1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910454015203321

Autore

Ridzi Frank

Titolo

Selling welfare reform [[electronic resource] ] : work-first and the new common sense of employment / / Frank Ridzi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : New York University Press, c2009

ISBN

0-8147-7737-6

0-8147-7633-7

1-4416-1566-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (330 p.)

Disciplina

362.5/5680973

Soggetti

Public welfare - United States

Welfare recipients - Employment - Government policy - United States

Poor - Government policy - United States

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-313) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 “Selling Work-First” -- 2 “You’re All Doing the Wrong Thing” -- 3 “A New Way of Doing Business” -- 4 New Technology and New Customers -- 5 “We Are a Thorn in the Side of Those Who Won’t Change” -- 6 “Not Everybody Fits into Their Box” -- 7 “Don’t Blame Me, It Wasn’t Up to Me!” -- 8 Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act promised to end welfare as we knew it. In Selling Welfare Reform, Frank Ridzi uses rich ethnographic detail to examine how new welfare-to-work policies, time limits, and citizenship documentation radically changed welfare, revealing what really goes on at the front lines of the reformed welfare system. Selling Welfare Reform chronicles how entrepreneurial efforts ranging from front-line caseworkers to high-level administrators set the pace for restructuring a resistant bureaucracy. At the heart of this remarkable institutional transformation is a market-centered approach to human services that re-framed the definition of success to include diversion from the present system, de-emphasis of legal protections and behavioral



conditioning of poor parents to accommodate employers. Ridzi draws a compelling portrait of how welfare staff and their clients negotiate the complexities of the low wage labor market in an age of global competition, exposing the realities of how the new "common sense" of poverty is affecting the lives of poor and vulnerable Americans.