Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

Introduction

Introduction In 1996, after nearly three decades of gridlock, the stalemate over public assistance in the United States was dramatically broken when President Bill Clinton agreed to sign the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The 1996 law ended “welfare as we knew it,” in Clinton’s words, by repealing the sixty-one-year-old cash-assistance program to low-income families with children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The old policy was replaced with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), that gave states substantial discretion over the use of funds even as it imposed strict time limits and work requirements on recipients. A whole new world of “get-tough” welfare reform was initiated.1 Access to assistance was tightened , and welfare shifted from an income support program to a behavior modification regime. Lawmakers created new rules designed to get low-income single mothers to augment their child-rearing work with paid employment outside the home.2 Some families were helped; others found the reforms innocuous because they were already ready to move on from welfare to work. A large number confronted new bureaucratic complexities and the hardships of trying to survive without public assistance while working a low-wage job.3 Still others fell through the cracks, leaving welfare , not working, relying more on family and friends, and hoping that charity and handouts could prevent them from succumbing to the oppressive weight of grinding poverty. Welfare reform has proven to be a milestone , though not the one that social justice advocates had hoped for back in the 1960s when the campaign for welfare rights had begun.4 In fact, the 1996 legislation could be said to represent several milestones, including the culmination of major changes in the relationship between welfare scholarship and politics.5 During the 1960s, much of the best welfare scholarship was done in collaboration with social movements to create pressure from the bottom up to promote social change. Gradually, such 1 work became marginal, displaced by a scientistic, technocratic social science that worked in service of the managers who fine-tune social policies.6 While conservative critics of welfare, such as Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, championed their political views in books and articles, the center of gravity for most social welfare research shifted to highly refined statistical analyses that sought to avoid being seen as political. From the 1960s to the 1990s, as corporate-sponsored campaigns to repudiate the welfare state ascended , conservative social welfare scholarship became increasingly vocal and explicitly political.7 By contrast, liberal social welfare scholarship in this changed political climate increasingly adopted a depoliticized idiom and became limited in its political influence by being assimilated into the expert discourses of the bureaucracy.8 In the process, the voices of dissent that opposed the deleterious effects of welfare reform were increasingly isolated. Critical scholarship on social justice issues has long been vulnerable to marginalization. Nonetheless, there have always been some scholars who have sought to ground their scholarship in ongoing struggles for social justice , especially so in social welfare scholarship. In the 1960s, for example, practitioners of a politically engaged scholarship worked to connect theory and practice and to facilitate an informed challenge to the structures of power, the inequities of the political economy, and the deficiencies of social policy in the United States. This scholarship was best represented by the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. Their scholarship and activism reinforced each other as they worked on both fronts with others to push for social change. Piven and Cloward wrote sophisticated analyses that blended political economy, historical research, and strategic theorizing ; they also worked directly with other activists to found the National Welfare Rights Organization and push for a guaranteed income policy that would eliminate poverty in the United States. While the guaranteed income narrowly missed getting enacted, the political agitation for welfare rights proved to be part of a larger set of social forces that led to the expansion of some social welfare policies and the development of others. Over the next few decades, billions of dollars in increased expenditures would be redistributed to low-income families and individuals. Piven and Cloward’s role in all of this demonstrated how social science could inform social-policy politics in ways that helped energize a movement for a more just form of social provision. Their scholarship constituted a “praxis for the poor.” The phrase “praxis for the poor,” I think, captures an...