A new paper published in Social Problems (vol. 56 no. 2, pp. 285–310) by Celeste Watkins-Hayes explores how the substantial increase in people of color working in street-level bureaucracies shapes policy implementation. In, “Race-ing the Bootstrap Climb: Black and Latino Bureaucrats in Post-Reform Welfare Offices,” Watkins-Hayes uses interview data collected from black and Latino supervisors and caseworkers implementing welfare reform to explicate how these actors deploy race and other social group memberships as tools in the delivery of casework services to black and Latino clients. Contrary to our assumptions about the level of impersonality entrenched in public bureaucracies, she finds that most caseworkers and supervisors of color identify with the circumstances of their clients, but interpret the politics of welfare through not only racialized but also classed and gendered lenses. Consequently, they support and challenge clients of color in a variety of ways often unexamined in previous scholarship on the inner workings of street-level bureaucracies. This article suggests that not only inter-racial but also intra-racial politics inform institutional processes within human service agencies.

The direct link to the article:

http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/sp.2009.56.2.285

The article is also currently available on the Social Problems website:

http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/325