Rebecca Joyce Kissane

“We call it the badlands”: How Social‐Spatial Geographies Influence Social Service Use

Using data from in‐depth qualitative interviews with poor non‐Hispanic white and Puerto Rican women living in a high‐poverty neighborhood in Philadelphia, this article investigates how issues of geographic and social space condition participants’ use of social resources provided locally by nongovernmental social service organizations (SSOs). The findings suggest that use of SSOs is highly contextual and situated in the local environment. In particular, proximity to agencies is found to be an important consideration in participants’ decision to use SSOs, but equally important are subjective understandings of the immediate environs and the ethnoracial groups that live there. Results suggest that studies of geographic place and social welfare might consider the role of service users’ sense of place and community in whether and how poor people make use of available organizational resources.

After Moving to Opportunity How Moving to a Low-poverty Neighborhood Improves Mental Health among African American Women

A large body of nonexperimental literature finds residing in a disadvantaged neighborhood is deleterious for mental health, and recent evidence from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program—a social experiment giving families living in high-poverty neighborhoods the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods—suggests a causal effect of moving to a low-poverty neighborhood on adult mental health. We use qualitative data from 67 Baltimore adults who signed up for the MTO program to understand how moving to a low-poverty neighborhood produced these mental health benefits. First, we document the vast array of mental health challenges, traumatic experiences, and stressors reported by both experimentals (those who received a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood) and controls (those who did not receive a voucher). We then explore how changes in the physical and social environments may have produced mental health benefits for experimentals. In particular, experimentals reported the following: improved neighborhood and home aesthetics, greater neighborhood collective efficacy and pride, less violence and criminal activity, and better environments for raising children. Notably, we also document increased sources of stress among experimentals, mostly associated with moving, making the positive effects of MTO on adult mental health all the more remarkable. These findings have important implications for both researchers and policymakers.

Poor women’s moral economies of nonprofit social service use: Conspicuous constraint and empowerment in the hollow state

This article explores the moral economy through which poor women apply shared understandings of what is fair, just, and appropriate to their use of nonprofit services. The findings suggest that such women perceive that others are needier than they, avoid undeserving opportunist labels (yet apply them to others), and complain that nonprofits routinely violate their moral obligations by withholding services or not affording respect. These views lead to “conspicuous constraint,” or service use only in the direst of circumstances, in which women claim to reject help, in part, so that needy others might receive aid. The author argues that this allows them to construct an image of themselves as self-reliant, morally empowered, benevolent actors in line with neoliberal rhetoric. Given that the public welfare system has transferred more responsibility for delivery of services to the nonprofit sector, the very sector that many poor women avoid, their well-being is of great concern.

Responsible but Uninformed? Nonprofit Executive and Program Directors’ Knowledge of Welfare Reform

Based on extensive qualitative data, this article explores nonprofit executive and program directors’ knowledge and views of welfare reform, including how their levels of knowledge affect their ability to advocate for clients and to plan proactively. Overall, the findings suggest that the majority of the respondents do not have a comprehensive understanding of the welfare rules. Analyses further suggest that levels of knowledge vary by organizational characteristics (e.g., agency size, main service domain, and type of clientele served) and the directors’ views of welfare reform.

“You’re Underestimating Me and You Shouldn’t”: Women’s Agency in Fantasy Sports

Using qualitative data, this article investigates women’s experiences in fantasy sports, a context that offers the potential for transformations in the gendered order of traditionally masculinized athletic environments by blurring the distinctions between real and virtual, combining active production and passive consumption, and allowing men and women to play side-by-side. We find, however, women often describe fantasy sports as a male/masculine space in which they are highly visible and have their ability to compete like men questioned, largely because of gendered assumptions regarding sports knowledge. Women’s attitudes and behaviors frequently reproduce traditional gender dynamics, although women also engage in behaviors and assert definitions of themselves that are potentially transformative—implicitly and explicitly pushing the boundaries of what females are expected to be and accomplish in sport. Often, however, they simultaneously reproduce and resist men’s dominance and women’s marginalization, exercising (1) “mediated agency” by using men to improve their fantasy sports experience and play or (2) “conflicted agency” by reinforcing or accepting gender stereotypes about women while using those stereotypes to their advantage or positioning themselves as atypical women to whom the stereotypes do not apply.

Bonding and Abandoning Gender, Social Interaction, and Relationships in Fantasy Sports

Using data on 396 fantasy sports participants, we explore how fantasy sports participation impacts players’ perceptions of their relationships with others, with attention to how and why outcomes are sexed and gendered. We find male players are more likely than female players to report bonding with friends through their participation, particularly via highly masculinized bragging and “smack talk” with others in their male-dominated leagues. Female players also discuss fantasy sports as a means of relationship building or strengthening, particularly with friends in their leagues or men in their lives; but our analyses suggest they may trade off social connections, as women who are highly involved in other groups are less likely to use fantasy sports to connect with others. Finally, male players, more so than their female counterparts, indicate fantasy sports participation strains relationships with their partners and families, an effect seemingly attributable to their greater emotional and mental investment in fantasy sports.

Work and Family Commitments of Low-Income and Impoverished Women: Guilt Is for Mothers with Good Jobs

Work and Family Commitments of Low-Income and Impoverished Women: Guilt Is for Mothers with Good Jobs centers on exploring the ‘‘broadly shared and influential moral and economic forces that shape how poor and low-income women, both on and off welfare, see themselves as workers and mothers and view their commitments to caring for and providing for children’’ (p. 5). Judith Hennessy frames the book as offering a unique look into work-family decisions and conflict from the vantage point of poor and low-income mothers—a group, she rightfully argues, that has been largely ignored in public accounts on this topic. Instead, she claims, we often hear about the dilemmas faced by and ‘‘choices’’ available to white, professional, middleand upper-class mothers as they navigate raising children and, perhaps, paid employment outside the home. Hennessy draws on these media accounts as well as the scholarly literature on middleand upper-class women and the so-called ‘‘mommy wars’’ to highlight the similarities and differences between professional mothers (and the narratives regarding their decisions and options) and those mothers at the bottom of our class hierarchy. Importantly, she notes, when poor and low-income women are brought into the work-family discussion, they are too often depicted as lacking any choice about work and, instead, as operating with only economic need in mind. Hennessy seeks to complicate this overly simplistic understanding and offers an interesting and compelling answer to the core research question of the book, ‘‘What are the cultural and moral models—devotion schemas—that inform how poor and lowincome women go to work and care for their children?’’ (p. 6). After introducing the subject matter of the book, Hennessy provides a brief history of welfare policy in America, from the mothers’ pensions of the early 1900s through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). This chapter offers a nice, but not novel, review of previous scholarship on welfare policy, demonstrating how the welfare state reflects, creates, and reinforces larger normative understandings of work and family life and obligations. Next come her four empirical chapters—three of which focus on themes emerging from her analysis of 39 in-depth qualitative interviews with poor and lowincome mothers and a fourth on her quantitative data (257 survey questionnaires with poor and low-income mothers). In these chapters she explores what she calls the ‘‘work commitment’’ and ‘‘family commitment’’ schemas, how welfare policies and negative stereotypes of welfare recipients connect to these schemas, and her respondents’ views of such policies. In the final chapter, Hennessy provides a summary of her findings and explores their implications. The heart of Hennessy’s analysis and its main contribution is her delineation and detailing of the work and family commitment schemas and of how these schemas often conflict with one another and relate to welfare policies and practices after welfare reform. The work commitment schema, she explains, offers women a cultural script wherein paid work fulfills obligations to one’s family and promises independence and self-sufficiency, respect, moral worth, and connections to others. The need to work is discussed, but Hennessy emphasizes that economic necessity alone does not fully explain these mothers’ decisions to work. Her respondents’ narratives are replete with comments that position work as a source of identity. Employment indicates character and responsibility and allows these women to demonstrate that they are good mothers in ways that parallel masculine scripts of parenting (e.g., being good providers). The women also point out that through working, they are acting as good role models to their children and distancing themselves from the stereotypical welfare mom who ‘‘does nothing all day’’ or ‘‘sponges off the state.’’ This latter opposition, she argues, provides additional context to why mothers might find the work commitment schema compelling. However, even those respondents Reviews 607

Selling Welfare Reform: Work-First and the New Common Sense of Employment

Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and