TY  - CHAP
AB  - Purpose In the United States, welfare-to-work workers are under scrutiny from everyone and must defend the program if they want to defend themselves as good workers and good people. I build on past research that has examined how workers manage their emotions to cope with dilemmas in their jobs in a number of settings including hospitals, nursing homes, restaurants, and airplanes.Methodology In this chapter, I draw on data from an in-depth case study of a rural North Carolina (USA) welfare office using data primarily from observations and interviews with 19 welfare-to-work workers.Findings Within this highly constrained and contradictory work environment, workers recreate and redefine themselves as good workers and good people while simultaneously punishing program participants. To achieve this difficult task, workers manage their emotions through two key strategies, using institutionalized rhetoric and tough love paternalism, to justify their actions toward participants.Originality/value I add to the existing literature by examining how welfare-to-work workers cope with the emotional and moral dilemmas of their jobs.
VL  - 26
SN  - 978-1-78441-630-0, 978-1-78441-629-4/0277-2833
DO  - 10.1108/S0277-283320150000026012
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320150000026012
AU  - Taylor Tiffany
PY  - 2015
Y1  - 2015/01/01
TI  - Policing Work and Family: How Workers Cope with Contradictions and Dilemmas of Implementing Welfare-to-Work
T2  - Work and Family in the New Economy
T3  - Research in the Sociology of Work
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 127
EP  - 150
Y2  - 2024/04/20
ER  -