SGER: The Private Construction of Welfare Law: 'Contract Bureaucrats' as Informal Lawmakers

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, explores an emerging issue in the relationship between law and bureaucratic institutions, namely, the shift from public to private arrangements for the production of welfare law. The private domain has assumed new significance in the aftermath of welfare reform, which has produced a virtual explosion in private contracting of public welfare functions relating to welfare's work provisions. This exploratory project investigates the private construction of law within "contract bureaucracies," agencies that perform essentially public welfare functions but do so outside the organizational boundaries of government. It extends research on the informal institutional practices through which law acquires specific meaning beyond the public sector. As a study of the construction of practical legal meaning, this inquiry is concerned, not with legal ideals or intent, but with the creation of legal realities. Case study research will be conducted in two private organizations contracted to provide welfare-to-work services. The cases will be purposefully selected to permit comparison with the researcher's public agency studies and to allow comparison with each other. This inquiry will utilize the methodology of street-level analysis, combining in-depth interview techniques often used by organization researchers with direct observation more commonly used in ethnography. The objective of this form of analysis is to reconstruct agency practice in terms of its own internal logic and to explain the particular form that law takes in specific settings.