Working against workfare: Coalitions and claims in the politics of welfare reform in New York City, 1995--2000

In 1995, New York City adopted the country's largest workfare program by putting nearly 40,000 welfare recipients to work in exchange for their benefits. Workfare workers complained of poor working conditions, arbitrary discipline, loss of benefits, and inequitable pay for the work they were doing. Municipal workers saw that jobs they had previously done being performed for a fraction of their pay. Community groups, welfare advocates, and unions therefore began to contest the dominant opposition between welfare and work by seeking to redefine elements of each.; I examine the struggle over the meanings of workfare in New York City during the period of its greatest expansion and institutionalization. Were workfare workers welfare recipients, workers, neither, or both? Whether public debates treat workfare workers as workers, welfare recipients, or some combination of the two reverberates into decisions about how to organize them, which legal frameworks to apply to litigation brought on their behalf, and what rights and responsibilities their position entails. In addressing the answers that various groups formulated to this question, I ask: Why some actors and claims come to dominate a political debate? Why do positions of domination change? How do coalitions around claims form? What organizational and cultural dynamics lead to changed strategic positions for actors and their claims? How do larger socio-economic processes shape the settings within which debates over workfare unfolded?; These questions lie at the intersection of cultural and political sociology. Drawing upon Gramsci's argument that the institutional differentiation of civil society disorganizes working-class coalitions by generating multiple, ambiguous principles by which claims can be made on state authorities, I show that workfare, through its effects upon many institutional arenas of urban life, similarly disorganizes its challengers. By extending Gramsci's argument with recent developments in social movement theory and cultural sociology, I propose that challenging groups' different capacities to set the terms of debate about workfare depend on their respective levels of narrative reach and constraint.; I draw on measurements from social network analysis to understand the configuration of political-interpretive coalitions and to map positions in the field. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...