The Recovery Model Comes to Welfare : Oblates, Advanced Marginalization, and Neoliberal Paternalism
U.S. welfare reform reflects a “neoliberal paternalist” approach to poverty governance in an age of globalization. This shift is facilitated by the simultaneous medicalization and moralization of welfare dependency, treatable analogous to a drug dependency. This redefinition of welfare dependency leads to the importation of what we call the “recovery model” into welfare reform, one aspect of which is the staffing of welfare-to-work contract agencies with “recovered” former welfare recipients. We analyze field interviews from over sixty case workers at contract agencies in four purposively selected workforce regions that administer the welfare-to-work program in the state of Florida. We explore the different ways former recipients can function as “oblates,” who, like “recovered” addicts, can model successful changes in behavior, in this case switching from welfare reliance to paid employment. The field interviews enable us to examine the anxieties associated with occupying a liminal status in transition from recipient to case manager. Our findings point to the tensions between mentoring and people-processing roles. In particular, we find that relationships between former recipient case managers and their clients produce forms of what Cathy Cohen (1999) has called “advanced marginalization,” where some members of a marginalized group gain access to upward mobility by taking on positions responsible for monitoring and disciplining other members of that marginalized group. We conclude by discussing what our findings imply about the neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance and its potential to help current recipients achieve self-sufficiency
Year of publication: |
2009
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Authors: | Schram, Sanford F. ; Houser, Linda ; Soss, Joe ; Fording, Richard ; Winterbottom, Tatiana ; Rosenstein, Paul |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
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