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This article examines the ways in which the urban poor in Argentina help one another in the arduous task of making ends meet when neither the formal labor market nor state welfare policies are able to secure their subsistence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article makes one substantive, one analytic, and one theoretical claim. Substantively, the article argues by way of empirical illustration that the urban poor are hardworking bricoleurs. Analytically, the article demonstrates the advantages of studying poor people's strategies in a simultaneously historic and ethnographic fashion through joint collaborative fieldwork. Theoretically, the article pushes toward replacing the notions of 'strategy of survival or subsistence' with the more encompassing notion of 'strategy of persistence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The functioning of the U.S. social safety net as a support for low-income families depends on various means-tested programs and a system of both public agencies and nonprofit organizations. Using in-depth interviews (n = 5) and a survey of nonprofit employees (n = 73), we seek to understand the role of nonprofits in promoting equitable access to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Our findings reveal that public assistance programs are a necessary support for families, but that access is not always easy or equitable, and nonprofits form a protective layer of support providing resources and guidance for those most in need. Implications for policy and partnerships between the various components of the social safety net are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eventually, she and I started a welfare rights group in Milwaukee among professionals working in anti-poverty jobs. The Reagan administration had just destroyed all work incentives: the $30 plus one third of our work income was no longer allowed to remain clear of the deductions to the welfare check resulting from earned income. In the job search class, I would sneak to the blackboard and use it as an opportunity to teach moms why part-time and/or low-paid employment was a waste of time since all income earned reduced the welfare check dollar for dollar, leaving mothers with a welfare income despite being employed. [Extracted from the article]

Federal policy changes for Head Start (HS) elevate the importance of measured academic performance over other traditional program aims, particularly those associated with the social-emotional development of children. Concerned about the possible effects of these changes on children, based on observations and interviews, detailed portraits of teachers, parents, and children in a program serving the chronically homeless were constructed. Based on these portraits, the authors conclude that the question that has largely directed studies of HS—“does Head Start do any lasting good?”—is the wrong guiding question for policy. The better question is “What is good for them now?” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most macrolevel analyses of governmental aid to the poor focus on the relationship between indicators of social threat and the expansion of welfare programs. In this article, the authors' investigation extends that research by exploring the consequences of welfare contraction. Taking advantage of Wisconsin's ongoing natural experiment with welfare reform, the authors examine the extent to which the codification of more restrictive eligibility requirements functions to enhance the labor supply. The interrupted time series autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) analyses of monthly welfare caseloads and labor force size fail to support previous contentions that restrictive eligibility requirements are designed to enforce work norms. The authors interpret those findings, raising serious doubts about the efficacy of the conflict perspective's contention that non-legal institutions, like welfare, serve as vehicles for the macrosocial control of subordinate groups or strata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses upon factors related to the desire of social work students to work with the poor. It examines three sets of variables: students' perceptions of the causes of poverty, the best way of dealing with it, and preferred professional interventions. The sample consists of 514 graduating BSW students from Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and the United States. The findings indicate that interest to work with the poor is associated with less inclination to perceive poverty as caused by lack of motivation, effort, and responsibility; more inclination to view the expansion of state provision as the best means of dealing with poverty, less inclination to support its reduction; and more desire to employ policy practice and advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a relational definition of poor people and poverty situations grounded in the Epistemology of the Known Subject and drawn from qualitative research data. I first examine the basic assumptions of such epistemology which has arisen from the limitations of prior ways of knowing; that is, of what I call the epistemological paradigms of the Epistemology of the Knowing Subject. Then I discuss the features of an empirical study on extreme poverty in Buenos Aires city, as well as the data analysis and concept creation processes involved. This enables me to consider the characteristics of the relational definition of poor people and poverty situations. Finally, I explore the societal model and the type of social process underlying the usual notions of poverty, and the influence of both on social policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have an abundance of information about congregations to inform religion and social welfare policy discussions in the United States. But their data tend to come from congregations located outside low-income neighborhoods, not congregations inside them. This may limit their ability to make definitive claims, especially to policy makers, about social welfare practices and the potential of congregations located in low-income neighborhoods to aid in poverty reduction initiatives. Are the literature’s findings about social service provisions by congregations applicable to congregations located in poor places? Using a data set of congregations located in the vicinity of public housing complexes in four cities, the authors explore this question. In the process, they discern factors that influence social service provisions by congregations located in low-income neighborhoods, identifying congregation income, clergy education, and congregation residency as the most significant predictors of social service activity. The authors conclude by identifying future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents critical perspectives on the books "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare," by F.F. Piven and R. Cloward, and "Flat Broke: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform," by Sharon Hays. "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare," is an important text due to its use of critical theory; and as a documentation of the social change efforts of academically based scholars. In "Flat Broke: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform," Hays' intent is to understand the contradictory cultural messages that are embedded within welfare reform--the conflicts between work and family, commitment to others and competitive individualism, self-sufficiency and dependency.

The article reports that through a concern with disciplinary power, post-structuralists have recently turned their attention to the discursive force of welfare in constituting the poor as docile and subservient populations. Using the recent example of 'work-welfare' in Britain, the pessimism of this position is rejected by pointing to the continuing importance of resistance and opposition, while considering their wider significance for the analysis of welfare provision. With the apparent failure of welfare statism, the inability of collectivism to withstand the current phase of welfare retrenchment and the growing influence of the new social movements and the voices from the margins, post-modernism and post-structuralism have been embraced as offering new ways of thinking about welfare and social policy. The post-structuralist claim to represent a new radical agenda for the analysis of social welfare provision is considerably less impressive, however, when positioned in relation to wider developments in radical thought.

The article discusses the benefits of chartering public welfare in the U.S. The history of welfare bureaucracy can be traced directly to the New Deal when Harry Hopkins unilaterally decided to channel public assistance benefits through state agencies rather than rely on the caprices of private charitable organizations. Unanticipated by its architects, the institutionalization of public welfare through the 1935 Social Security Act would consign the poor to decades of inferior treatment. Today, public welfare has become synonymous with providing second-class service to second-class citizens, the vast majority of whom are minority women with dependent children. Chartering public welfare would allow citizens and professionals to establish organizations to provide essential financial and social services to families. To obtain a charter, such agencies would have to meet basic standards of service provision established by local government. Objectors to chartering public welfare will fall into two camps: The liberati will insist that the welfare-poor are too ignorant to make decisions about family finance and well-being and need a good dose of maternalism for their own good. Laissez-fair conservatives will insist the poor need the spur of their own poverty--that noxious public welfare dissuades the poor from becoming publicly independent. The ultimate rationale for chartering public welfare, however, is grounded in the realpolitik of poverty policy. The 1996 welfare reform prescribes a 5-year lifetime limit on receipt of federal aid with many states instituting shorter periods. Yet research on welfare-to-work programs has concluded that the majority of families on public assistance are poorer after aid is terminated due to time limits. Instead of time limits, welfare families require stable incomes and accelerated upward mobility, neither of which is a priority of public welfare departments.