How Management Matters: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Welfare Reform

How Management Matters: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Welfare Reform. By Norma M. Riccucci. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 224p. 26. 95. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) famously ended welfare “as we knew it”—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—and replaced the 60-year-old AFDC with a new program pointedly called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. TANF substantially increased state discretion in choosing how to aid families with children, but it also established various process requirements that were intended to increase efforts to move unemployed adult recipients into jobs. The new regulations generally require close interaction between benefit recipients (often disingenuously termed “customers”) and local agency personnel. Presumably, it is in these interactions that recipient understanding of the nature and terms of public assistance is to some extent formed. If it is the objective of welfare reform to change these perceptions, reform must address what happens when those seeking help encounter the system.