Independent Workers, Dependable Mothers: Discourse, Resistance, and AFDC Workfare Programs

Little, Deborah L.

doi:10.1093/sp/6.2.161

Cited by 39 publications

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“…In a study of a workfare program, DeborahLittle (1999) finds elements of resistance. Little claims that welfare reliant women deflect the blaming implications of individualist discourses to their own situation, by framing "others," such as men who use public assistance to buy drugs, as the "real" lazy dependents.…”

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confidence: 99%

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Sharone

2007

Qual Sociol

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Unemployed Americans overwhelmingly describe their predicament as an individual and private challenge, and not as a public issue with structural causes and political solutions. This case study utilizes participant observation and in-depth interviews at a support organization for unemployed white-collar workers to explore the concrete dynamics that render the structural and political dimensions of unemployment beyond discussion. Whereas the existing literature focuses on the role of ideology in shaping subjective understandings of unemployment, my ethnographic data indicate that the lived experience of job searching is critical to understanding why individualist ideologies resonate with unemployed job seekers. Engagement in the process of job searching is analyzed as a type of work that generates an absorbing "work-game." Playing this game depoliticizes unemployment by channeling the players' practical energies towards strategic decision-making and individual level maneuvers and away from larger structural contexts. The depoliticizing effects of the game endure even after job seekers cease to play. For job seekers who encounter obstacles to finding employment in the labor market and become discouraged, the process of playing the game generates the experience of being a loser, and thus reinforces individualized understandings of unemployment.

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confidence: 99%

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Sharone

2007

Qual Sociol

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“…The obligation to work, however, imposes a further obligation on low‐income women as childcare and other support requires repayment. As such, as is well known, women do not enter the labour market as independent workers (Little, 1999; Strother, 2003) but as socially dependent on others. By creating the imperative for financial ‘independence’, welfare‐to‐work policies entrench social dependence, as women must turn to private sources of support to fulfil their family's care needs.…”

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confidence: 99%

Social support in single parents' transition from welfare to work: Analysis of qualitative findings¹

Cook

2011

Int J Soc Welfare

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Cook KE. Social support in single parents' transition from welfare to work: Analysis of qualitative findings Since 1995, single parents have been required to participate in welfare‐to‐work activities. While quantitative meta‐analyses have consolidated the social and economic impacts of such transitions, no attempt has yet been made to synthesise the qualitative evidence. In this article, I offer an analysis of 16 qualitative articles that explore the role of social support in the lives of single mothers making the transition from welfare to work. By focusing on the functions and reciprocal nature of social support, this study examined how welfare‐to‐work programmes shift women's dependence from the state onto family and friends, many of whom are in similarly impoverished situations and/or are unable to provide adequate support. Furthermore, women are often required to reciprocate the support they receive, which creates additional barriers to a successful welfare‐to‐work transition.

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“…Yet individuals can resist and reconfigure them in a number of different ways (Valverde 1991). Because discourses are multiple and contradictory within themselves, a possibility for agency exists as women select from and respond to particular frames contained within a given discourse (Little 1999). For instance, as shown in this study, women sometimes argue that their partners' practices are uncontrollable because of these men's substance use.…”

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confidence: 99%

Intimacy, Time, and Scarcity: Drug-Involved Women Account for Secretly Withholding Financial Capital in Violent Intimate Relationships

Rajah

2010

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

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Research on the intimate relationships of drug-involved women has characterized these women either as passive victims of male violence and exploitation or as instrumental actors who maintain intimate relationships merely for the financial benefits they provide. This dichotomous depiction fails to capture the complexity of women's accounts of such intimate relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a group of poor, innercity, largely African American and Puerto Rican women with a history of drug addiction and violent intimate relationships, this article looks at the accounts women offer for secretly withholding financial capital from their partners. Taking a constructionist approach, it demonstrates that women account for their practices within a normative context of gender relations by withholding capital to address the changing financial needs of the couple over time. In so doing, women provide themselves with a needed sense of order and continuity, what Anthony Giddens calls ontological security. This article adds to our understanding of how drug-involved women's changing

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Independent Workers, Dependable Mothers: Discourse, Resistance, and AFDC Workfare Programs

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Social support in single parents' transition from welfare to work: Analysis of qualitative findings¹

Intimacy, Time, and Scarcity: Drug-Involved Women Account for Secretly Withholding Financial Capital in Violent Intimate Relationships

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Independent Workers, Dependable Mothers: Discourse, Resistance, and AFDC Workfare Programs

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

Social support in single parents' transition from welfare to work: Analysis of qualitative findings1

Intimacy, Time, and Scarcity: Drug-Involved Women Account for Secretly Withholding Financial Capital in Violent Intimate Relationships

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Social support in single parents' transition from welfare to work: Analysis of qualitative findings¹