Evelyn Z. Brodkin

University of Chicago | UC

When crises strike, street-level organizations (SLOs) form the frontline response, providing essential services on which society depends. Yet the role of SLOs as crisis responders has received little theoretical attention. This article considers that role, advancing a theoretical framework for understanding how SLOs respond to the extraordinary con...

div class="title">The Ethnographic Turn in Political Science: Reflections on the State of the Art - Volume 50 Issue 1 - Evelyn Z. Brodkin

Apolitical views of discretion, much like apolitical views of administration, overlook the latent, political functions of discretion, generally, and within street-level organizations, in particular. This chapter highlights three ways in which the discretionary practices of street-level organizations are salient to welfare state politics. Street-lev...

By the end of the 20th C., workfare and labor market activation policies had become increasingly common around the globe. These developments provoked debate over whether these policies were advancing a project of commodification (Esping-Andersen 1990) by marketizing citizenship or a project of inclusion by bringing marginalized groups into the econ...

In recent decades, workfare-style policies have become part of the institutional architecture of welfare and labor market arrangements around the world. In this article, we offer a comparative, historical view of workfare's advance. Our analysis recognizes the complexity and diversity of what we call the “policies of workfare” and highlights the di...

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Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume, edited by Brodkin and Marston, offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmar...

Street-level organizations are pivotal players in the making of public policy. The importance of these organizations is reflected in new public management strategies that aim to influence how street-level organizations work, in part, by “steering” discretionary practices through performance-based incentives. The underlying assumptions are that if p...

Organizations operate as the gateway to public benefits. They are formally authorized to adjudicate claims, in the process interpreting and applying eligibility rules. Beyond their designated role, they also operate as informal gatekeepers, developing modes of operation that affect the ease or difficulty of claiming. Operational practices-both form...

The challenge of managing street-level discretion lies at the heart of the search for strategies of administrative oversight and control. How can management promote accountability without deadening responsiveness and undermining the application of professional judgment on which management also depends? This article reconsiders the problem of accoun...

Bureaucratic discretion is a fundamental feature of social provision, one that presents enduring difficulties for management. In general, management reform has taken two, divergent paths. One, utilizing the familiar public bureaucratic model, seeks to control discretion through hierarchical command structures and standardization. The other, utilizi...

Bureaucratic discretion is a fundamental feature of social provision, one that presents enduring difficulties for management. European states that have commonly held to a strong, bureaucratic tradition are increasingly looking toward American models of privatization and devolution. This working paper offers a critical perspective on the American ex...

Policy making has increasingly turned to controlled analysis, in the form of demonstration projects and experiments, to test social policies before they are legislated nationwide. Reviewing the history of three hallmark welfare experiments, we examine how controlled analysis became a "shadow institution"-an alternative to more visible and highly co...

In the post-reform era, the production of welfare policy is taking shape in an increasingly devolved and discretionary environment. Street-level workers are "making" reform through their day-to-day practices in public, quasi-public, and private agencies, extending even into the private workplace. In order to adequately understand the "practical" me...

This detailed case study of the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program in Chicago highlights problems that arise when state agencies have discretion in administering a welfare contract built around work. The day-to-day operations observed in this study reveal the role bureaucratic discretion plays in giving specific meaning to the welfar...

Of all the initiatives directed toward improving the administration of social welfare programs, the federal government's quality control (QC) systems have been the most successfully implemented and sustained over the last decade. Despite the apparent neutrality of quality control mechanisms, initial findings from our study of the Massachusetts AFDC...