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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]

The ten empirical chapters and conclusion provide a fine-grained account of China's changing class structure with the focus on the old proletariat: that is, state-sector workers who enjoyed urban citizenship. In the decade before the early 2000s, some 60 million state and collective enterprise workers were dismissed amid massive enterprise restructuring in China. [Extracted from the article]

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]

Long held as a critique of postwar consumption, Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961) took place in a storefront on the Lower East Side, an area at the center of federal intervention into Black and Puerto Rican poverty. This article reinterprets The Store through comparison to Mobilization for Youth (MFY), an anti-poverty organization that operated next door. Both shared an environmental "method": the operational use of the storefront. MFY revolutionized the practice of social welfare by opening "storefront centers" that integrated its programs into resident's daily lives by placing its clinics next to neighborhood shops. Using the storefront as a gallery and performance venue, The Store similarly repurposed its space. By aligning Oldenburg and MFY, the article proposes that the transformation of labor circa 1961—when automation began to displace the former industrial workers targeted by MFY—has been overlooked as constitutive to The Store 's meaning. Moreover, the article argues that the politics of The Store 's heralded return to realism are productively described by MFY's postwar practice of liberal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Across Europe, new welfare programs exemplify attempts to govern through community. This article asks how such governing through community is done in practice. Drawing on comparative insights from fieldwork with parenting support professionals and volunteers in Amsterdam, Milan, and Paris, we document not only how governing through community is actually done but also what new forms of entanglements and unruly effects such governing creates. We argue that intimate welfare landscapes organized at the scale of the neighborhood (1) entangle welfare actors in neighborhood-focused networked relationships; (2) tend to bridge, obfuscate, and dissolve boundaries between state agent and citizen and between state and society; and (3) rely heavily on affective labor and personalized relationships. We show that the reorganization of governance through neighborhood-based networks produces an unwieldy quagmire of networks and partnerships. Moreover, rather than creating self-caring communities, new welfare programs primarily draw increasing numbers into governmental roles. Finally, instead of being released from its welfare and social responsibilities, locally embedded professionals turn out to be particularly effective at bringing the welfare state back in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrolled 2.5 million young men, putting them to work on public lands in relief projects meant to combat the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression. African Americans accounted for roughly 10 percent of these enrollees; however, their experiences were often defined by discrimination in selection and segregation throughout their service. Nevertheless, Black enrollees continuously looked for ways to gain more than the food, lodging, and dollar a day in salary that the corps offered to recruits. A crucial means to this end was the educational program in the camps. One of few facets of the corps in which African Americans had the chance to lead, the educational programs in segregated CCC camps were shaped by Black educational advisers who worked with their enrollees to build programs that reflected a commitment to racial pride and uplift. This article draws on federal records, camp newspapers, photographs, and personal correspondence to elucidate the educational impact of the CCC on Black Americans. [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]

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, a contentious debate has ensued in the Democratic Party, and in the U.S. left more generally, about whether Trump's victory was the result of racist and white nationalist appeals or was powered by an economically anxious and forgotten white working class left behind by globalization. From a Latin American perspective, this U.S. debate about the relative salience of race and class is strikingly familiar. After decades of denying the existence of racism, Latin America experienced a historic expansion of rights for black and indigenous peoples during a "left turn" that coincided with the expansion of social welfare policies, quickly followed by a "right turn" fueled by racist backlash. Thus, taking a hemispheric vantage point reveals that it would be a mistake to believe that class appeals alone are sufficient to counter the current politics of right-wing racist backlash. [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]

The article discusses the history of aging in capitalist West Germany and Communist East Germany in the 1950s. It explores the relationship of the history of aging with broader histories of political economy, welfare and citizenship. The creation of a new policy environment for older people between 1956 and 1958 is explored. Also discussed is the connection between German modernization and the exclusion and isolation of the elderly.

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]

Invariabilism is the view that the same theory of welfare is true of every welfare subject. Variabilism is the view that invariabilism is false. In light of how many welfare subjects there are and how greatly they differ in their natures and capacities, it is natural to suppose that variabilism is true. I argue that these considerations do not support variabilism and, indeed, that we should accept invariabilism. This has important implications: it eliminates many of the going theories of welfare while making some of the remaining ones more attractive. [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."

Nonstate providers are often more important in the everyday lives of the poor than outposts of the state. In this essay, I focus on one type of provider, sectarian organizations, which are an integral component of politics and welfare regimes in parts of the Middle East and other developing regions. Focusing on Lebanon, I describe how sectarian welfare providers emerge from and help to constitute political sectarianism while tracing what is at stake for the poor. First, by holding public offices and dominating informal channels that mediate access to public benefits, these actors mediate the experience of accessing the "rights" of citizenship. Second, while they provide benefits and services that might not otherwise be available, the modes of allocating welfare by sectarian parties can be discriminatory, notably along partisan and religious lines. Third, sectarian groups politicize the process of accessing social benefits while undercutting the political voice of the poor by weakening alternative channels of claim making. Finally, the crosscutting effects of sectarian organizations in welfare regimes suggest additional challenges to boosting local participation in development policy: while they are deeply embedded in the communities they serve, they produce and reinforce social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris (founded 1666), expressions of a masculine culture of science echoed contemporary language used to articulate the aristocracy's value to crown and state--even though the academy was not an aristocratic institution as such. In the eighteenth century, the pursuit of science became a new form of manly service to the crown, often described in terms of useful knowledge and benefit to the public good [le bien public]. This article explores the connection of academic scientific knowledge to the domestic spaces where it was made and, in particular, to the household of R.-A. Ferchault de Réaumur, an exemplary academician. Although Réaumur had neither wife nor children, a complex net of affective ties, some of them familial, linked the members of the household, which accommodated women (the artist Hélène Dumoustier and her female relatives) as well as men (a series of assistants, many of whom eventually entered the academy). As head of this dynamic household, Réaumur produced not only scientific results but also future academicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic concepts have a double status. They are elaborated for scientific purposes, but they are also used in the real world, especially by decision makers. In this paper I focus on the latter aspect and address the question of the uses of these concepts in welfare reform. I base my reflections on the case of the renewal of welfare-control policy in France. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork on the daily practices of welfare control provide the occasion to confront the economic vulgate of welfare reform with the actual situations of welfare recipients and ground a critical evaluation of the effect of reforms inspired by this vulgate. By doing so I propose a basis for a socioanthropological critique of the political implications of economic concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article focuses on the contributions of British judge and conservative activist John Reeves towards the democratic reform and public service activities in Great Britain. Information about Reeves broad understanding of legal principles which focuses on compiling legal antiquities and settlement of disputes between planter-inhabitants and merchant fishermen factions in New Foundland. He also developed a network of associations exercising eternal vigilance against sedition and treason.

Migrants' encounter with new economic and sociopolitical institutions often triggers contestations around normative gender arrangements. This article draws from ethnographic work with Somalis in Minnesota to analyze the dynamic ways that new opportunities and challenges in the settlement shape gender bargains. The study asks: How do migrant men and women articulate socioeconomic challenges and opportunities in the United States? In what ways are these articulations gendered, and what are the consequences of these articulations for the ways scholars think about migration, gender, and the role of public institutions in such matters? The analysis centralizes family conflict in part triggered by contact with new institutions such as the welfare regime and the police in America. The study concludes that migrants' experiences in the context of reception as well as their religious beliefs privilege a reification of patriarchal ideologies and, thus, serve to curtail women's opportunities to resist gender subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how political appeals to a shared human vulnerability could potentially deconstruct the able/disabled binary that continues to exist in the case of disability. The notion of vulnerability is important because it moves us beyond thinking about disability as a discrimination issue and approaches it as a shared matter of political planning and public welfare. To begin, I adjudicate between competing conceptions of vulnerability and its relationship to politics, focusing on the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre and Judith Butler. Drawing from both authors while emphasizing Butler's politicized version of vulnerability, I make the case for how disability scholars and activists should shift political efforts from a narrow focus on identity politics to a more encompassing vision of coalition politics, thereby removing the stigma of needing “special” protections for currently disabled citizens, while also making the case for the state to provide adequate social rights for all citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]