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Process innovations in welfare reform technology are complex processes that evolve over time, rather than linear ones that unfold in predictable sequence. Findings from the Texas change center project demonstrate that implementation of these innovations is sensitive to the characteristics of adopting organizational units. Human service managers seeking to introduce similar innovations in welfare reform technology should take into consideration administrative intensity, professionalism, and organizational slack beyond the early stages of project implementation. KEYWORDS, Management, welfare reform, human services, technology, innovation

The Community Springboard (CS) program, sponsored by the Training and Enterprise Council of Leeds, England, successfully provides the hard-core unemployed with an alternative to dependency upon welfare. CS mobilizes support networks from within their own communities, to encourage and supervise the unemployed as they pursue self-designed educational, training and employment projects. CS uses its Working and Learning Club, along with seven other projects, to empower unemployed workers and disadvantaged communities to better their own circumstances, and increase their access to policymakers.

A plan passed in the state legislature will enable parents to assume support of their own families by focusing on work. If welfare suddenly did not exist and we could [...]

Contemporary approaches to social welfare based on the idea that the resources generated by economic growth should be redistributed to fund social programs. Although this approach has dominated social policy since the 1950s, it has been undermined by the argument that redistributive social welfare expends scarce resources on unproductive social services, maintains needy people in dependency, and stifles economic growth. Faced with need for new ideas that will legitimate social welfare, social development offers an alternative perspective on redistribution that emphasizes resource allocations to social programs that are productivist and investment oriented and that enhance economic participation and make a positive contribution to development. Elaborating this argument, this article outlines strategies for implementing developmental social programs.