Evelyn Z. Brodkin

Inside the Welfare Contract: Discretion and Accountability in State Welfare Administration

This detailed case study of the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program in Chicago highlights problems that arise when state agencies have discretion in administering a welfare contract built around work. The day-to-day operations observed in this study reveal the role bureaucratic discretion plays in giving specific meaning to the welfare contract. The study also identifies contextual factors that influence how state welfare agencies respond to their policy obligations at the street level. It illuminates the risks of welfare reforms that increase state administrative flexibility under conditions of limited resources and minimal accountability for performance.

Accountability in Street-Level Organizations

Abstract The challenge of managing street-level discretion lies at the heart of the search for strategies of administrative oversight and control. How can management promote accountability without deadening responsiveness and undermining the application of professional judgment on which management also depends? This article reconsiders the problem of accountability from a street-level perspective. First, it reviews the literature on implementation, street-level bureaucracy, and new public management in order to raise questions about the limitations of current approaches to accountability, including new public management solutions that rely on performance measurement. Second, it makes the case for a street-level approach to accountability and illustrates how it can be used to reveal critical dimensions of organizational practice that are not captured by other means. Finally, issues of street-level practice are placed in broader perspective, as part of an on-going global search for ways to advance transparency and accountability in social provision.

Policy Experiments and Poverty Politics

Policy making has increasingly turned to controlled analysis, in the form of demonstration projects and experiments, to test social policies before they are legislated nationwide. Reviewing the history of three hallmark welfare experiments, we examine how controlled analysis became a “shadow institution” — an alternative to more visible and highly contested legislative channels for policy conflict. Applying a political‐institutional lens, we explore what kind of channel this is and how it structures conflicts over poverty policy. We find that controlled analysis may be more apt to reiterate than to challenge conventional wisdom about poverty and the poor.

Quality Control in AFDC as an Administrative Strategy

Of all the initiatives directed toward improving the administration of social welfare programs, the federal governments quality control (QC) systems have been the most successfully implemented and sustained over the last decade. Despite the apparent neutrality of quality control mechanisms, initial findings from our study of the Massachusetts AFDC program suggest that administrative reform to reduce payment error incorporates changes in policy and practice that are inherently political. The distributive consequences of these changes reflect a strong bias toward restricting access to assistance rather than extending it.

Street-Level Organizations, Inequality, and the Future of Human Services

In a time of increasing economic precariousness, social vulnerability, and inequality, human service organizations are being put to the test. At the frontlines of efforts to address social needs, t...