Conveying the Benefits of Employment: A Comparison of the Organizational Settings of California’s AFDC and GAIN Programs

1 INTRODUCTION In July1996, American family welfare policy entered a new era, one that espoused a strong ideological commitment to transforming welfare from a program primarily concerned with providing basic economic support to the eligible poor, to one providing only temporary assistance to families while moving large numbers of poor parents into employment. Such a welfare-to-work vision is in part premised on the belief that through the communication of programmatic expectations and the availability of supportive services, clients will alter their behavior and find work. It is important, then, that clients understand and act on a complex array of information and that agencies communicate clear and consistent messages about employment. Welfare workers occupy a unique position in this scheme. Their access to knowledge of program regulations and community resources, as well as their " regular " contact with recipients, make them a primary vehicle for informing and motivating recipients. But creating a communicative worker-client relationship depends in large part on the organizational setting in which workers and clients interact. Legislation and agency directives which attempt to modify worker functions can be undermined by existing work routines, office culture, and cross-cutting organizational goals. These mediating factors are often not fully appreciated by policy makers or by researchers whose methodological approaches fail to look at the street-level. (Lipsky) The goal of this paper is to provide a model for explaining how organizational settings affect the communicative capacity of different kinds of welfare workers. The analytic utility of this model will be illustrated in two distinct but related applications: 1) identifying distinct, ideal typical workers whose job profiles reflect emblematic sets of organizational conditions, for the purpose here of characterizing their different communicative capacities; and 2) mapping the impact of organizational and larger environmental conditions and changes along the multiple dimensions that constitute the worker-client relationship. 2 This analysis will involve a comparison of two different programs – Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cash assistance program in effect in California until 1998, and Greater Avenues to Independence (GAIN), California's employment and training program for AFDC recipients. A major conclusion of this analysis is that certain kinds of specialized GAIN workers, and to a lesser extent specialized AFDC workers have the clear programmatic authority and frequent and flexible client contact that allow them to communicate the benefits of employment in an individualized and motivational style. In addition, the possibility of this …