Abstract
Kerry Woodward’s Pimping the Welfare System: Empowering Participants with Economic, Social, and Cultural Capital rests on a contradiction: why do welfare-reliant women in Contra Costa County have positive things to say about the welfare program there, when so many academics have soundly criticized the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program and decried its harmful effects on low-income families? Rather than trying to adjudicate between these conflicting evaluations, Woodward starts from the women’s assessment and aims at identifying the program’s positive features so they can be replicated by other counties. She enlists Bourdieu’s theory of capital in this project, using it as the foundation for a new typology for characterizing local welfare programs arranged along a continuum from empowering to repressive. By the end of the book, I was disagreeing with her characterization of the Contra Costa County program; however, her analysis reveals important insights into gaps between the way programs are structured and how they are implemented and unknowingly identifies potential limitations of Bourdieu’s theory of capital as a framework for analyzing the effects of welfare reform and other neoliberal policies on economic inequality and insecurity.
With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, the federal government started to require states to introduce new time limits and work requirements and to ensure that poor mothers assist local child-support officials in securing support payments from non-custodial fathers. The law also produced greater variation in women’s experiences claiming assistance. In addition to granting state and county officials new leeway in designing eligibility requirements and sanctions, by increasing participation requirements Congress expanded agency supervision and worker discretion, so that women from the same county might be offered different services and opportunities, assigned different activities, and face different risks of being sanctioned.
Woodward is critical of time limits, family caps, and limits on the types of education and training women can pursue while they receive cash assistance; however, she argues that without sufficient political support to change these limits, scholars interested in improving the lives of poor families should focus on variable features of the program, which she sees as potentially empowering poor mothers or burdening them further. She suggests that earlier evaluations missed the significance of micro-level interactions between agency staff and women seeking benefits because they classified programs by locating them along a work-first/human capital development continuum.
To remedy this oversight, Woodward proposes a new classification scheme built on Bourdieu’s theory of capital. Like Bourdieu, who expanded the concept of capital to include cultural and social forms to better account for the generational transmission of social advantage under capitalism, she suggests that policy scholars extend their analyses to consider the cultural scripts (cultural capital) and social connections (social capital) in addition to the cash and in-kind benefits women secure by participating in welfare programs. She departs from Bourdieu’s framework, however, by dividing capital into dominant and subjugated forms, based on how these features are assessed by mainstream society. Within this scheme, dominant forms of income, social connections, and behaviors are those society associates with middle and upper-class families, whereas subjugated capital refers to forms of capital associated with the poor, such as undeclared income or income from illegal activities, social ties with poor people, and stigmatized cultural practices and tastes.
Woodward uses this distinction to form the basis of her system for classifying welfare programs. She suggests that evaluation studies locate programs along a continuum from repressive to empowering depending on: (1) the amount of dominant economic capital they impart, (2) the extent to which they overlook the possession of subjugated economic capital, (3) the level of trust they promote between participants and agency staff, and (4) the way they address subjugated cultural practices. Rather than demeaning women who engage in stigmatized practices, empowering programs, according to Woodward, recognize the value of subjugated cultural capital and encourage women to become adept at switching between different cultural scripts as they move between different social contexts. These theoretical moves allow the author to recognize the potential utility of alternative forms of capital possessed by poor women; however, they also fix the distinction between dominant and subjugated capital within her analytical framework and leave un-theorized the processes by which social actors affect which dispositions and actions are rewarded and which are penalized by agency staff and employers.
Woodward studied welfare programs administered in Lewiston and Strafford, California. In addition to interviewing eleven women enrolled in the program and a handful of staff, Woodward spent one year observing women’s meetings with various workers tasked with completing the intake process, determining eligibility, supervising women’s work activities, or visiting women at risk of losing benefits. She also attended the required job preparation and job search classes. Using the new framework, she identifies empowering features of interactions between women seeking assistance and agency staff, confirming the assessments of the women she interviewed. Although some scholars, and even some lawmakers, have criticized courses designed to teach women what agencies call “soft skills,” Woodward points out how they create opportunities for poor women to develop important social ties with their instructors and with other participants. She describes how the instructors she observed facilitated the development of these relationships by sharing their own experiences, recognizing the capital women already had, and using their own social networks to help secure job leads and other resources. They fostered trust by honoring the women’s long-term goals, acknowledging the challenges they faced, and by not sharing information with caseworkers should a woman reveal how she used subjugated forms of economic capital to get by.
However, should we call a program empowering when instructors have to tell participants to “pimp the system,” the source of the book’s title? Granted, California’s policy of allowing families to continue receiving a partial grant when women are sanctioned or reach their time limit aids many families; however, most of the empowering interactions the author describes take place between women and instructors, who do not determine eligibility. She relates instances of intake workers coaching applicants on how to answer questions to qualify for more benefits, but she also recounts instances of caseworkers withholding information about benefits or services women could have claimed. Therefore, one could argue that the interactions she considers empowering result from individual workers drawing on their personal capital or assuming the risks associated with working around program rules to help the women they meet through the program. It is possible that the program is designed to foster these kinds of interactions; however, the little evidence we get about how the agencies assess their workers suggests otherwise.
Unfortunately, we do not have the empirical data to decide whether these interactions affect women’s employment trajectories. Woodward recognizes this limitation, but suggests that it is reasonable to assume that women receiving these forms of capital by complying with the program will do better than women who do not. This assumption is consistent with a model that focuses on the progressive accumulation of different forms of capital. However, without a way of incorporating time into this model, we cannot consider whether complying with the program exposes women to risks associated with forgoing other opportunities or causes them to rely on unstable forms of capital that fail when they need them.