations are sometimes negatively associated with the prevalence of these targeted populations, especially when those contracts go to distributive organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study documents an increase in the prevalence of extreme poverty among US households with children between 1996 and 2011 and assesses the response of major federal means-tested transfer programs. Extreme poverty is defined using a World Bank metric of global poverty: $2 or less, per person, per day. Using the 1996-2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we estimate that in mid-2011, 1.65 million households with 3.55 million children were living in extreme poverty in a given month, based on cash income, constituting 4.3 percent of all nonelderly households with children. The prevalence of extreme poverty has risen sharply since 1996, particularly among those most affected by the 1996 welfare reform. Adding SNAP benefits to household income reduces the number of extremely poor households with children by 48.0 percent in mid-2011. Adding SNAP, refundable tax credits, and housing subsidies reduces it by 62.8 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses caseworker and agency data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to explore the relationship among employment characteristics, workplace opportunities for need satisfaction, and burnout among child welfare workers. In a four-step process, linear-regression models are estimated to determine whether employment characteristics are associated with worker burnout and to test whether workplace opportunities for achievement, autonomy, and affiliation mediate the relationships. The author finds annual salary, adoption work, and whether the agency operates under a consent decree to be negatively associated with burnout. Opportunities for achievement, autonomy, and affiliation mediate the association between consent decrees and burnout, but worker pay and adoption work remain statistically significant inverse predictors of burnout. The article concludes by discussing implications for policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the notion of self-sufficiency as the central goal of recent policy efforts in Canada to move social assistance recipients into the labor market. The authors base their examination on a longitudinal, institutional-ethnographic study of 17 welfare-to-work participants attempting to make the transition from social assistance to employment in the province of Alberta, Canada. Findings from a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with participants about their day-to-day experiences show that there is a considerable gap between “the promise” and “the reality” of welfare-to-work programs. This gap reveals the difficulties of relying on the goal of self-sufficiency for all citizens, demonstrating how, as an abstract ideological notion, self-sufficiency has shaped concrete policy orientations that affect marginalized citizens by overpromising and underdelivering sustainable employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how child support arrears affect fathers' labor force participation. It relies on longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Findings from analyses of these data suggest that child support arrears result in declines in average weeks worked in the formal labor market in subsequent time periods. These findings are driven by the behaviors of fathers who had relatively high amounts of arrears and no income in the previous year and are mostly robust to tests for selection into no work or low levels of work by fathers. Findings also suggest that arrears obligations that are low relative to income result in increases in the probability that fathers engage in any formal work. Arrears are not statistically significantly related to informal labor force participation. This study highlights both intended and unintended consequences of the growth in arrears under current child support enforcement policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the quantitative literature evaluating welfare reform focuses on caseloads. In order to contextualize caseload declines, the current study examines a closely related measure of welfare coverage: the ratio of children receiving welfare assistance to children in poverty. A multilevel model approach is employed to investigate state-level factors that have contributed to declines in coverage. The findings suggest that welfare coverage has fallen the most in states with higher levels of coverage prereform, ideologically conservative governments, Republican governors, and larger proportions of African American welfare recipients. In addition, this study identifies specific policies and administrative practices that are associated with falling coverage and reveals a substantial erosion of the traditionally countercyclical relationship between unemployment and welfare provision since reform. By the late 2000s, the policy choices that embody welfare reform have produced both historically low levels of welfare coverage nationally and unprecedented diversity in benefit accessibility across states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hallmark of the welfare state is the extension of social rights to the most vulnerable, a cause historically championed by nonprofit human-service organizations. With the rise of neoliberalism, these rights are threatened. This article attempts to show how the institutional, economic, and political environment of the nonprofit human-service sector is reshaped by a neoliberal ideology that celebrates market fundamentalism. The ideology institutionalizes such rules and practices as new public management, devolution, and privatization of services. Those elements shift the political discourse about the rights of the most vulnerable from the national to the local level. By turning vulnerable citizens into consumers, the ideology also reduces the national visibility of their needs. Most importantly, neoliberalism dampens the sector's motivation to challenge the state and greatly curtails its historical mission to advocate and mobilize for social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative comparison of two welfare-to-work organizations, one private and for-profit,one nonprofit, examines the influence of state performance contracts on managers' responses to welfare service provision and on clients' employment outcomes. Despite organizational theories that suggest that the mandates of state performance contracts and state monitoring may prompt agencies to become increasingly similar to each other, this analysis finds that the differing organizational logics of for-profit and nonprofit service couple with the behaviors of managers to lead to starkly different organizational structures, processes, and client employment outcomes [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 study analyzes changes in the determinants of use of multiple food assistance (FA) programs by low-income children from 1990 to 2009. Using data from the 1990 and the 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, it compares very poor households with those that are poor and near poor. For both poverty groups, use of other welfare programs, especially Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is found to be an important determinant of multiple FA program use, but the effects are found to decline over the study period. Volatility in household income-to-poverty ratios is also found to reduce both groups' participation in multiple programs, but this effect grows for the very poor over the length of the study. Very poor children in households with more employed and married adults are found to use fewer FA programs, although they are apparently eligible for these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies examine the effect of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) on employment trends, financial security, and family structure, but few consider its implications for mental health issues. Yet mental health is central to a key objective of welfare reform: increasing work effort and self-sufficiency. This study uses data from the 1995 and 2006 waves of the National Survey of Drug Use and Health to relate trends in welfare recipients' mental health to welfare reform. Results suggest that, before PRWORA, welfare recipients did not differ from other poor women in depressive or alcohol dependence symptoms. Ten years after reform, welfare recipients experience more depressive symptoms than other poor women. This suggests that welfare reform left unusually symptomatic women on the rolls. The findings also suggest that mental health services are critical if welfare recipients are to succeed in making the transition from welfare to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this study examines changing levels of Unemployment Insurance (UI) eligibility and benefits receipt among low-educated, single mothers who entered unemployment between 1990 and 2005. It also examines changing participation in cash welfare and the Food Stamp Program (FSP). Data from 1990-94 and 2001-5 show that low-educated, single mothers who enter unemploymentexperience an increase in UI eligibility but not an increase in UI benefits receipt, when compared to low-educated, single, childless women who enter unemployment. Because of declining cash assistance receipt during 2001-5, UI becomes a more common income support for this population than cash assistance. Further, the probability of accessing the FSP increases among low-educated, single mothers who enter unemployment in 2001-5. As a result, the proportion of this population accessing benefits from at least one of these programs remains similar across the study period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]