Vicki Lens
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 114272 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vicki Lens |
| NOMBRES | Vicki |
| APELLIDO | Lens |
| FIRMA | LENS V |
| AFILIACIONES | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4676-5522 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 159 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Epistemic Pluralism, Open Inquiry, and Constructive Disagreement
Response to Comment on Distortion, Distraction, and Disservice. A Critical Response to the Backlash Against Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Social Work Education
Fostering Financial and Family Well-Being
Introduction
Navigating a flawed system
Family courts have been criticized for failing their core mission of rehabilitating families. Structural inequalities embedded in the family court system, combined with the role of adversarial judges and resource constraints, have contributed to the creation of a problematic environment for parents and families. In this paper, we examine the strategies that legal teams (attorneys, legal social workers and parent advocates) employ to serve child w…
From Practice to Policy
When countries experience a surge of migrants at their borders, they search for ways to assert control, often using strategies aimed at slowing, reducing, discouraging, or blocking entry. To the extent that national and international law confers rights on some migrants, in particular laws allowing individuals to cross borders to claim asylum, the tools for directly impeding entry may be limited. In this context, states may develop administrative …
Deconstructing the Administrative State”
Attacks on the administrative state are escalating. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is on track to reverse key pillars of administrative law that gives deference to an agency’s expertise and knowledge when interpreting its authorizing statute. This article explores the legal, ideological, and philosophical underpinnings of these doctrinal changes in administrative law and the likely effect on administrative governance. It aims to inform…
Another Dobbs? The Supreme Court and the Administrative State
Journal Article Another Dobbs? The Supreme Court and the Administrative State Get access Vicki Lens Vicki Lens PhD, JD, MSW, is associate dean and professor, Silberman School of Social Work, Hunter College, 2180 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10035, USA; email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 69, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 106–108, https://doi.org/10.109…
The View from the Other Side
This qualitative study brings together the voices of parents and their representatives, including attorneys, social workers and parent advocates, to understand the lived experiences of child welfare involved parents as they navigate Family Court, and how to improve it. The findings suggest that these courts are difficult to navigate for both parents and their representatives, and are often experienced as punitive and unsupportive spaces. The find…
Mapping Immigration Policy at the Southern Border
Presidents are increasingly relying on a mode of governing—presidentialism—that produces radical shifts in public policy through the administrative state, rather than through Congress. Most recently, using the tools of the administrative state rather than legislative action, the Trump Administration has reinterpreted the laws governing asylum, especially as to citizens from Central America seeking refuge from violence and dire poverty. Through a …
The Collateral Consequences of State Central Registries
Virtually every social worker knows about the core role of state central registries in the child welfare system. Less well known is how the very registries that protect children can also threaten the economic security of their families and, in so doing, undermine child safety. Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (P.L. 93-247) in 1974 to incentivize states to develop child maltreatment reporting systems to systematically …
Asking for Help
Objectives: Help-seeking patterns in people experiencing material hardships are poorly understood. This study examines variations in patterns of help seeking among people experiencing material hardships who do, and do not, seek help from nonprofit organizations. Method: The qualitative research design included 70 in-depth, semistructured interviews with New York City residents experiencing financial hardship. Participants (ages 18–65+) ranged fro…
Executive Orders and the Trump Administration
With the election of Donald Trump, policies antithetical to our clients' well-being, in areas as diverse as criminal justice, the environment, health care, and immigration, are being proposed at a rapid rate. Many of these policies are being transmitted through executive orders (EOs), a mechanism for exercising executive power less familiar to social workers. This article analyzes EOs issued by the Trump administration during its first five month…
Social Work and Law
Social Work and Law: Judicial Policy and Forensic Practice by Sunny Harris Rome." Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 37(5), pp. 551–552
Case workers in family court
Welfare Queen
Welfare queen is a derogatory phrase that encapsulates the central myth underlying welfare policy in the United States—that welfare recipients are deceitful and devious, and are gaming the system to collect unneeded welfare payments. This myth is built on an edifice of both racial and gender stereotypes. It taps into pejorative myths about African American women, combining potent images of promiscuity and laziness to suggest that welfare recipien…
Against the Grain
The last several decades have seen a proliferation of specialized courts, including within the family court system, that deviate from the adversarial model, and that rely on therapeutic jurisprudence and other problem-solving techniques. Whether and how traditional family courts can incorporate the best practices of these specialized courts is a largely understudied area. Drawing from ethnographic observations of a traditional urban family court,…
Work and the Welfare State
Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare state politics, policy and management. This volume 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 United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
Choreographing Justice
A significant form of civil justice is administrative hearings, used to resolve individual disputes in the provision of government welfare benefits. Drawing from ethnographic observations, analysis of recorded transcripts of the hearings, and interviews with administrative law judges in the United States, we examine two contrasting approaches to judging, one a ‘bureaucratic’ approach which replicates the style of decision‐making on the front line…
Judge or Bureaucrat? How Administrative Law Judges Exercise Discretion in Welfare Bureaucracies
Administrative law judges are neglected but powerful actors in public welfare bureaucracies, presiding over quasi-judicial hearings triggered if participants challenge a bureaucratic decision on public welfare benefits. Drawing on ethnographic observations of fair hearings, as well as interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study seeks to understand the ways in which these judges exercise discretion and how it affects the a…
Contesting the Bureaucracy
This article explores citizens’ use of administrative hearings to appeal adverse government decisions about their welfare benefits. It draws on interviews with 79 welfare participants and observations of hearings and interviews with administrative law judges in a state in the United States to understand what hearings, and the act of appealing, mean to citizens. I find that beyond individual redress, participants view appealing as an opportunity t…
Respect
The dramatic reshaping of welfare in 1996 included an arsenal of policy tools, from time limits, work requirements, and sanctions to work supports, job training and education, and case management services. To deploy these tools, welfare offices have been reconfigured and outside providers, including for profit and nonprofit agencies, enlisted. One policy tool, however, has been conspicuously and persistently absent: respect
Negotiating the discourse of race within the United States welfare system
The incendiary dynamic between race and welfare in the United States is well-known. An under explored aspect of this dynamic is how recipients of colour navigate the racial undercurrents that permeate welfare and which may result in differential treatment. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four recipients of colour, this study seeks to understand the ways in which they negotiate their relationships with workers. The study finds that…
Seeking Justice
An understudied area of public administration is administrative hearings, used by clients to challenge denials or reductions of aid in public welfare programs. They help ensure that officials are applying the law consistently, fairly and equitably, and as intended by policy makers. Drawing on 59 qualitative interviews with public assistance clients in an urban and suburban county in New York who received notices discontinuing or reducing their as…
Confronting Government After Welfare Reform
Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with th…
Work and the Welfare State
Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare state politics, policy and management. This volume 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 United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
Welfare and Work Sanctions
Sanctions are a key tool for enforcing welfare reform’s work requirements, but little attention has been paid to how laws, administrative procedures, judicial decisions, and worker discretion interact in the application of sanctions on the front lines. This study analyzes administrative fair hearing decisions and in‐depth interviews with sanctioned recipients. The findings suggest that workers interpret and apply sanction rules narrowly, failing …
Seeking Justice
An understudied area of public administration is administrative hearings, used by clients to challenge denials or reductions of aid in public welfare programs. They help ensure that officials are applying the law consistently, fairly and equitably, and as intended by policy makers. Drawing on 59 qualitative interviews with public assistance clients in an urban and suburban county in New York who received notices discontinuing or reducing their as…
Confronting Government After Welfare Reform
Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with th…
Administrative Justice in Public Welfare Bureaucracies
One of the few avenues open to citizens to dispute mistakes in the administration of public welfare programs is administrative hearings ("fair hearings"). However, recipients rarely use them. This has important implications for social equity, as government is obligated to ensure its process for distributing benefits is fair and equitable. Drawing on data from 28 qualitative interviews with recipients who were sanctioned for violating the work rul…
Judge or Bureaucrat? How Administrative Law Judges Exercise Discretion in Welfare Bureaucracies
Administrative law judges are neglected but powerful actors in public welfare bureaucracies, presiding over quasi-judicial hearings triggered if participants challenge a bureaucratic decision on public welfare benefits. Drawing on ethnographic observations of fair hearings, as well as interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study seeks to understand the ways in which these judges exercise discretion and how it affects the a…
Complaining after Claiming
Over 30 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court granted welfare clients the right to an administrative hearing before the termination of their benefits. Fair hearings have since become a mainstay of the welfare bureaucracy, but there has been scant empirical research on them, particularly since welfare reform, which eliminated the entitlement status of welfare while emphasizing clients’ obligations. This article reports on an empirical study of the fai…
Tanf
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, widely heralded as the "end to welfare as we know it," is in its sixth year of implementation. According to many, the welfare debate has been settled, and both legislators and the public have proclaimed the program a success. This article examines the accumulated data on the effect of welfare reform, which shows, contrary to popular opinion, the goal of self-sufficiency remains elusive f…
Choreographing Justice
A significant form of civil justice is administrative hearings, used to resolve individual disputes in the provision of government welfare benefits. Drawing from ethnographic observations, analysis of recorded transcripts of the hearings, and interviews with administrative law judges in the United States, we examine two contrasting approaches to judging, one a ‘bureaucratic’ approach which replicates the style of decision‐making on the front line…
Negotiating the discourse of race within the United States welfare system
The incendiary dynamic between race and welfare in the United States is well-known. An under explored aspect of this dynamic is how recipients of colour navigate the racial undercurrents that permeate welfare and which may result in differential treatment. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four recipients of colour, this study seeks to understand the ways in which they negotiate their relationships with workers. The study finds that…
Advocacy and Argumentation in the Public Arena
Whether translating research findings for public consumption, or arguing for a policy position that reflects social work values, social workers engaged in cause advocacy need rhetorical skills. The author draws from the disciplines of linguistics, logic, and communications and provides a framework for making arguments in the public arena. The structure and components of arguments are analyzed, and strategies for choosing persuasive empirical evid…
Principled Negotiation
Many methods of social work practice, including brokering, case advocacy, and cause advocacy, require the social worker to engage in negotiations to resolve disputes. This article demonstrates how principled negotiation, a form of negotiating developed out of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard University and used widely in the business and legal world, can be an effective tool in social work practice. Principled negotiation is especially …
In the Fair Hearing Room
This article explores how welfare clients use and experience the fair hearing system, the administrative mechanism for challenging denials or reductions of aid in public welfare bureaucracies. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with clients, it explores how old-style procedural protections like fair hearings are being used to challenge new-style welfare reforms. This research found that clients use fair hearings as a form of resistance and …
Implementing Full and Partial Work Sanctions
This study examines the implementation of work sanctions in Texas, a state that switched from partial to full benefit sanctions. A qualitative research design is used consisting of 255 individual case studies obtained from administrative fair hearing data under Texas's full and partial sanction regimes. Recipients' explanations for not complying with the work rules and how workers assessed these explanations and whether sanctions were appropriate…
Examining the Administration of Work Sanctions on the Frontlines of the Welfare System
Objectives. Financial penalties, or sanctions, are a core mechanism for enforcing the work requirements of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and helping clients achieve self‐sufficiency. This study's objective is to examine whether sanctions are being administered consistent with policy goals of encouraging work. Methods. This study uses administrative fair hearing decisions, which are the product of an adversarial‐style procedu…
Reading between the Lines
Supreme Court decisions can be read on two levels: as prescriptive statements of what legally can or cannot be done and as discourses that define the Court’s view of social problems. This article explores this latter role through a content analysis of Court decisions that directly address the struggle for women’s equality in the workplace during the 1970s. As it formulated the legal rules applicable to gender discrimination, the Court also gave s…
Welfare Reform, Personal Narratives and the Media
As TANF comes up for reauthorization in 2002, stereotypes of welfare recipients must be challenged so that public animosity can be transformed into public support. This article explores strategies for doing so, drawing on a study describing the stories welfare recipients told about their lives and experiences with welfare in the New York Times and the Washington Post during the 1996 debate over welfare reform. The role of journalists in framing t…
Public Voices and Public Policy
Much of the public discourse on welfare reform is subjective and value laden, a composite of socially constructed stories and myths that support the dominant ideology. This article reports on a study that examines the language used by government officials, poverty experts, advocates and others to discuss welfare reform. Statements made about welfare reform were extracted from the Washington Post and the New York Times and analyzed using qualitati…
The Supreme Court, Federalism, and Social Policy
The Supreme Court is entering a new era, discarding long‐standing legal doctrines to reshape the relationship between the states and the federal government. Paralleling trends in the legislative and executive branches of government, the Court is constructing its own version of devolution. Through a reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is the anchor for many of our civil rights and social welfare laws, the Court has s…
From Practice to Policy
When countries experience a surge of migrants at their borders, they search for ways to assert control, often using strategies aimed at slowing, reducing, discouraging, or blocking entry. To the extent that national and international law confers rights on some migrants, in particular laws allowing individuals to cross borders to claim asylum, the tools for directly impeding entry may be limited. In this context, states may develop administrative …
Asking for Help
Objectives: Help-seeking patterns in people experiencing material hardships are poorly understood. This study examines variations in patterns of help seeking among people experiencing material hardships who do, and do not, seek help from nonprofit organizations. Method: The qualitative research design included 70 in-depth, semistructured interviews with New York City residents experiencing financial hardship. Participants (ages 18–65+) ranged fro…
Contesting the Bureaucracy
This article explores citizens’ use of administrative hearings to appeal adverse government decisions about their welfare benefits. It draws on interviews with 79 welfare participants and observations of hearings and interviews with administrative law judges in a state in the United States to understand what hearings, and the act of appealing, mean to citizens. I find that beyond individual redress, participants view appealing as an opportunity t…
The Collateral Consequences of State Central Registries
Virtually every social worker knows about the core role of state central registries in the child welfare system. Less well known is how the very registries that protect children can also threaten the economic security of their families and, in so doing, undermine child safety. Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (P.L. 93-247) in 1974 to incentivize states to develop child maltreatment reporting systems to systematically …
Against the Grain
The last several decades have seen a proliferation of specialized courts, including within the family court system, that deviate from the adversarial model, and that rely on therapeutic jurisprudence and other problem-solving techniques. Whether and how traditional family courts can incorporate the best practices of these specialized courts is a largely understudied area. Drawing from ethnographic observations of a traditional urban family court,…
Sound Bites, Spin and Social Change
The news media is an essential player in the policy making process. Social work students learning how to scrutinize, and influence, the complex world of social policy can benefit from an educational model that incorporates the media. This article first examines the theoretical framework for understanding the media's role in public policy formation. This framework is then used to construct a classroom exercise for analyzing the public discourse us…
Advance Directives
Although the legal basis to refuse life supports is firmly embedded in the laws of all 50 states, there is evidence that a gap exists between patients' preferences and physicians' actions. Patients and their families have increasingly begun to turn to the courts for redress, requesting damages when a physician has ignored their request to forgo life-sustaining treatment. This article explores the reasons why patients' end-of-life medical choices …
Protecting the Confidentiality of the Therapeutic Relationship
Journal Article Protecting the Confidentiality of the Therapeutic Relationship: Jaffee v. Redmond Get access Vicki Lens, MSW, JD Vicki Lens, MSW, JD clinical instructor, adjunct professor Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, 500 West 185th Street, New York, NY 10033-3201 and Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, Touro College, Huntington, NY; e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Goog…
The Supreme Court, Federalism, and Social Policy
The Supreme Court is entering a new era, discarding long‐standing legal doctrines to reshape the relationship between the states and the federal government. Paralleling trends in the legislative and executive branches of government, the Court is constructing its own version of devolution. Through a reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is the anchor for many of our civil rights and social welfare laws, the Court has s…
Sound Bites, Spin and Social Change
The news media is an essential player in the policy making process. Social work students learning how to scrutinize, and influence, the complex world of social policy can benefit from an educational model that incorporates the media. This article first examines the theoretical framework for understanding the media's role in public policy formation. This framework is then used to construct a classroom exercise for analyzing the public discourse us…
Welfare Reform, Personal Narratives and the Media
As TANF comes up for reauthorization in 2002, stereotypes of welfare recipients must be challenged so that public animosity can be transformed into public support. This article explores strategies for doing so, drawing on a study describing the stories welfare recipients told about their lives and experiences with welfare in the New York Times and the Washington Post during the 1996 debate over welfare reform. The role of journalists in framing t…
Public Voices and Public Policy
Much of the public discourse on welfare reform is subjective and value laden, a composite of socially constructed stories and myths that support the dominant ideology. This article reports on a study that examines the language used by government officials, poverty experts, advocates and others to discuss welfare reform. Statements made about welfare reform were extracted from the Washington Post and the New York Times and analyzed using qualitati…
Tanf
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, widely heralded as the "end to welfare as we know it," is in its sixth year of implementation. According to many, the welfare debate has been settled, and both legislators and the public have proclaimed the program a success. This article examines the accumulated data on the effect of welfare reform, which shows, contrary to popular opinion, the goal of self-sufficiency remains elusive f…
The Supreme Court and Women's Rights
This article examines the conservative activism of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rehnquist. Suggestions are made on how advocates, including social workers and their professional organizations, can advance the cause of social justice for women, given the current parameters of the Supreme Court. Strategies include shifting attention to other arenas, including federal and state legislatures and state courts; diluting the effects of the Cour…
Reading between the Lines
Supreme Court decisions can be read on two levels: as prescriptive statements of what legally can or cannot be done and as discourses that define the Court’s view of social problems. This article explores this latter role through a content analysis of Court decisions that directly address the struggle for women’s equality in the workplace during the 1970s. As it formulated the legal rules applicable to gender discrimination, the Court also gave s…
Social Work and the Supreme Court
Journal Article Social Work and the Supreme Court: A Clash of Values; a Time for Action Get access Vicki Lens, JD, PhD Vicki Lens, JD, PhD assistant professor Columbia University School of Social Work, 622 West 113th Street, New York, NY 10025; e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 49, Issue 2, April 2004, Pages 327–330, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/49.2.327 P…
Principled Negotiation
Many methods of social work practice, including brokering, case advocacy, and cause advocacy, require the social worker to engage in negotiations to resolve disputes. This article demonstrates how principled negotiation, a form of negotiating developed out of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard University and used widely in the business and legal world, can be an effective tool in social work practice. Principled negotiation is especially …
Advocacy and Argumentation in the Public Arena
Whether translating research findings for public consumption, or arguing for a policy position that reflects social work values, social workers engaged in cause advocacy need rhetorical skills. The author draws from the disciplines of linguistics, logic, and communications and provides a framework for making arguments in the public arena. The structure and components of arguments are analyzed, and strategies for choosing persuasive empirical evid…
Complaining after Claiming
Over 30 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court granted welfare clients the right to an administrative hearing before the termination of their benefits. Fair hearings have since become a mainstay of the welfare bureaucracy, but there has been scant empirical research on them, particularly since welfare reform, which eliminated the entitlement status of welfare while emphasizing clients’ obligations. This article reports on an empirical study of the fai…
Examining the Administration of Work Sanctions on the Frontlines of the Welfare System
Objectives. Financial penalties, or sanctions, are a core mechanism for enforcing the work requirements of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and helping clients achieve self‐sufficiency. This study's objective is to examine whether sanctions are being administered consistent with policy goals of encouraging work. Methods. This study uses administrative fair hearing decisions, which are the product of an adversarial‐style procedu…
Administrative Justice in Public Welfare Bureaucracies
One of the few avenues open to citizens to dispute mistakes in the administration of public welfare programs is administrative hearings ("fair hearings"). However, recipients rarely use them. This has important implications for social equity, as government is obligated to ensure its process for distributing benefits is fair and equitable. Drawing on data from 28 qualitative interviews with recipients who were sanctioned for violating the work rul…
In the Fair Hearing Room
This article explores how welfare clients use and experience the fair hearing system, the administrative mechanism for challenging denials or reductions of aid in public welfare bureaucracies. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with clients, it explores how old-style procedural protections like fair hearings are being used to challenge new-style welfare reforms. This research found that clients use fair hearings as a form of resistance and …
Implementing Full and Partial Work Sanctions
This study examines the implementation of work sanctions in Texas, a state that switched from partial to full benefit sanctions. A qualitative research design is used consisting of 255 individual case studies obtained from administrative fair hearing data under Texas's full and partial sanction regimes. Recipients' explanations for not complying with the work rules and how workers assessed these explanations and whether sanctions were appropriate…
Welfare and Work Sanctions
Sanctions are a key tool for enforcing welfare reform’s work requirements, but little attention has been paid to how laws, administrative procedures, judicial decisions, and worker discretion interact in the application of sanctions on the front lines. This study analyzes administrative fair hearing decisions and in‐depth interviews with sanctioned recipients. The findings suggest that workers interpret and apply sanction rules narrowly, failing …
Seeking Justice
An understudied area of public administration is administrative hearings, used by clients to challenge denials or reductions of aid in public welfare programs. They help ensure that officials are applying the law consistently, fairly and equitably, and as intended by policy makers. Drawing on 59 qualitative interviews with public assistance clients in an urban and suburban county in New York who received notices discontinuing or reducing their as…
Confronting Government After Welfare Reform
Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with th…
Respect
The dramatic reshaping of welfare in 1996 included an arsenal of policy tools, from time limits, work requirements, and sanctions to work supports, job training and education, and case management services. To deploy these tools, welfare offices have been reconfigured and outside providers, including for profit and nonprofit agencies, enlisted. One policy tool, however, has been conspicuously and persistently absent: respect
Negotiating the discourse of race within the United States welfare system
The incendiary dynamic between race and welfare in the United States is well-known. An under explored aspect of this dynamic is how recipients of colour navigate the racial undercurrents that permeate welfare and which may result in differential treatment. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four recipients of colour, this study seeks to understand the ways in which they negotiate their relationships with workers. The study finds that…
Contesting the Bureaucracy
This article explores citizens’ use of administrative hearings to appeal adverse government decisions about their welfare benefits. It draws on interviews with 79 welfare participants and observations of hearings and interviews with administrative law judges in a state in the United States to understand what hearings, and the act of appealing, mean to citizens. I find that beyond individual redress, participants view appealing as an opportunity t…
Judge or Bureaucrat? How Administrative Law Judges Exercise Discretion in Welfare Bureaucracies
Administrative law judges are neglected but powerful actors in public welfare bureaucracies, presiding over quasi-judicial hearings triggered if participants challenge a bureaucratic decision on public welfare benefits. Drawing on ethnographic observations of fair hearings, as well as interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study seeks to understand the ways in which these judges exercise discretion and how it affects the a…
Work and the Welfare State
Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare state politics, policy and management. This volume 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 United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
Political science (40 obras) · Law (36 obras) · Law (31 obras) · Sociology (31 obras) · Welfare (20 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Public Administration (13 obras) · Public Administration (13 obras) · Public relations (12 obras) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 obras)