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1999 Dozier Award Winner / Welfare reform, in its attempts to order the lives of women on cash assistance, uses time as a means of controlling women. Single mothers living in poverty experience, perceive and use time in ways that the state welfare bureaucracy fails to recognize and/or refuses to work with. Poverty is anchored in a historical and cyclical dynamic based on low valuations of people's time, structured by race, class and gender. This essay shows how specific temporal sequences, orderings and flows are implicated in the etiology of poverty, forming cumulative feedback loops that challenge the linear trajectory of the welfare-to-work model. It argues that the welfare state bureaucracy practices a powerful politics of time, consisting in the imposition of forms of order and rigid temporal structures on the highly contingent and unpredictable lives of the poor. These temporal devices of control, rather than facilitating women's efforts to move from dependence to self-reliance, only exacerbate their struggles to manage the vagaries and irregularities of time in their lives. Time thus constitutes a locus of struggle in the welfare relationship, between women on welfare and the welfare agency.

The effect of welfare policies is evident in the behaviours of welfare recipients and in their patterns of health. Yet there are very few studies with up to date analyses on the health consequences of the mid-1990s welfare reform in Canada. This study examines the effects of welfare income and welfare reforms on health outcomes of welfare recipients. I use National Population Health Survey (NPHS) in 1996 to present a baseline health differences by welfare status. I later utilize the mid-1900s welfare reform in a natural experiment setting to examine the health outcomes of welfare poor and working poor respondents. By using provincial welfare reform intensities, I detect exogenous variation that can indicate the effect of a greater reduction in welfare funding on health outcomes. Overall, my results show a strong correlation between welfare income and health outcomes, but policy makers must be cautious when interpreting causality.

xiv, 354 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT JV8222 .F75 2007 / In both Sweden and the United States immigration has increased, and public concern over immigration, integration, and social citizenship has become heightened. Across affluent Western countries, immigration and integration concerns have been molded into a consensus on the need to instill discipline, but conflict has emerged through public discussions of where discipline is to be applied. Analyzing media content and public documents, I find that in Sweden and in Europe more broadly, as in the United States, some disciplinary political narratives suggest that immigrants themselves are deviant and should be targeted for exclusion from the social rights of citizenship; other narratives hold that immigrants can best be incorporated by using the state to facilitate the expansion of the secondary labor market. It is popularly claimed that the expansion of secondary labor markets promotes economic inclusion, which is held to be the foundation for integration. While this has proven an effective wedge among voters, I probe the validity of this neoliberal claim by reviewing the integration of previous labor immigrants in Sweden through industrial-sector jobs, and by examining immigrant economic inclusion and social citizenship in the U.S. I use comparative data on inequality and immigration within the United States and across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to assess trends in relationships driving social citizenship politics. In interviews with policy makers and integration officials and reviewing the labor union confederation literature in Sweden, I find satisfaction with the operation of the Swedish social democratic division of labor in immigrant policy-setting and integration; as well I find on the national level a lack of concern with the wider, politically-transformative implications of prominent social citizenship politics. This allows me to demonstrate how state actors and even labor institutions can be steered into facilitating neoliberal wedge politics and reforms that undermine social citizenship in favor of concentrated accumulation. / Adviser: Linda Fuller

Welfare reform has been an issue in America for many years. The need to make positive changes to the welfare system escalated to the point that federal legislation was passed in 1996. This legislation mandated that each state establish welfare-to-work programs and require that welfare recipients begin to work or face loss of benefits after two years. Virginia responded to this mandate through its Virginia Initiative for Employment Not Welfare (VIEW), which requires welfare recipients to seek work opportunities. The purpose of this study was to examine employers' perceptions of factors contributing to their participation in VIEW and factors they felt affected welfare recipients' entry into the workforce. The theoretical framework of this study is based on two theories of organizational change: are the innovations and diffusion of innovations models. Interviews were conducted with twelve people who were in decision making roles in businesses that participated in VIEW. The following research questions were used to guide this study: 1. What factors encourage employers to participate in Virginia's Initiative for Employment Not Welfare (VIEW)? Interviews with employers were recorded, transcribed, and coded using the Nud.ist qualitative research software program. Twelve factors were identified: mass media, social services agencies, the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC), other information sources, employability skills, qualifications, work experience, education and training, child care, lack of funds for transportation and appropriate clothing, welfare policies, and a support system or monitoring plan. The first four factors affected employers' decisions to be a part of VIEW; the others were factors they felt affected workforce entry. This study confirms portions of the review of literature relative to research regarding factors that affect the entry of welfare recipients into the workforce. Two major conclusions emerged from the findings: the majority of employers interviewed suggested that welfare policies and child care significantly affected the employment of welfare recipients. Further study is needed to determine what changes are needed in welfare policies and preparation for those entering the workforce. Research should involve both welfare recipients, employers, social services personnel, and job training providers. / Ph. D.

The 1996 welfare reforms were part of a bipartisan consensus led by Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress about the downfalls of the existing United States welfare system. Under these reforms, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was an entitlement program that had been in effect since 1935. Similar to AFDC, TANF intended to serve as a safety net that provides cash assistance to needy families, but it also aimed to reduce government dependence by attempting to instill values in welfare recipients through stricter work requirements and eligibility criteria. The goals of TANF included promoting job preparation, reducing the incidence of births to unmarried mothers, and increasing the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Many of TANF’s goals were driven by the theory that family structure is important for economic and social stability, but states have a lot of freedom in how they choose to distribute TANF funding and implement the program. This research examined TANF funding allocation and social outcome differences between predominantly Republican (red) and predominantly Democratic (blue) states in order analyze TANF’s ability to reduce out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates. There was limited, but interesting, evidence that there were differences in how red and blue states were funding TANF programs. On average, red states allocated greater proportions of their funding to categories that were inconsistent with the purposes of TANF than blue states. Most states provided very little funding to goals associated with family structure. So, while out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates were different in 1996 (pre-TANF) and 2016 (post-TANF), these changes are unlikely associated with the program. Similarly, blue states had significantly less divorces than red states, but it is unlikely that TANF is responsible for this difference.

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The purpose of my dissertation is to further our understanding of why some states restricted immigrant access to welfare in the 1990s while other states granted immigrants access to social programs. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), many states diverged from equal access to welfare programs, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), for immigrants arriving after 1996. Very little scholarly work examines the variance in immigrants’ access to welfare programs. Current research studying welfare attitudes and policy has largely failed to investigate whether and how the influx of immigrants over the last three to four decades has decreased public support for welfare programs and resulted in policies that both decrease benefit levels and restrict access to programs based on citizenship. This is a serious shortcoming because immigration since the 1970s represents the largest population shift since the early 20th century, a change that has increased the size of the underclass and transformed the cultural and racial makeup of theUnited States. Accordingly, in my dissertation, I will examine how changes to the American political environment, immigration levels and the increasing number of immigration media stories, trigger authoritarian attitudes that in turn form a breeding ground supporting restrictive welfare programs. The results from the individual-level analysis provide strong evidence that authoritarians prefer less welfare spending, fewer immigrants, and a waiting period before immigrants can access welfare programs. In addition, authoritarians view immigrants as a threat due to their perceived failure to socially conform to American society. Building on these individual-level results, I find that states with large authoritarian populations are more likely to adopt restrictive welfare policies.

This thesis explores tensions within UK childcare policy and welfare reform. Through an ethnographic study of policy implementation, I examine themes of government, governance and governmentality. The evidence based policy movement assumes that the nature of evidence is self-evident but ethnographic data reveals how implementers draw on cultural resources of interpretive repertoires, myth and symbolism to make sense of policy. Central Government structures the policy implementation process with a “core offer”, hypothecated funding, a timetable and targets. Local policy actors manage implementation partly through tick box performative practices but they stretch time and juggle money. Implementation practices comprise branding, reification and commodification processes and the design of elastic policy products. Change and stasis are both in evidence with time-scales experienced variously as tight, as long running or as plus ça change. The community is produced as subject and object of governance, as an agent of change and a site for policy intervention. This glosses over childcare as women’s issue, market tensions and social class determinants of child poverty. Drawing on a range of theoretical resources and using the analogy of a palimpsest I show how discursive governance achieves a temporary policy settlement. This is neither workfare nor welfare but an unanticipated creative set of outcomes, exemplified in a circus project. I reveal some relatively hidden aspects of public policy and analyse give-away artefacts as hyper-visible policy manifestations. Commitment to a public service ethos is in evidence with policy implementers exercising their discretion in the interstices of market and state bureaucratic governance regimes. The Sure Start brand moves on from a flagship programme to Sure Start Children’s Centres but a novel Community Learning Partnership struggles to tug the oil tanker of children’s welfare services in a radically new direction or solve the wicked issue of child poverty.