Selling Welfare Reform: Work-First and the New Common Sense of Employment - Softcover

Ridzi, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814775942 ISBN 13: 9780814775943

Publisher: NYU Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Ridzi is Associate Professor of Sociology, Kauffman Entrepreneurship Professor, and founding Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research at Le Moyne College in Syracuse New York.

Review:

"&9220;In this fascinating study, Ridzi deftly explores how ‘work-first’ came to dominate welfare policy and how this neoliberal ideology contours the interactions between welfare staff and their clients. Selling Welfare Reform is a must-read for all those interested in contemporary welfare reform." (Nancy Naples,co-editor of The Sexuality of Migration)

"&8220;Ridzi provides a deeply grounded and richly detailed view of the many activities that have produced a new U.S. welfare regime. His focus on implementation gives fresh insight into the complex interplay of local and extra-local forces." (Marjorie DeVault,editor of People at Work)

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0814775942
• ISBN 13: 9780814775943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344