A Policy Travelogue by Catherine Kingfisher

Author:Catherine Kingfisher [Kingfisher, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Sociology, Marriage & Family
ISBN: 9781782380061
Google: LTbUAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-09-01T02:51:44+00:00

Reading through Welfare Policy in Riverview

One of the differences between my interviews with welfare providers and community service providers in Riverview concerned the relative emphasis each group placed on macro versus micro issues. I started all interviews with the same general preamble—something along the lines of, “I’d like to learn more about the kind of work you do, the kinds of people you work with, and your views about welfare more generally”—and left it up to my interlocutors to decide how they wanted to proceed. The result was a clear divergence in the weighting, and to some degree also in the sequencing, of topics in interviews. Welfare providers tended to focus on welfare mandates with reference to their specific roles as providers and to interactions with their clients; this is what was most salient to them, and this is what they spent the most time discussing. They did voice concerns about problems in the state’s approach to provisioning as well as about wider social issues, as I outlined in chapter 2, but these topics tended to emerge later in interviews, and providers devoted less time and attention to them. In contrast, community service providers tended to start with their views about what was wrong with society at large and with Riverview culture in particular, situating their ensuing readings of the welfare system and of their work with their clients within these larger frames. Although this pattern held for interviews only, the differences index the divergent lenses through which welfare and community service providers translated policy.

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