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The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of information practices of welfare workers and how they fit into daily work of welfare work within a small community sector organisation in Victoria, Australia.

The study was constructivist (interpretivist) in its underpinning philosophy, drawing on both personal constructivist and social constructionist theories. The research methods used, with a sample of 14 welfare workers and two clients, were organisational ethnography and grounded theory. Data collection techniques were interview and participant observation, along with limited document analysis. Data analytic techniques, drawn from grounded theory method, provided a thorough way of coding and analysing data, and also allowed for the development of theory.

Key findings centre on the role of information in welfare work. Welfare workers mostly used resources to hand, “making do” with resources they already had rather than seeking new ones. They also recombined or re-purposed existing resources to make new resources or to suit new circumstances. Their information practices were found to be fluid, consultative and collaborative. The findings of the research have led to a deep exploration of bricolage as a way to describe both the use of resources and the processes inherent in welfare worker information practices.

The fact that there is a paucity of research focused on information practices of welfare workers in Australia makes the research significant. The bricolage theoretical framework is an original contribution which has implications for exploring other groups of workers and for the design of information systems and technology.

The ideational connections between social democracy and basic income is the theme of this article. Social democracy is not a fixed doctrine, but as a movement it shares some key ideas with the policy of basic income, like solidarity, equal opportunity, freedom and social security. Due to current challenges emerging from waves of digitalisation, globalisation, etc., the support for a universal basic income has taken off, but not among social democratic politicians. The article argues that the social democratic policy of full employment implies an increasingly tough work orientation that is challenging to reconcile with de-commodifying social rights, which has characterized social democratic welfare states. It is further argued that a strict reciprocity-based policy has not proven effective in getting people into work on a permanent basis, and that the current challenges require new policy ideas. Two alternatives are discussed: guaranteed jobs and a basic income. The article argues that the lack of enthusiasm for the last option among social democrats is based on the misconception that a basic income will harm people's motivation to work, their self-respect, the social economy and the principle of justice. The article sheds light on this misconception. In the closing remarks, the proposal for an ‘emergency basic income’ is considered in view of the current global corona crisis.

The conventional economic analysis of welfare programmes is based on the work disincentive issue. This has become a leading justification for recent discussions of welfare reform in the USA that emphasize getting recipients off the rolls and back into productive employment. The presumption is that recipients are rational and selfish agents, and that welfare is sufficiently attractive as to provide substantial work disincentives. Questions that view. This questioning is motivated by the surprisingly high attachment of welfare recipients to the labour force, and is based on the development of a more general framework for viewing the motivations behind economic behaviour. By allowing for diversity of personality types, we are led to a less pessimistic scenario regarding the possibility of designing a system with adequate benefits and without inappropriately high work disincentives.

This study examines the administrative role played by the state of North Carolina in the provision of welfare. A survey of county professionals was conducted in April 2000 assessing perceptions of how well the state was performing its administrative functions. Fifty-three survey items composed ten indices that were grouped into three categories of resources, leadership and accountability. Logistic regression analyses examined perceptions of the state's Resources, Leadership, and Accountability administrative capacity in relationship to the four Work First Report Card measures of (1) putting people to work, (2) having them stay off of welfare, (3) reducing the number on welfare, and (4) collecting child support. Findings indicate that the state's efforts are not perceived as contributing to the success of welfare reform. Administrative capacity perceptions account for little of the variation explained by the logistic regressions. The state is not perceived as contributing to putting people to work or helping them to stay off of welfare subsequently. It actually is seen as slightly hindering efforts at reducing the welfare rolls. Only in the area of child support collection does state administrative capacity (in leadership and budgeting) improve the odds for success.

This article examines the impact of the 1996 welfare‐to‐work law on women’s work and welfare outcomes. I investigate four welfare and work outcomes: (1) off welfare and employed; (2) off welfare and unemployed; (3) on welfare and employed; and (4) on welfare and unemployed. I compare how women on welfare move into these different categories from 1990 to 2000, with specific interest in examining what happened to the number of women in these categories after 1996, which is the bench mark year to examine the impact of the 1996 welfare‐to‐work law. In this article I will investigate four questions: (1) are long‐term welfare users permanently leaving welfare?; (2) is there a group of welfare users that permanently left welfare before the 1996 welfare‐to‐work law? (3) is there a hard‐to‐serve welfare population?; and (4) are those women that leave welfare finding employment. I draw four conclusions from my analyses. My first conclusion is that a new group of welfare users emerged after 1996 that is different than the conventional three groups (e.g., long‐term users, short‐term users, and recidivists). I call this new group PRWORA leavers, which are long‐term welfare users that have permanently left the welfare rolls after 1996. My second conclusion is that a group of welfare users permanently left the welfare rolls before 1996. Thus, many women were already leaving welfare and finding work be fore the law was passed. My third conclusion is that there remains a consistent hard‐to‐serve population on welfare. However, this group of welfare users is small. My fourth conclusion is that work participation has significant in creased from 1996 to 2000 for long‐term welfare users.

These reforms offer a vision of a fairer welfare system where truly no one is written off, where nearly everyone is preparing or looking for work, where everyone is treated as an individual and gets the support they need. More importantly, these reforms point the way to a fairer society where children don't grow up in poverty, where disabled people enjoy real equality, and everyone is given real help to overcome the barriers to achieving their full potential. (DWP, 2008, p. 8)Workfare has finally arrived in the UK, but not with trumpet blasts of outrage: it's been smuggled in with lofty rhetoric about ‘personalisation’, ‘individually tailored’ advice and support which will enable people to ‘take control of their journey to work'. (Bunting, 2009)

The purpose of this paper is to address the ideological narratives which came to comprise a new welfare consensus in the USA and subsequently a welfare state which was more fiscally austere, demeaning, and coercive. It also explores the role of the political and financial restructuring which facilitated the implementation of retrogressive reforms.

Macro-level historical forces are investigated through various texts such as policy statements, journal articles, press releases, political addresses, congressional transcripts and testimony, archived papers, newspaper articles, and occasional sound bites and popular culture references pertaining to welfare and which have come to construct the common understanding of it.

The formation of this consensus was due in part to three factors: first, the growth of and increased influence of an elite policy planning network; second, welfare program administration and financing had been decentralized which allowed greater autonomy of state and local governments to implement their own retrogressive reforms; and third, there emerged an overarching discourse and paradigm for structuring policy and explaining the causes of poverty which emphasized individual behavior.

This paper focusses on the materialization of the contemporary welfare consensus during the 1980s and 1990s in terms of its ideological and political history and on its persistence which has affected the ensuing policy culture and which continues to constrain anti-poverty policy discourse as well as what can be accomplished legislatively. The paper is of value for for readers, fields, courses with work that encompasses an examination of political and social theory, ideology, social policy, power/hegemony, poverty, inequality, families, gender, race, and meaning making institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

This paper looks at the changes in the time allocation of welfare recipients in the United States following the 1996 welfare reform and other changes in their economic environment. Time use is a major determinant of well-being, and for policymakers to understand the broad influences that their policies can have on a population they ought to consider changes in all activities, not simply paid work. While an increase in market work of the welfare population has been well documented, little is known on the evolution of the balance of their time. Using the Current Population Survey to model the propensity to receive welfare, together with a multiple imputation procedure, I replicate previous difference-in-differences estimates that found an increase in child care and a decline in nonmarket work. However when additional data sources are used, I find that time spent providing child care does not increase. This is especially relevant as welfare recipients are overwhelmingly poor single mothers and the welfare reform increased time at work with ambiguous effects on time spent with children. I also find that time at work follows business cycles, with dramatic increases in work time throughout the strong economy of the late 1990s, accompanied by less time in leisure activities.