Abstract
The 1996 welfare reform devolved greater responsibility and flexibility to state welfare organizations; however, most of these organizations have not transformed their organizational cultures towards a vision of client well-being. This study examines dominant and alternative narratives espoused during twenty-two interviews with staff in a welfare organization. The dominant narrative endorsed the welfare program and understood ‘success’ as client compliance, which resulted in regulatory suggestions for change, such as implementing stricter policies. The alternative narrative subverted this dominant narrative by identifying problems with the welfare program, which resulted in suggestions for organizational change that promoted client well-being. Fostering alternative narratives in welfare organizations may prompt liberatory organizational culture shifts that redefine the notion of client ‘success’.
INTRODUCTION
Public discourse has touted the 1996 welfare reform as a success because the rolls have drastically declined. The public discourse that supported the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) was a promise to end an entitlement program and begin a welfare-to-work program, which relied on the premise that working would lead to self-sufficiency. The reform was framed in public debate as a ‘win-win’ for clients and government coffers: clients would become ‘personally responsible’ by building their human capital to promote self-sufficiency, which would decrease the rolls and the cost of the program in the future (Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007).
However, the rhetorical ‘win’ for clients is less obvious in the actual policies and their outcomes. The federal reform included a five-year lifetime limit on welfare receipt, a 24-month limit on consecutive receipt of cash assistance, and full-time work-related requirements for most clients. From 1994–1999, female-headed families living in poverty declined 22% while welfare caseloads declined 48% (Lichter and Jayakody, 2002). Research supports that many women and families are not more self-sufficient after they leave the rolls, on factors such as living above the poverty line or securing stable jobs, benefits, and affordable childcare (Acs and Loprest, 2004; Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007; Hennessy, 2005).
Lens (2002) found that the language of ‘liberation’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘independence’ was superficially invoked by government officials to build support for the passage of the conservative policy based on her analysis of newspaper articles covering welfare reform debates between 1994 and 1996. However, she found a paucity of stories on the structural issues related to welfare receipt, or the resiliency of clients who overcame these constraints, to counteract the predominating neoliberal message of blaming individual clients for staying on welfare. Therefore, public rhetoric appropriated liberal jargon to gain support for the reform, but the actual policies reflected a neoliberal agenda to hold clients personally responsible and to devolve federal social service programs down to states (Nathan and Gais, 1999; Peck and Tickell, 2002).
Almost all states are meeting their Work Participation Rates (WPRs), which are the state performance measures that ensure a sufficient proportion of clients are complying with work-related activities for states to receive their maximum amount of federal funding. More recently, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 made WPRs more stringent. The WPR has become the policy-based definition of ‘success’ (i.e. decreasing caseloads and placing clients into work activities) and has obscured the value-based notion of ‘success’ that was espoused in public rhetoric during reform debates, which included building ‘human capital’ to ‘liberate’ clients through actualizing ‘self-sufficiency’ and well-being (Lens, 2002).
Although federal accountability has increased pressure on states, federal devolution has also granted states greater flexibility and discretion to design and implement welfare programs. Hence, state welfare organizations were allotted opportunities to revamp their programs; which held the potential for them to enact changes that pursued both notions of success. Nathan and Gais (1999) noted that the reform clearly communicated to states that adding the program onto pre-existing organizational systems and structures would be inadequate to implement new policies, and the consequence would be financial. The implication for state organizations was that major organizational change and innovation was necessary to optimize using new flexibility to meet federal performance measures and to promote client self-sufficiency and well-being (Mead, 2002). However, Gais and Weaver (2002) found that state innovation and implementation of access-enhancing policies to encourage work has leveled off since 1998.
Because the WPR acts as the proxy of policy success, perhaps it is not surprising that research (reviewed below) supports that welfare organizations have preserved regulatory organizational cultures that stress meeting policy-based success goals without the accompanying cultural shifts that promote value-based success goals (i.e. well-being and self-sufficiency). However, employees report the desire to earnestly promote value-based goals (Thaden et al., in press), but most state welfare organizations are not using their new-found discretion to pursue both. Approximately one decade after the reform, this study examines organizational narratives in interviews with 22 staff of a southeastern state welfare organization to understand how they make sense of these often discordant goals in their work.
The Organizational Culture of the Welfare System
Organizational culture comprises the ‘shared philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs, expectations, attitudes and norms that knit a community together’ (Kilman, et al., 1986: 89). Organizational change theorists have expressed the necessity to address organizational culture if deep, transformative change is going to be actualized. Schein (1992) notes, if an organization’s members articulate change goals congruent with their underlying assumptions about their work then the likelihood that their practices will reflect these goals is greater. However, research on whether welfare organizations have changed since the reform supports that the reported goals and practices of organizational members do not often concurrently reflect both policy-based and value-based goals (e.g. Beckerman and Fontana, 2001; Jagannathan and Camasso, 2006; Riccucci et al., 2004).
Numerous studies have supported that, even if welfare staff did espouse the goal of moving clients to self-sufficiency, these values were not typically internalized by staff to change their practices (Beckerman and Fontana, 2001; Brodkin, 1997; Lurie and Riccucci, 2003; Meyers et al., 1998; Riccucci et al., 2004). Three years after the reform, Lurie and Riccucci (2003) conducted interviews and observations in 11 welfare offices across four states and reported that welfare staff’s goals differed by the hierarchical levels of the system. They found that administrators emphasized self-sufficiency while frontline workers focused on accuracy and timeliness. Frontline staff lacked confidence in whether Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) reforms would effectively promote self-sufficiency. They did not perceive TANF as different from its predecessor (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), which had espoused many of the same goals but did not change client outcomes or organizational practices. Frontline staff also reported that their jobs had not changed with the exception of additional paperwork.
Similar findings were reported by other investigators who researched welfare offices in different states that were implementing pilot programs to prepare for the reform (Brodkin, 1997; Meyers et al., 1998) and TANF after the reform (Beckerman and Fontana, 2001; Jagannathan and Camasso, 2006; Riccucci et al., 2004). They concluded that organizational culture shifts were incomplete; frontline staff continued to emphasize eligibility and accuracy, and staff did not use their discretion to promote client self-sufficiency or well-being. In line with a policy-down approach, these studies imply that welfare organizations have undergone reactive change, meaning that their systems and procedures were incrementally modified to comply with PRWORA policies, rather than transformative change that advanced both policy-based and value-based goals (Burke, 2002).
Based on surveys with 133 case workers and 167 clients in four California welfare offices during the implementation of Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (the precursor for California’s TANF program), Hasenfeld and Weaver’s (1996) findings emphasize the connection between staff’s underlying assumptions and practices. They concluded that employees who maintained underlying assumptions that were built upon the vision of self-sufficiency were more likely to understand client behavior in terms of human capital and solve problems accordingly. Conversely, if staff perceived clients as morally deficient then interactions with clients were more likely to reflect bureaucratic goals and people-processing work patterns. This study supports that workers who internalized neoliberal ideologies reflected these beliefs in their practices by emphasizing policy compliance, while workers whose beliefs were congruent with value-based goals reflected these goals in their work.
In stark contrast to these studies, Ridzi’s ethnography of a New York welfare office found that espoused workplace norms and staff practices were consistent with the goal of self-sufficiency (2004). This organization was designed from the ground up during TANF implementation. Job applicants, including former clients, dedicated to the mission were recruited for hire. This deviant case study highlights the importance of organizational memory and buy-in during attempts to change an organization’s systems and culture. It also shows the potential for state welfare agencies to align their goals and practices with both policy-based and value-based goals. However, most of the aforementioned studies indicate that, although devolutionary trends have granted increased discretion down to states that reach the frontlines, welfare organizations have not fostered the necessary cultural and structural changes to enable frontline staff to use their discretion to actualize client well-being.
The Utility of Narratives to Understand Organizational Culture
Polkinghorne states that ‘people strive to organize their temporal experience into meaningful wholes and use the narrative form as a pattern for uniting the events of their lives’ (1988: 153). Narrative analysis strives to capture the ways that people make sense of the world by telling stories that communicate their perceptions and experiences (Bruner, 1990; Labov 1997; Riessman, 1993). Narrative theory has incorporated epistemological aspects from feminist, ecological, and critical approaches. Some theorists have conceptualized narrative research as a method that not only documents personal stories but may traverse the personal to the relational, social, and organizational cultures of groups (Ezzy, 1998; Mishler, 1986; Weick and Roberts, 1993). Thereby, narratives are symbolic forms of discourse that elucidate how reality is constructed within settings and organizations (Brown, 1986; Myrsiades, 1987). Critical narrative analysis calls into question why some stories or narratives become dominant while others are marginalized (Bruner, 1990; Aaaltio-Marjosola, 1994; Rappaport, 2000).
In terms of organizational theory, narratives may preserve organizational memory (Orr, 1990) by becoming normative stories that circulate through an organization to maintain its culture (Bruner, 1990; Martin et al., 1983). They can also uncover how meaning is ascribed while organizations are undergoing change (Rhodes, 2000). Narrative approaches may surface ‘counter stories’ that can provide alternative narration (Boje, 2001; Rappaport, 2000; Rhodes, 2000). During agentic narration, ‘politics of possibility’ may be discovered that highlight which stories hold dominant and subversive reserves of power (Fraser and Weninger, 2008; Foucault, 1979). This subversive space holds possibility for power to unleash organizational cultural transformation (Myrsiades, 1987). This study explores discursive moments of narration by a welfare organization’s members to excavate dominant narratives that perpetuate an organizational culture that devalues client well-being relative to federal policy compliance and marginalized narratives that hold possibility for a liberatory shift in organizational culture.
Study Design
Sample
The mission of the division of the state organization that serves Prioritizing Families (PF; a pseudonym for the state welfare program), Food Stamps, and Medicaid clients is to provide an effective system of services to promote self-sufficiency and improve the quality of life for disadvantaged, disabled or vulnerable citizens. 1 At the time the interviews were collected, approximately 70,000 families were receiving PF services in the state. The WPR for the state was 56 percent. About one-third of closed cases re-entered the PF program within 55 months. The average cash allowance for families was $170 per month.
The organization under investigation was one of 16 states that received a federal waiver for the implementation of some TANF policies. Similar to the majority of states, this organization instituted the most frequent restrictive and access-enhancing policies reported by Gais and Weaver (2002). The PF program had more access-enhancing policies than many other states’ programs, such as education and ‘good cause’ work exemptions calculated into the WPR, a greater range of situations to ‘stop the clock’ for clients, and longer periods of transitional benefits. However, at the time of the study, the organization was preparing for the waiver to end, which would make maintaining federal funding more difficult due to the stricter WPR calculation. Unlike some states, which devolved discretion down to local offices so they may respond to local contexts, this organization prioritized state control and standardized most program components across localities (see Burt et al., 2000). Hence, this state used some of its new-found flexibility to blunt the punitive aspects of the reform by incorporating program elements that advanced value-based goals; however, as neoliberal policies applied more pressure, they shifted their focus to federal performance measures (Peck and Tickell, 2002).
Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 22 staff in this southeastern state’s welfare organization across the two dimensions of urban-rural locality and position. These dimensions were selected based upon prior findings that frontline staff and management maintained different perspectives on TANF (Lurie and Riccucci, 2003) and that challenges in program implementation varied by localities (Arsneault, 2006). Hence, this sampling approach aimed to optimize the depth and variation in responses and to account for thematic differences that may be attributed to these dimensions. The regional manager of each locality was asked to identify interviewees who worked most closely with the PF program, including its clients and contractors. During interviews, participants confirmed the selection of staff.
The sample consisted of the PF program’s state director, thirteen urban, and eight rural staff members. Interviewees included the state director, two regional managers, three supervisors, eight case workers, and eight eligibility assistants who assisted case workers with referrals to contractors and tracking client compliance. Urban informants were African American, except for one white informant; rural staff and the state director were white (reflecting the racial characteristics of each local organization). Four interviewees were male. The state requires a bachelor’s degree for all positions except eligibility assistants. Their average duration of employment was 6.5 years.
Method and Analysis
Employees were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol that aimed to understand what facilitated or hindered organizational change since the passage of PRWORA. 2 Interviewers asked each respondent a pre-determined set of questions; however, researchers diverged from these questions to probe for greater understanding of respondents’ explanations and narratives of clients, the program, and the organization. This interview approach, which centered on repeatedly asking ‘why’, was crucial to surface the co-endorsed, and often contradictory, narratives. The interviews lasted approximately one hour and took place in private offices where informants worked during the spring of 2006. Interviews were conducted by three researchers who were white but differed by age and sex. Interviews were transcribed and field observations were added (observations are omitted from this analysis).
Narrative is a discourse that represents a connected succession of happenings (Lieblich et al., 1998), and narrative analysis ‘interrogates language – how and why events are storied, not simply the content to which language refers’ (Riessman and Quinney, 2005: 349). Hence, this analysis may illuminate the content in addition to the structure and performance of telling. Our initial intention was not to use narrative analysis; however, informants predominantly responded to questions by telling stories about the program, their clients, or their experiences at work and then shared their interpretations and evaluations of these stories to make points about the program, clients, and the organization (Labov, 1997; Lieblich et al., 1998). While traditional qualitative analysis tends to break down what is ‘told’ into coded units to identify themes, narrative analysis of interview data also preserves ‘the sequence and consequence’ of ‘telling’ the stories (Riessman and Quinney, 2005: 394).
To make sense of the collective narrative, we analyzed the data using Lieblich’s ‘categorical-content’ approach, which has traditionally been called ‘content analysis’ as it ‘focuses on the content of narratives as manifested in separate parts of the story’ (1998:16). First, we color-coded all data by ‘what’ (i.e. telling of the story) and ‘why’ (i.e. explaining the story). We then read through the ‘what’ data independently to open code for emergent themes in the narratives as well as the temporal sequence of these stories. Next we coded core concepts, phrases, and points during informants’ evaluations and explanations of their stories (the ‘why’ data) (Boje, 2001; Lieblich et al., 1998). Then we axial coded how they linked the themes and sequencing of their stories to the concepts and points within their explanations (Polkinghorne, 1988; Strauss, 1987). We both identified similar themes, concepts, and sequencing in the stories and their evaluations that revealed a ‘dominant narrative’ because it predominated across all interviews, referred to by Boje as a ‘grand narrative’ (2001).
However, the analysis revealed discrepancies within most interviews (only one informant only endorsed the dominant narrative). In other words, informants espoused dominant narratives while concurrently contradicting them through counter-stories or alternative evaluations of the program, clients, and their work (Boje, 2001; Riessman, 1993). Therefore, we followed the same process to recode the data for the contradictions within each informant’s transcript, where we captured the themes, sequencing, concepts, and points of these alternative stories and their interpretations (referred to as the ‘alternative narrative’). The themes and interpretations of this narrative echoed the liberal public rhetoric espoused during debates about the reform (Lens, 2002) but questioned how welfare policies could attain these espoused value-based goals without major organizational change or structural change related to poverty. The next section presents how informants explained these two parallel narratives (i.e. dominant and alternative), which both had a beginning, middle and end (referred to as narratives 1, 2, and 3 below) (Riessman, 1993).
Guidelines by Erlandson et al. (1993) and Lincoln and Guba (1985) were used to assess the trustworthiness of the findings. This data was collected as part of a larger project, and the first author had spent a year working with the organization, reflecting prolonged engagement. Additionally, triangulation of researchers and peer debriefing sessions bolstered the credibility of these findings. Lastly, the first author reviewed results from 14 focus groups with staff (n = 105) in the same offices to assure that the dominant narrative identified in this report was echoed by other staff using a different method. While the content of these focus groups validated our findings, their purpose, sampling, and protocol was not designed to explore the primary questions presented in this article; hence, no data from the focus groups are presented below.
Results
Anything you need we’re going to make available for you to be self-sufficient. All you need is the mindset to do it. And I think our customers do not have the mindset……But it’s a good program. I think it’s set up where we have too many loopholes, which means that you’re going to have a percentage of success stories but you’re going to have more not success stories. (Supervisor)
Very little variability across position or locality was found during analysis. While no differences were identified across positions, some differences in locality influenced informants’ explanations. First, rural interviewees commonly reported running into their clients outside of the welfare office (one worker reported attending high school with some clients). Second, the rural area had less supportive resources and employment opportunities for clients than the urban area. Consequently, rural staff more strongly endorsed the alternative narrative by communicating more compassion for clients’ situations and identifying more environmental constraints that hindered self-sufficiency. Locality is noted below if responses were unique on that dimension.
Dominant Narrative 1: The Welfare Program Leads to Self-Sufficiency
Overwhelmingly, staff reported that the PF program was a ‘good program’ that was ‘successful’ for moving clients to self-sufficiency. For instance, the state director said, ‘There’s no question that when someone walks in our door with huge life issues, they can be better off when they’re off the program.’ This was driven by the assumption that services offered by contracted organizations provided clients with the ‘opportunities’ needed to become self-sufficient. One informant explained, ‘All you’ve got to do is show up and go [to Employment Career Services], and they’re going to help you find a job.’ Transportation, counseling, child care, car repair, dental and vision services were available if clients maintained compliance by attending their 40-hour per week assignments. These assignments could include education, counseling or work-related activities, such as job searching or working.
Although most interviewees provided evidence to counter that ‘working the program’ would lead to self-sufficiency, interviewees continued to maintain that the program worked. Informants referenced client success stories, which were admittedly rare cases of individuals who left PF and entered into high-paying jobs. These stories were attributed to individuals who had maintained compliance and were ‘really wanting employment’.
The procedures that were implemented to track the WPR perpetuated the notion that compliance equaled success. One informant explained that she was making many referrals to Employment Career Services (ECS), and the organizations had a better system in place to track non-compliance so clients were getting what they needed to become self-sufficient. Additionally, the urban leadership promoted this narrative by prompting contractors to share ‘success stories’ at monthly meetings. Hence, a leap in logic existed between how compliance would promise self-sufficiency. For instance, one rural case worker noted multiple problems with contractors and the paucity of jobs in his area; however, when the interviewer asked if he had faith in the PF program, he stated, ‘Absolutely. After everything I’ve said, yes I do … If they really want to move forward, I believe it’s a good program … I’ve got one client. I believe she’s going to be a chemical engineer after she graduates.’ As this comment elucidates, this logical fallacy was rarely noted by informants, and if it was noted, informants still maintained that the program worked based upon a minority of clients who attained economic self-sufficiency.
Alternative Narrative 1: Aspects of the Program and Environment May Hinder Self-Sufficiency
Although informants rarely directly challenged that PF could lead to self-sufficiency, they did provide counter-evidence that subverted this dominant narrative. Staff identified internal and external factors which may hinder self-sufficiency. Internal factors were within the welfare program while external factors were external to the welfare program, such as the economy or job market. For instance, one eligibility assistant explained the program’s transitional benefits led to ‘a revolving door’: ‘How are you going to take care of bills? A vehicle? To and from work on $5.15 an hour? The state says because you have a job, they’re gonna reduce your Food Stamps … then your childcare. The program is supposed to bring people into self-sufficiency, but this is where we’re losing them.’ As this informant took the interviewer through the story of clients trying to transition to self-sufficiency, she identified problems with the program’s structure that hindered well-being and led compliant clients to need further assistance.
Another insight highlighted by numerous rural staff was that there were few jobs in the region. These staff noted that available jobs did not have living wages. One supervisor shared, I have faith in the general principles [of PF], but right now, it’s not working. Even the Work Participation Rate, it’s not representative of what’s going on. For instance, we might get a person four or five jobs in the same year and then they lose them, or we get them a good job at a factory and then that factory moves out …It’s almost like we just want to get them a job no matter what job that is and get them off [assistance]. That looks good on paper, but in the long run, are we really getting as many people off as we think?
Dominant Narrative 2: Compliance is a Client’s Choice
As informants explained that the program leads to self-sufficiency, their narration relied on the assumption that self-sufficiency was a consequence of program compliance. Since ‘all of the opportunities are being given to them’, compliance was described as a client’s choice: ‘Non-compliance is when you don’t do it. You just don’t do it, and you don’t have a good reason.’ When staff described client non-compliance with work plans, they attributed it to issues of motivation, complacency, laziness, or manipulation, such as ‘using and abusing the system’.
Tracking compliance allowed the organization to regulate the WPR. Non-compliance and deviations from protocol, such as referring clients to additional services, was associated with more work for staff and more chances for errors. Staff had lengthy procedures for non-compliance, including tracking probation periods, documenting numerous client contacts, and working with outside personnel to complete case closures. This process could culminate in an appeal procedure for which case workers had to justify their decisions. These systems appeared to pit case workers against clients, leading to the appropriation of a client-blaming narrative. This, in turn, promoted a culture driven by policies and regulations because staff had to meticulously follow procedures to ‘successfully’ close client cases. As one supervisor said, ‘Our clients are extremely smart, believe it or not. They know every loophole in the book. Some of them know policy better than we do.’
Perceiving non-compliance as a client’s choice allowed staff to justify closing cases to alleviate their workloads. One supervisor described caseworkers who were ‘not concerned about the overall outcome of getting the customer what they need. They might just want to hurry up and get them closed. If they’re missing class, it’s almost like, “Good. I can send’ em in for closure.”’ Rather than perceiving non-compliance as a signal that clients may need additional support, it was used to justify dropping clients from assistance. Staff used their discretion to deal with non-compliant clients in punitive ways. As one case worker explained, he tried to not emphasize that counseling services were available because his clients used counseling to avoid work activities.
Alternative Narrative 2: Non-compliance May Signal that Clients Need More Support
Some informants diverged from this dominant narrative, acknowledging that compliance was not always in the clients’ hands and did not necessitate ‘success’. Informants described how organizational issues could impede compliance. Also, they identified barriers in clients’ lives, such as domestic violence or mental and physical issues. This narration began to erode the premise of ‘choice’ and led informants to shift the onus of blame away from clients.
Alternatives to the dominant narrative resulted from interviewers probing why clients were thought to be ‘lazy’ or ‘unmotivated’. When asked what may affect a client’s motivation to meet compliance requirements, one caseworker responded, ‘It’s kind of tied with key personal issues as well. The children, if they can get daycare set up. Things of that nature.’ In this case, as well as others, the rural caseworker recognized that the lack of available child care agencies made it difficult for clients to set up the infrastructure necessary to comply with work plans. For instance, numerous informants explained that transportation services often made errors, resulting in clients missing work activities. As one supervisor stated, ‘I think we’re failing them’.
Informants also expressed compassion towards the clients’ experiences with the program. They indicated that program requirements could lead clients to feel ‘hopeless’ and not necessarily lead to self-sufficiency. One informant explained how clients could have thought about the program: ‘“They’re never gonna help me. I went through Adult Education. I got my GED. I went to [ECS].” It’s these programs they come up with, like, “oh, we’ve created something new.” It’s not new. These clients will go through all these programs and still be on PF.’ Hence, as staff began to consider non-compliance from the client’s perspective, they uncovered how the regulatory nature of PF could make clients feel defeated and how compliance did not necessarily promote well-being. Notably, rural interviewees were more likely to explain these views from their clients’ perspectives.
Dominant Narrative 3: Stricter Regulations Will Lead to Compliance
When informants followed the dominant narrative through to its end, their change suggestions fit within the policy-driven organizational culture. The program was espoused to be a good program that should result in self-sufficiency if clients are compliant, so policy should be changed to enforce compliance more strictly. One eligibility assistant explained her perception of the typical client thought process, ‘“If I don’t want to go [to work activities] they may slap my hand the first time, but then I can come back and give excuses.” And they’re given opportunity after opportunity … I don’t think there are effective consequences to not keeping up your end of the deal.’ At least 75 percent of informants suggested that the organization needed to increase the consequences for PF clients by creating stricter policies, such as terminating cash assistance for ninety days after a client is deemed non-compliant.
Alternative Narrative 3: The Organization Can Innovate Ways to Support Self-Sufficiency
As informants explored alternative narratives about the factors internal and external to the program that hindered self-sufficiency, such as high unemployment rates, informants surfaced innovative ideas for organizational change. For instance, multiple workers suggested moving clients to areas with higher employment rates and pay scales. As one rural worker explained, staff could support clients moving for better jobs or education, ‘We have to get jobs here, and I can’t do that. We can’t do that as a department, but we could help clients see that it’s okay to move out of the county. It’s okay to go there, get your degree, get a better job and then you can eventually move back to your community.’ Other ideas included partnering with the local Chamber of Commerce, having the state partner with businesses that would provide on-the-job training that fulfilled work activities and tracked clients into stable, high-paying employment, and directly giving clients more of the money spent on the program. As one respondent noted, current policies hemorrhaged funding on transportation services: ‘For what we pay to transport people, we could buy our customers a car … We’ve paid out $15,000 a year transporting somebody.’
When informants contemplated that non-compliance could signal organizational issues or clients needing extra support, they followed this alternative narrative through to its end by suggesting liberatory changes (including some ‘access-enhancing’ policy changes identified by Gais and Weaver, 2002). Almost every informant discussed how clients deserve rigorous case management services. All case workers and eligibility assistants emphasized wanting to spend more time listening to clients to learn about personal issues and create individualized goals. One person suggested creating case management teams involving the client, their family, community members, ECS staff, counselors, and welfare workers. Another idea was to increase networking within local communities to enable clients to receive additional services. Interviewees suggested mobile offices or home visits to ameliorate the cost of travel or inadequate transportation that often led to non-compliance. They also suggested that the state invest in building organizational capacity of contractors and increase their funding so they could optimally promote client well-being. Others suggested pulling more of the contracted activities in-house so that staff could holistically and comprehensively work with clients.
Conclusion
This study explored dominant and alternative narratives espoused by staff in a southeastern welfare organization. The dominant story explained that the welfare program was ‘good’ because it provided clients with opportunities that should lead them to self-sufficiency. When clients failed to reach self-sufficiency or comply with the organization’s demands, staff narrated that clients were to blame. As supported by other studies (Hasenfeld and Weaver, 1996; Lurie and Riccucci, 2003; Thaden et al., in press), the organization fostered a culture of regulation and people-processing, which reinforced this narrative. Frontline staff were battling their workloads due to bureaucratic procedures and policies, resulting in staff using their discretion to reinforce policy-driven goals. This resulted in organizational change ideas that recapitulated the values of the existing system: if current policies were not making clients self-sufficient then stricter policies were the solution. This finding is similar to Riccucci et al.’s results (2004), who found that welfare practitioners’ ideas for change were superficial and insufficient for clients to actualize self-sufficiency (echoing the superficiality of public rhetoric used to justify the reform; Lens, 2002). Consequently, the historical momentum and pervasiveness of this dominant narrative – and the political and social scaffolding that condones it – poses significant challenges for future organizational change or cultural transformation.
However, unlike Hasenfeld and Weaver (1996) who found that staffs’ ideologies about clients were either aligned with policy-based or value-based goals, we found that staff maintained both goals in their narratives. Most informants produced an alternative narrative to describe the challenges for clients moving towards self-sufficiency and well-being. When this narrative was elicited, most informants seemed to interpret the welfare program from the perspectives of clients, which considered organizational and socioeconomic issues. In turn, this narrative culminated in ideas for organizational change that were transformative, such as revamping the structure of the program and building collaborations within and beyond the organization and its clients. Although changing the culture of the welfare system is an ambitious goal that requires more than the transformation of staff discourse, surfacing alternative narratives may erode the pre-existing culture and activate a culture shift. After all, it is only through the circulation of alternative narratives that a new culture may become normative (Martin et al., 1983). More broadly, Lens (2002) argues that alternative narration in public discourse is necessary to move towards radical structural change that addresses root issues of the welfare system, namely inequality.
We found that liberatory ideas were unleashed from welfare staff when they positioned themselves from the perspective of clients. Rural informants who interacted with clients outside of the welfare office more strongly endorsed the alternative narrative. This has been supported by Cheek and Piercy (2001) who found that former welfare clients working in the human service sector were empathic towards clients and had greater insights about the system. Some potential suggestions for fostering discourse and change that values client well-being is to create space for client stories to be heard by staff and practices that support organizational change based on what is learned, such as client-staff-community feedback loops and design teams (Garvin, 2000). This may enact ‘politics of possibility’ because the mode of engagement (i.e. listening to clients) acts against a ‘people-processing’ approach and holds potential for staff to appropriate a new discourse that is client-driven rather than policy-driven (Fraser and Weninger, 2008; Hasenfeld and Weaver, 1996), which may prompt organizational transformation that redefines the current policy-based notion of ‘success’. For instance, in a study that derived a bottom-up definition of ‘self-sufficiency’ from low-income jobseekers, clients identified that they needed personalized support from the organization, local community, and public policies to stepwise develop their sense of self-efficacy, skills and resources, and realistic financial goals as well as collective collaboration to change the realities of their position and opportunities within the labor market (Hong et al., 2009).
This study takes a within-system approach to highlight the possibility for organizational culture change. However, just like clients’ well-being is hindered by systemic issues of poverty more so than by TANF policies, these organizations and their members are constrained by the broader systemic issues that press upon their day-to-day realities, such as receiving federal funding and managing overwhelming caseloads. Although beyond the scope of this article, we believe that without-system approaches to effect social change are also needed to foster client well-being. However, it is hard to imagine that larger structural change is possible if welfare organizations do not promote alternative narratives of their clients. Welfare organizations have the ability to not adopt client-blaming cultures and practices (even if they must adopt some federal policies). Instead, they may use their new-found – albeit constrained – discretion to interact with clients in ways that promote well-being and consider structural oppression.
As in all naturalistic inquiry, this study is not generalizable. Although research has reported similar cultures in other welfare organizations (Lurie and Riccuci, 2003), staff narratives will undoubtedly vary by organizational differences and personal agency. However, this study highlights how large-scale phenomena, such as federal policies or poverty, have impacted staff narratives, which may support transferability to other welfare organizations (Erlandson et al., 1993). We must acknowledge that this article reflects the (re)production of narrative(s) since the process of writing research is also a process of narration (Czarniawska, 1998). Therefore, future research should continue to provide alternative narratives to our story.
As meeting WPRs becomes increasingly difficult for state welfare organizations, we anticipate that the goals of client well-being and meeting federal performance measures will converge. Similar to the mandate faced by states for implementing TANF, soon state organizations will have to ‘get creative’ to continue meeting WPRs and moving clients towards self-sufficiency. Therefore, we believe that if state organizations foster cultural shifts that value innovation and organizational change now then their clients, their staff, and their finances will fare better in the future. This study supports that organizational members have the potential to innovate; however, they will need support from their organizations to enact these ideas. Future research is needed to document change ideas in the welfare system from diverse stakeholders’ perspectives.
Footnotes
1
Additional information and references are not provided to maintain the confidentiality of organizational members.
2
The key questions asked to interviewees that informed this analysis were: 1. What do you do and what does the organization do in the PF program?; 2. What systems, procedures, and activities are used to administer PF policies? Are they working? Why or why not?; 3. What systems, procedures, and activities are used to promote client self-sufficiency? Are they working? Why or why not?; 4. In an ideal world, what do you think the organization could do to facilitate client self-sufficiency?; 5. What do you believe are the optimal ways for clients to have healthy lives and outcomes?; 6. What has and has not changed since PF? What do you think the organization needs to change? Why?