Urban affairs research has not examined how broad social forces and policy changes affect daily life in urban communities, organizations, and families. Drawing on ethnographic field work in urban food assistance sites as well as analyses of the comparative roles of government and the voluntary sector in responding to social problems, this study provides evidence that: ( I ) voluntary organizations (in this case food assistance providers) have been drawn into a growing institutionalized "shadow government" (Wolch, 1990); (2) this newly institutionalized voluntary bureaucracy closely parallels the bureaucracy, the rigidity, and the depersonalization of government agencies; (3) willingly or not, this increasingly institutionalized food provision network contributes to the continued view of poverty in America as primarily the result of personal defects and temporary misfortunes requiring only an "emergency, " albeit virtually permanent, response from society; and (4) these changes have consequences for the transfer of responsibility for assistance from the public to the private sector under werfare reform.U r b a n affairs research has been dominated by political science, sociology, geography, and economics. Discussions of the interdisciplinary nature of the field consistently cite these disciplines and attempt to reconcile differences among them in theory, method, and
Despite long-term interest in poverty in the United States, and the increasing role of applied and practicing anthropologists as producers and consumers of policy research, anthropologists have not yet had much impact on the welfare policy debate. That debate rests on certain widespread assumptions about the causes and consequences of poverty, the characteristics of the poor, and the effectiveness of proposals to eliminate poverty. As Brett Williams points out, discussions of poverty and welfare have been dominated by economists, who count and classify the poor, and journalists, who depict the poor as isolated and pathological ("Poverty Among African Americans in the Urban United States," Human Organization 51,2[1992]:164-174).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.