Welfare Bureaucracy Research Articles

Disgendered

In US literary history, the Great Depression stands as a wellspring of poetry and prose that imagines homelessness otherwise, that reads the embodiments and relationalities of homeless dispossession as an abolitionist horizon, cutting across the structural, epistemic violence of urban sociology, welfare bureaucracy, and the carceral state as well as practicing radical alternatives of relating to housing. Arguably influenced by discourses on subproletarian pathology, myriad Depression-era writers regarded the homeless as bereft of futurity, and they understood the condition of unhoused immiseration as a state of social death that marked the homeless as kinless. This literary vein conceived of homelessness as a disgendering experience in which the homeless body becomes an aberration from the heteropatriarchal gender binary. Alongside this literature of homeless nonfuturity, this article locates a literary countercurrent that explores how homeless persons continue to build kinships and collective futures that manifest through and exceed their bare existence. In particular, the article examines the poem “Homeless but Not Motherless” (1935) and the novel The Girl (ca. 1939), finding in both a recognition not only of the disgendering violence of homelessness but also of the potentialities for forging kinship across exclusions from labor, housing, family, and civil society.

An ‘interface first’ bureaucracy: Interface design, universal credit and the digital welfare state

AbstractThe front‐line of the welfare state is increasingly not a letter, phone call or face‐to‐face visit, but an online user‐interface. This ‘interface first’ bureaucracy is a fundamental reshaping of social security administration, but the design and operation of these interfaces is poorly understood. Drawing on interview data from senior civil servants, welfare benefits advisors and claimants on the UK's flagship Universal Credit working‐age benefit, this paper is a detailed analysis of the role played by interfaces in the modern welfare state. Providing examples from across the Universal Credit system, it sets out a five‐fold typology of user‐interface design elements in the social security context: (i) structuring data input, (ii) interaction architecture, (iii) operative controls, (iv) prompting and priming, and (v) integrations. The paper concludes by considering the implications of an ‘interface first’ welfare bureaucracy for future research.

‘You Just Have to Wait’: Bureaucratic Offerings and Spiritual Repertoires of Waiting in Postcolonial Paris

ABSTRACT Egyptian migrant mothers living in Paris often advice one another that they ‘just have to wait’ and practice ‘patience’ as they navigate French migration and welfare bureaucracies. These exhortations bring into view agentive modes of inhabiting bureaucratic waiting. This paper examines the ways in which Egyptian-background working-class mothers in Paris shape their position as ‘patients of the state’. Based on informally shared understandings of waited time as the central currency to French bureaucracy’s hidden logic, these mothers engage with their time-spent-in-waiting as something that can be offered to the bureaucratic system in exchange for a possible resolution. They also draw on religious repertoires of patience and acceptance as gendered Islamic virtues, endowing bureaucratic challenges and enforced waiting with divine significance. Migration bureaucracy thus is converted into a domain of spiritual practice.

“That's where the hunt for the correction begins”: Experiences of administrative errors as sites of administrative burden

AbstractTo err is human, and as such, administrative errors are an inevitable component of current and future welfare state bureaucracy. Hitherto, while studies on administrative burden have shown us that routine interactions with welfare bureaucracy are often burdensome, very little is known about the nature of these interactions when something goes wrong. Most social policy and public administration scholarship focus on ex‐ante analysis of administrative errors, with only scant research devoted to ex‐post analysis of how claimants experience such errors once they occur, and the types of costs they may incur. This article contributes to the growing field of administrative burden research by examining welfare claimants' experiences of administrative errors. Analysis of 19 interviews with Israeli benefit recipients uncovered two themes. The first related to the process of correcting errors, including identifying and communicating them to the system. The second theme addressed the consequences of errors: on the one hand, economic and emotional costs including loss of trust in the system, and on the other, acquiring bureaucratic skills. These findings highlight bureaucratic errors as a critical and unique site of learning burden, as well as the need for a human contact to allow claimants to better deal with their consequences.

Data as Relation: Ontological Trouble in the Data-Driven Public Administration

This paper examines how the intense focus on data in political digitalization strategies takes effect in practice in a Danish municipality. Building on an ethnographic study of data-driven management, the paper argues that one of the effects of making data a driver for organizational decision-making is uncertainty as to what data are and can be taken to mean. While in political discourse and strategies, data are considered as a resource for collaboration across organizational units as well as for optimization of their performance, in practice, data are not this straightforward entity. The paper presents a kind of data work that identifies data as part of different worlds (ontologies). The management task that results from this is nurturing organizational spaces that articulate data as relational. The paper argues that being attentive to the troublesome experiences public sector employees have when encountering data may help mitigate some of the risks of seeing data merely as a resource. The paper concludes that as public sector managers learn to nurture spaces where differences in data can be articulated, they also protect core values of welfare bureaucracies. Acknowledging that data work is about what we take to be real and what not (ontological work) is a first step in this direction.

Between hunger and contagion: digital mediation and advocacy during the COVID-19 emergency in Delhi

When COVID-19 struck India in March 2020 the central government announced a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. In Delhi, the suspension of normal economic and social life precipitated a crisis of hunger for the thousands who depend on daily wage labour to feed their families. Many of these workers were unable to access the city’s Public Distribution System for subsidised food supplies because they lacked the correct paperwork. In response, the Delhi government implemented an online system, known as E-Coupons, through which those affected could apply for emergency rations. However, this digital system proved complicated to navigate for the marginalised people that it was aimed at. In the east Delhi neighbourhood in which this research took place brokers offering digital connections and online form-filling services proliferated in the crisis, but often provided unreliable or incomplete support to those in need. Recognising the need for digital mediation and support for the marginalised we argue that networks of reliable community advocates are required if welfare bureaucracies are to be digitised through mobile governance projects such as E-Coupons. The human mediation and advocacy, which underpins these schemes should be acknowledged and included in system design.

The Political Origins of Persistent Elderly Poverty in South Korea

This study explores the origins of pervasive elderly poverty in South Korea, which persists despite the continuous expansion of welfare programs and the consolidation of popular democracy in the country. Predicated upon the historical-institutional details of the development of welfare programs, this article examines and elucidates how the instrumentalization of welfare policy-making since the onset of state-led industrialization and the progress of electoral democracy since the democratic transition have hindered the implementation of e ective anti-poverty policies. It argues that the exponential politicization of welfare issues amid the demise of the agenda-setting and implementation capacity of the welfare bureaucracy has resulted in a political preference for low-benefit, quasi-universal solutions without an increase in taxes or contributions, which has crowded out the policy option of imposing su ciently generous measures targeted at this vulnerable segment of society. As pervasive elderly poverty persists, old-age welfare has been substantially privatized and dualized, compelling seniors to find market-based alternatives or to work in low-paying precarious labour sectors. Consequently, trust in South Korea's public welfare system has declined, impeding the formation of pro-welfare solidarity despite the overall growth of the universalist welfare system and popular democracy.

Linking social capital and organizational ties: How different types of neighborhood organizations broker resources for the urban poor

ABSTRACT Recent studies have called attention to how neighborhood organizations can help people in low-income neighborhoods who face risks of social exclusion. This study examines how different types of neighborhood organizations broker resources for the urban poor. We investigate how neighborhood organizations employ linking social capital (vertical networks) and organizational ties (horizontal networks). Furthermore, we discuss the process of organizational brokerage and through which mechanisms neighborhood organizations make resources accessible. Qualitative field work was conducted in a faith-based organization, a professional welfare organization and a volunteer organization. Our findings demonstrate that organizations broker resources in different ways, and that mechanisms of organizational brokerage complement each other. We further show how neighborhood organizations play an important role in connecting people from low-income neighborhoods to main institutions such as the labor market and welfare bureaucracies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for neighborhood effects studies and policy, and what the study’s limitations are.

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment, and Reform during the Great Depression

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment, and Reform during the Great Depression

Granting ‘Human Dignity’

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare bureaucracies, this article explores the place of emotions in the administrative treatment of cases—particularly those involving migrants, whose welfare rights are increasingly limited. Welfare offices are responsible for granting social assistance—in the form of medical treatment, material help, or financial benefits—in order to guarantee that those residing in Belgium live in dignified conditions. This article delves into civil servants’ emotional engagement, discourses, and relationship to ‘the state’ and into the way they decide on specific cases based on feelings, administrative guidelines, and instructions from above. It challenges the assumption that street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and daily practices often effectively restrict citizens’ access to public services and shows instead how emotions, professional ethics and values contribute to assessing deservingness, and to the way civil servants ‘do the state’ on a daily basis.

Failing, writing, litigating: daily practices of resistance in Belgian welfare bureaucracies

AbstractThis paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian ‘welfare bureaucrats’ who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants’ access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still allowing them to perform and remain loyal to the state and to higher principles such as a commitment to the fundamental right to human dignity. Three main contestation strategies are identified: failing to provide certain services to demonstrate the absurdity of certain guidelines, writing reports against the administration and in favour of the user, and encouraging litigation against the federal agencies that employ them. These strategies show Belgian welfare workers’ commitment to providing a form of public service that aligns with their professional ethos rather than enforcing specific government policies.

Feminist NGOs: Building Resilience in Low-income Single Moms

This article discusses risk and protective factors impacting resilience through exploring how and why some mothers were able to achieve positive outcomes (economically, socially, as parents) in spite of adversity. By employing a qualitative research method and participatory action research, data were collected from 20 in-depth individual interviews, 3 focus groups with 18 participants and case profiles from the larger data set. The analysis counters the dominant individualism ideologies, which make the person solely responsible for their situation, and instead, argues that social structures can play important roles in building resilience and capacity. Practices of feminist NGOs reported in this study confirm this. The analysis has implications for changing practices in welfare bureaucracies and supporting feminist and similar NGOs.

The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.

Mission Impossible? The Moral Discomfort among Swedish and Norwegian Welfare Bureaucrats Encountering Refugees

Mission Impossible? The Moral Discomfort among Swedish and Norwegian Welfare Bureaucrats Encountering Refugees

Austerity as Bureaucratic Violence: Understanding the Impact of (Neoliberal) Austerity on Disabled People in Sweden

Drawing on a framework offered by Bauman and literature from disability studies and other sociological areas, this article argues that the experience of austerity for disabled people in Sweden is one of bureaucratic violence, shaped by disablism. The article aims to broaden the sociological conceptualisation of bureaucratic violence to include disablist austerity within its purview. It utilises fieldwork data from interviews with disabled people in Sweden to explore how welfare bureaucracy isolates and dehumanises disabled people. It also examines how Swedish welfare bureaucracies obscure the impact of austerity on this population. Due to the convergence of neoliberalism and austerity in Sweden, the exploration of bureaucratic violence opens up important questions regarding the Social Darwinist elements in neoliberal theory. Ultimately, bureaucratic violence is a useful concept for sociologists for two reasons: it sheds austerity of its technocratic veneer and connects lived experiences of welfare reform to the lethal consequences of austerity.

'Give Me My Allowance or I'll Run!' Everyday Resistance By Foster Children and Justice Outsourced

This essay will appear in a new book co-edited by Professor Michael L. Perlin and Dr. Kelly Frailing, JUSTICE OUTSOURCED: THE THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE IMPLICATIONS OF JUDICIAL DECISION-MAKING BY NON-JUDICIAL OFFICERS (Temple University Press) (2021). The chapter fits the overall theme of this book, which looks at the role of non-judicial officers as a hidden space in the U.S. judicial system through a Therapeutic Jurisprudence lens. It examines relationships between children and their state caregivers through their recorded experiences and testimonial voices, incorporating insights from poverty law and lawyering, child welfare law and policy, administrative law, clinical legal education, and TJ. The chapter builds on Austin Sarat’s socio-legal study of the complex relationships between welfare recipients and public assistance systems, and their ambivalent relationships with legal services providers, The Law is All Over”: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor, It integrates metaphors from this field study of the welfare poor into the analysis of formal and informal, abstract and material rules that envelope foster children, illustrated by examples from the University of Miami Children & Youth Law Clinic case docket. Although foster children can challenge decisions by the child welfare bureaucracy in court or fair hearings, many decisions fall beyond the purview of judicial or administrative due process. Less formal client advocacy enables children to resist state control as individuals and as a group and to overcome daily challenges such as getting personal allowances from caregivers. This paper is not to be cited until this book is published.

Housing rights, homelessness prevention and a paradox of bureaucracy?

In most nations homelessness remains a major injustice. A key response in Wales has been the introduction of a pioneering justiciable right to homelessness prevention and relief assistance. This paper explores the complexities of the new welfare bureaucracy this has created. We explore whether these housing rights invoke a paradox, whereby the positive impacts for citizens are accompanied by distancing and exclusion. The study reveals both a faceless bureaucracy characterised by processes of silencing and subordination propped up by tools of exclusion, particularly impenetrable paperwork, but also a system that can work to grant housing rights to those in need of support. There is no evidence for an utterly ‘faceless tyrant’ of a bureaucratic system, due to the often-inclusive ways that frontline staff operate, frequently at the margins of the law (Arendt 1970). Thus, this paper draws attention to the complexities inherent in a rights-based homelessness system and the paradoxical nature of attempting to grant housing rights.

Granting rights through illegalisation: EU citizens’ contested entitlements, actors’ logics and policy inconsistency in Belgium

ABSTRACT Although Member states have increasingly relied on welfare policies to control intra-EU migration in the last decade, they often grant additional social rights to EU citizens who do not comply with residency requirements set by EU law, revealing a gap between declared restrictive aims and actual inclusive measures. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews in Belgium, this article analyses the interests and logics of the plurality of institutional and civil society actors on the welfare-EU migration nexus, suggesting that policy inconsistency resulted from the struggle of these – conflictive – logics. In doing so, the paper also reveals how the category of ‘illegal EU migrants’ has been institutionally produced ‘from below’, with healthcare providers, welfare bureaucracies and pro-immigrant organisations – rather than ‘the State’ – taking the lead in that process.

Child welfare and future assessments – An analysis of discretionary decision-making in newborn removals in Norway

This study explores a particularly wide discretionary space set for decision-making within the Norwegian welfare bureaucracy; care order decisions concerning newborns directly removed from the hospital by the child protection system. The aim is understanding how decision-makers reason and justify in applying (child welfare) policy when decisions have a predictive and uncertain nature. To explore this, all (N = 19) written newborn care order decisions from 2016 decided by the County Social Welfare Board, where the parents have had no previous children removed, are analyzed. Under analysis are parents’ problems or problematic behavior and subsequent capacity to change. Three categories of change emerge; case problematics most often appear as permanent, a quarter as slow-moving, and a small number are transient, where some form of change is taking place. Further findings are large variations in the number of sources and contexts applied in the justifications. The study concludes that newborn cases involve a highly marginalized demographic within child protection, as decision-makers unitarily find high, long-lasting risk to equal minimal change capacity in a majority of the cases. Simultaneously, decision-makers appear to mitigate future uncertainty by invoking the parents’ childhoods, health and social welfare histories as parenting indicators.

The Moral Economy of Charity: Advice and Redistribution in Italian Caritas Welfare Bureaucracy

ABSTRACT Welfare state transformation has resulted in the expansion of private associations and the increased role of religious charities. In the context of the austerity crisis, the paper addresses how Caritas volunteers in an impoverished urban area in southern Italy deal with the bureaucratisation of resource distribution in face of increasing demands of ‘aid’. The categorisation of poverty by welfare agents and the moral evaluations that underlie volunteers’ approach to ‘the new poor’ provide insights to the explanatory frameworks they articulate in order to make sense of their compensatory role in the face of scarcer welfare state provisions. The paper highlights the linkages of formal and informal circuits in charity initiatives in order to analyse the interplay between procedural and moral definitions of poverty. It shows how volunteers adjust to the transfer of the responsibility to care from welfare state to charity and finally how they make sense of social inequality.