Organizational Responses to Social Policy: The Case of Welfare Reform

Abstract

I argue that worker-client relations and their consequences are the actual manifestation of people changing policies. A theoretical framework is presented to explain the path from the policy to its outcomes, which includes the policy design, the institutional and political economy of the local community in which the policy is implemented, the strategic choices made by the organization, the responses and adaptations of the workers, and the resulting worker-client relations and their consequences. The framework is applied to the implementation of welfare reform, demonstrating why there is an inherent disjuncture between the policy design and the actual organizational practices.