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In this article we argue that current reform proposals coming from Robert Pinker and others are challenging the universalist premises of generic social work. Pinker et al. argue that social work should, for the sake of efficiency and performance, be a connected set of specialist activities. This 'determinate dispersal' which we recognise as falling within the remit of postmodern strategies, we contrast with the far more libertarian ideas of the noted post-modern theorist J.F. Lyotard. Thus we site the political and cultural meanings of Pinker's ideas between generic social work which upholds ideas of universal ethical values and universal provision, and those of Lyotard whose anti-foundationalism proposes a radically heterogeneous society with no central value-structure. We express our concern that the 'new specialist' remit may allow too much power to the social worker. Thus we have considerable sympathy for Lyotard's call for a radical anonistics - a field wherein the inequalities of power between say, a worker and her client, to some extent can be redressed.

This paper employs original survey data on female single parents in Boston to examine the determinants of welfare participation. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis--growing out of the literature on the urban underclass--that there are important neighborhood effects. The results provide support for the existence of neighborhood effects. These effects remain after controls for the personal characteristics of the respondents and for the possible endogenaity of neighborhood choice. The study also provides support for an explanation in which neighborhood effects are a result of the level of resources, particularly resources related to the percent of family heads who work. There is less support for the influence of stigma attached to welfare.

This article investigates four competing explanations of variation in the extent of local governments' welfare activity: a need responsiveness explanation, a fiscal capacity explanation, a crime-oriented version of social disturbance theory, and a community homogeneity thesis. Using census data for a national sample of U.S. cities in 1977, the analysis shows that, once the powerful effects of intergovernmental influence and functional scope are taken into account, only the fiscal capacity and social disturbance explanations are empirically supported. The social disturbance explanation is supported whether a simple, homicide incidence indicator or a more complex indicator reflecting the interaction of race and crime is used.

This article examines low-income family characteristics that are important to the American public in judging deserved amounts of public assistance. Results are based on a nationally representative survey that included vignettes describing poor families with varying levels of income, numbers of children, marital status, work motivation, and so on. The findings suggest that the public focuses more on characteristics of need in evaluating mother-only families but focuses more on work status and motivation of the father in evaluating two-parent families. The average benefit designated by respondents exceeded the poverty line, suggesting that the public supports higher levels of assistance to families than legislators currently grant.

The analysis pools ten years of General Household Surveys to identify the effects of Britain's welfare benefit system on a lone mother's probability of employment. It confirms the prediction that, because of the implicit 100 percent tax rate in the system, higher nonlabor income (other than welfare benefits) increases the probability while a higher benefit guarantee reduces it. The analysis also confirms that among women who could never be eligible for benefits, higher nonlabor income reduces the probability of employment and the guarantee has no effect. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

In this paper we relax the unrestricted domain condition of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem to allow the consideration of domains of econimic preferences--i.e., continuous monotonic preferences on some positive orthant [R.sup.M.sub.+]. The impossibility result remains in effect after all but the most drastic reductions in the size of the domain, in the sense that any domain admitting an Arrow SWF must be nowhere dense in the usual topology on the set of admissible preference profiles.

The 'New Consensus' on welfare expresses the idea that the major problem in social welfare is dependency, not poverty. Much of the evidence for this perspective has come from trend line data indicating that over time poverty did not evaporate in the face of increases in social welfare spending. Using various measures of the 'dependent' poor, the empirical analysis presented suggests that reducing welfare expenditures relative to need does not produce less poverty and dependency.

Most antipoverty public policy assumes that household income is an adequate indicator of household welfare. The thesis of this article is that welfare results, in part, from accumulation of household assets. It is suggested that assets yield a number of welfare effects other than deferred consumption, and these welfare effects may be quite important in reducing poverty.

A recent study looks at the economic well-being of women and children following an exit from AFDC The goal of many previous national welfare reform efforts has been to help [...]

Research is presented describing the study of teenage births and the influence of economic benefits on the choices made by teenagers whether to have children or not.

The National Bureau of Economic Research and the Universities Research Assn held a conference to discuss the effect of state and federal government reforms on public assistance and social insurance programs on May 14, 1999, in Cambridge, MA. Topics taken up at the two-day meeting included the efficacy of intergovernmental incentives in special education funding, the impact of automobile ownership on positive employment outcomes and the effect of minimum wage legislation on the case loads of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program., An NBER-Universities Research Conference on the Impact of Recent State and Federal Reforms in Public Assistance and Social Insurance Programs took place in Cambridge on May 14 and 15. Organizers [...]