New edition of “Human Services as Complex Organizations” released
December 18, 2009 at 4:39 pm | Posted in amenities, job centers, new books, non-profits, poverty, race, social service agencies, welfare offices, what to read | Leave a comment
Sociologist and social welfare scholar Yeheskel Hasenfeld has recently published a new edition of his seminal volume, Human Services as Complex Organizations. This comprehensive and state-of-the-art collection on human service organizations weaves the latest theoretical and empirical studies in macro theory with contemporary examples from hospitals, schools, social service organizations, mental health centers, and public welfare agencies. Blending theory with application, this outstanding anthology highlights the moral choices and accomplishments made by human service organizations. University of Michigan Professor Emerius Mayer Zald writes, “Hasenfeld has done it again. An excellent collection of essays on many of the most important trends and issues involving human service organizations.” The volume features essays from urbanorgs.org members Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Evelyn Brodkin, Stephen R. Smith, Jodi Sandfort and many others.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes publishes book on the professional lives of bureaucrats in welfare offices
June 27, 2009 at 3:36 pm | Posted in job centers, job search, new books, poverty, social service agencies, welfare offices, what to read | Leave a comment
A behind-the-scenes look at bureaucracy’s human face in the wake of welfare reform, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is a study of welfare officers and how they navigate the increasingly tangled political and emotional terrain of their jobs. Celeste Watkins-Hayes here reveals how welfare reform engendered a shift in focus for caseworkers from simply providing monetary aid to the much more complex process of helping recipients find work. Now both more intimately involved in their clients’ lives and wielding greater power over their well-being, welfare officers’ racial, class, and professional identities have become increasingly important factors in their work. Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in two very different communities, The New Welfare Bureaucrats is for anyone looking to understand the impact of the institutional and policy changes wrought by welfare reform as well as the subtle social dynamics that shape the way public resources are meted out to the poor at the individual level.
New book by Sandra Smith
September 24, 2008 at 8:16 pm | Posted in job centers, job search, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment
In Lone Pursuit:Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor, based on interviews with jobs seekers and job holders and on observations in a state job center, Smith examines the use of personal and institutional social capital among the black urban poor. From the publisher: Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent joblessness among the black poor. In Lone Pursuit, Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process through which the black poor search for jobs. Based on in-depth interviews with 105 low-income and low-skilled African American men and women, Smith reveals that pervasive distrust between black poor jobseekers and their labor market intermediaries makes the activation of personal and institutional forms of social capital for job-finding unlikely.
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