This Social and Behavioral Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship funds two years of independent research for an underrepresented minority scholar in the social sciences with the overall goal of increasing underrepresented groups in the sciences. During the first year, the Fellow will focus on the organizational dynamics of poverty relief in the wake of recent changes in welfare policies. The passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) set a definitive new tone in the country's aid to the poor, one of time-limited assistance with the requirement that welfare mothers work. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) programs. The creation of TANF marked the end of federal entitlements and federal-state matching grants for recipients. Few studies have attempted to understand the dynamics within the front-line organizations that are responsible for the implementation of this broad policy shift: local welfare bureaucracies. Millions of low-income families who seek public assistance still frequently interact with these institutions, seeking financial support, work support resources, information about social services, and guidance in their economic transitions. Using the tools of organizational theory to examine welfare office dynamics opens an important avenue in the study of poverty relief. The ways in which welfare reform is unfolding in TANF offices charts a course for the long-term success or failure of this historic policy transformation and it provides important lessons about the relationships between institutional change, role transitions in organizational life, and the often-contested identities of the individuals involved. The proposed ethnographic research therefore, incorporates an analysis of how a range of interlocking identities held by organizational actors - professional, racial, class, and community - can be challenged or promoted; re-shaped or solidified; and articulated or silenced in bureaucracies undergoing transformation. It assesses whether and how economic and community demographic shifts in TANF offices' surrounding areas might fuel internal institutional dynamics by making racial, ethnic, class, or community conflicts and alliances central concerns that impact caseworker-client interactions. The project also traces the genealogy of the support versus surveillance functions of welfare workers from the years prior to the creation of welfare in 1935 to post-1996 welfare reform to analyze how one aspect of this duality comes to be emphasized over another in certain contexts, how and why this long-standing duality remains in present-day TANF offices, and whether this model is obsolete under the new welfare reform. Through in-depth interviews, participant-observation, and archival research in two East Coast TANF offices, the project seeks to demonstrate how a sweeping institutional change such as the one brought on by welfare reform becomes embroiled in conflict around not only how the target population should be transformed, but also about how front-line workers - as professionals, members of particular racial and class groups, and residents in the offices' surrounding communities - should re-shape and re-articulate their identities in its wake. The project hypothesizes that this "identity-work" frames TANF caseworkers' approaches to their labor, therefore shaping how welfare reform is realized on the ground. The project will lead to a book manuscript and other publications that consider the implications of the findings for ongoing academic and public debates on welfare policy implementation, the front-line dilemmas of devolution and organizational change, and the persistent racial and class conflicts embedded in the welfare system. Post-doctoral funding for the second year supports an ethnographic analysis of the social consequences of HIV/AIDS for Black women. By exploring a range of social domains such as work, family, parenting, and relationships, the study seeks to specify some of the ways in which Watkins hopes to contribute to our understanding of the social dynamics that shape women's experiences with the AIDS epidemic and the disease's relationship to the social and economic factors that perpetuate inequality.
