Work Programs and Welfare Recipients: An Ethnography of Work-Based Welfare Reform

This paper employs participant observation and interviewing at two community-based welfare-to-work agencies to explore the everyday experience of work-based welfare reform. The paper examines how attempts at what I call cultural retraining (that is, bringing presumably deviant behavior in line with middle-class standards) are delivered and understood in these two work programs. The analysis presented in the first case study suggests that work programs that attempt to teach norms about punctuality, workplace discipline, and proper workplace behavior stigmatize and disaffect their participants, despite manufacturing ostensible consent. Participants reject the stigma that is thrust upon them and "other "that stigma onto other welfare recipients. As a result, participants in this type of program disassociate from one other and are unlikely to create social networks for the exchange of social support and information in the job search process. In the second case study, I find that consciousness-raising around issues of gender violence, racial discrimination, and poverty can mitigate against the stigma attached to welfare receipt and lead to the creation of social ties that serve welfare recipients emotionally and practically in the job search process.