This study examines welfare dynamics in Mississippi under the newly created TANF program. Specifically, it examines welfare-to-work transition between 2001 and 2009 and tests several hypotheses regarding individual and contextual characteristics. The data come from multiple sources that include administrative records and publicly available data. Data on TANF transitions come from the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Data on TANF employment come from the Mississippi Department of Employment Security. Data on training come from the Mississippi workforce investment system. Information on both neighborhood and labor market characteristics come from the 2000 Census. The findings clearly support the hypothesis that individual and contextual conditions influence the ability of a poor single mother to exit TANF and gain employment. On the other hand, there is weak evidence supporting the hypothesis of welfare dependence when controlling for unobserved characteristics for multiple spells within individuals. The main implication here is that TANF might have indeed addressed the longstanding concern about welfare dependency. The results, however, show that individual and contextual factors still play a role in determining welfare dynamics across poor single mothers with different individual and contextual backgrounds.

Since 1999 UK employment programmes (known as welfare-to-work programmes) have been delivered through the procurement of services from organisations outside of the public sector. Managed by contractual arrangements and arranged in a quasi-market system controlled by the state, private and third sector organisations compete to secure contracts predominantly based on payment-by-results and competitive tendering processes. This thesis used an instrumental case study to analyse the impact of the welfare-to-work quasi-market on a third sector organisation based in Scotland. Using a qualitative mixed-methods research strategy including 20 in-depth interviews, 150 documents, an ethnographic study and financial analysis of the organisation’s accounts, the thesis presents an in-depth insight into the development of the welfare-to-work market and its changes over time and the impact this had on instigating organisational change in a third sector organisation. Drawing on transaction cost theory, neoinstitutional theory and resource dependency theory the study found that activities, structure, and management processes changed in line with changes in its organisational field in order to attract and maintain resources and gain legitimacy. Furthermore, the organisation under investigation faced financial management tensions as it sought to balance its involvement in service delivery with transaction costs associated with market participation. The thesis found that the dependence on resources from complex quasi-markets relations creates new power asymmetries between delivery organisations and the state.

Thesis advisor: David Blustein / This qualitative study explored the experiences of women going through a welfare-to-work program in a northeastern setting. Specifically, the women's identities as mothers, women of color, and women living in poverty were examined. Feminist and critical theory informed the research questions and literature review. Qualitative description and content analysis were used to analyze the data from 10 interviews. The concepts that emerged described the women's experiences going through the program, their identity as mothers and caregivers, the negative psychological experiences and impact of going through the system, feeling labeled and misunderstood, obstacles and barriers to success, forms of resilience and resistance, and their relationship with work. Four major inferences were gleaned from the results: the need to integrate the experience of motherhood/caregiving more explicitly into WTW, the need for more attention to mental health concerns, an alarming level of corruption and corruption within the welfare system itself, and a dialectical struggle between the theoretical and practical experience of work and employment. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A significant new direction in Australian income support policy was introduced in 2002. Known as Australians Working Together, this development changed the basis of social security entitlement for parents. Throughout most of the twentieth century, low-income sole mothers, and later sole fathers and parents in couple families, could claim income support throughout most of their children’s school years. The primary grounds for their entitlement were low income and parenting responsibilities. Australians Working Together introduced compulsory employment-oriented activities to Parenting Payment entitlement for parents whose youngest child had turned 13. This thesis investigates mothers’ experience of this new welfare system. Using Dorothy Smith’s ‘everyday life’ approach to research, it draws upon qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse Australians Working Together. The research is grounded in a longitudinal interview survey of Australian mothers of teenage children who were subject to these changes. The analysis moves from their experience outwards through the four levels of analysis in Williams and Popay’s welfare research framework. The thesis examines mothers’ day-to-day worlds, the opportunities and constraints they navigate, the policies and institutions which shape their opportunities, the political framing of those policies, and wider social and economic transformations. In their negotiation of the social security system, mothers are striving for recognition of autonomy and care. They want their capacity to determine for themselves how to live their lives to be acknowledged. They would like the social contributions they make through employment, education and voluntary work to be recognised. They struggle for their unpaid work caring for their families to be valued. They wish that they had sufficient material resources to care well for their families. The thesis develops a theoretical framework to examine these struggles drawing on the work of Honneth, Fraser, Lister, Sennett, Fisher and Tronto, Daly and Lewis. This multi-level, everyday life analysis reveals the possibility of reframing the social security system around mutual respect.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A significant new direction in Australian income support policy was introduced in 2002. Known as Australians Working Together, this development changed the basis of social security entitlement for parents. Throughout most of the twentieth century, low-income sole mothers, and later sole fathers and parents in couple families, could claim income support throughout most of their children’s school years. The primary grounds for their entitlement were low income and parenting responsibilities. Australians Working Together introduced compulsory employment-oriented activities to Parenting Payment entitlement for parents whose youngest child had turned 13. This thesis investigates mothers’ experience of this new welfare system. Using Dorothy Smith’s ‘everyday life’ approach to research, it draws upon qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse Australians Working Together. The research is grounded in a longitudinal interview survey of Australian mothers of teenage children who were subject to these changes. The analysis moves from their experience outwards through the four levels of analysis in Williams and Popay’s welfare research framework. The thesis examines mothers’ day-to-day worlds, the opportunities and constraints they navigate, the policies and institutions which shape their opportunities, the political framing of those policies, and wider social and economic transformations. In their negotiation of the social security system, mothers are striving for recognition of autonomy and care. They want their capacity to determine for themselves how to live their lives to be acknowledged. They would like the social contributions they make through employment, education and voluntary work to be recognised. They struggle for their unpaid work caring for their families to be valued. They wish that they had sufficient material resources to care well for their families. The thesis develops a theoretical framework to examine these struggles drawing on the work of Honneth, Fraser, Lister, Sennett, Fisher and Tronto, Daly and Lewis. This multi-level, everyday life analysis reveals the possibility of reframing the social security system around mutual respect.

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The effects of neoliberal practices on social policy decisions continues to favor a form of privatization in which corporatized marketplace practices are the guide for social institutional operations. One effect of this has been an increase of marketplace organizations as operators of social services programs, including welfare-to-work programs. These organizations adhere to the prevailing trends in business community for profit making, while ostensibly following the principles of welfare-to-work regulations for service delivery. However, the practices introduced by pursuing profit can conflict with the recognizing all the goals of workfare as outlined in the federal policy of TANF or the Temporary Aid for Needy Families. Under these regulations, providers are charged with assisting welfare recipients receiving cash support in addressing personal barriers to economic stability and in gaining employment intended to provide a catalyst to economic stability. This research examines a corporate social services provider, the practices instituted by its leaders, and the effects that those practices have on the staff of the welfare-to-work center and their clients. Specifically, this examines how the links between profit making and the statistical performance assessments of state funding agencies influenced an operational model, analogous to the manufacturing center for cheap labor. The emphasis on quick workforce attachment strategies exceeded the state's performance measures and allowed the maximization of profit; however, this research determines that these strategies denied workfare clients the services that they and the state expected them to receive. / Anthropology

This study represents the intellectual biography of an idea. That idea is the Welfare to Work regime of the New Labour government of Tony Blair over the period 1997 to 2007. This Welfare to Work regime is situated within a concept of an Enabling State developed in speeches by New Labour Ministers, particularly Blair, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and the brothers Ed and David Miliband. The study elaborates the concept of 'enabling', traces its origins back, partly to the debates at Putney at the end of the English Civil War, partly through working-class history, and partly through the transformation of Gladstonian Liberalism wrought by New Liberals such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson between 1880 and 1914. lt will argue that New Labour can be understood only by reference back to these origins. The study will also define the Enabling State by defining its opposite, the Disabling State created, albeit unintentionally, by the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997. The study employs a subset of Discourse Analysis, Speech Act Theory, to study the Labour speeches, since there has yet not been elaborated a 'theory of the Enabling State'. A participant observation is also employed to discuss how 'enabling' works at the level of individuals. The study is an attempt to 'read history backwards' as it were: to define the enabling state as it exists now, at least at the level of rhetoric, and then, as practical history, to trace lead ideas back to their sources, and to find antecedents: not cause and effect, for that is too difficult, but to find practices, traditions, concepts and discourse on which New Labour have been able to draw. This study will argue that, far from abandoning traditional Labour values, New Labour has found new ways to realise them.

The current welfare-to-work reform in Britain is activating lone parents with older children and marks a step-change in the treatment of lone parents. While there has been some support for using age of child as selection criterion for the activation of lone parents, it is not clear whether this equates to selecting by ‘ability to work’ if interpreted as ability to obtain a job. The commitment of the current government to evidence-based-policy-making and the large amount of research available in this area form the justification for carrying out a policy appraisal of this aspect of the current welfare-to-work reform. The potential and likelihood to make substantial progress towards the lone parent employment and the child poverty target of the selection criteria will be assessed and compared to alternative approaches. Five selection models are identified in the international policy review: selection by age of child, transition status, employability or by caseworkers and finally, a voluntary model. The analysis is based on a critical discussion of the available evidence, an international policy review and secondary analysis of the Families and Children Study. I argue that the current approach of selecting lone parents by the age of child is unlikely to result in substantial progress towards the lone parent employment target and instead likely to create a substantial group of long-term unemployed lone parents. Alternative approaches, such as using different selection criteria that take into account the employability of lone parents are more likely to make progress towards the employment and child poverty target.