In the twenty-first century, racialized police violence and related protests have renewed debates over the proper relationship between social work and policing. Although debates often center on social work’s capacity to reform policing, they can overlook scholarship documenting social work’s carceral and coercive practices and historical evidence of the social work–police relationship, which is critical for assessing how social workers have attempted to influence police. This article offers a historical analysis of the relationship using proceedings from the National Conference of Charities and Correction. Drawing on strategic action field theory, we examine how social work actors sought to influence police and, through these relationships, the broader field of charities and corrections. We trace this relationship across three eras (1874–1904, 1909–49, 1954–82), showing how social workers partnered with police to address social problems while seeking to reshape the field in line with social work’s rehabilitative and preventive ethos. Our findings reveal a persistent pattern of social workers seeking influence through partnership but stymied by power asymmetries and organizational constraints. By historicizing these dynamics, our study underscores the challenge of advancing reform through social work–police partnerships and the value of historical analysis for contemporary debates.
We explore the impact of burden-reducing legislation intended to improve access to emergency rental assistance through California's COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The law simultaneously made three changes to the program: it simplified paperwork, fully funded rent arrears, and created a means to send funds directly to the tenant. Using a pre-post modeling approach on administrative data, we find strong evidence that the law increased the capacity of the program to disseminate needed assistance, particularly to women, Hispanics, those living in less dense dwelling units, and those in less formal housing arrangements. However, our descriptive analysis finds little evidence that these changes affected tenant experience. We conclude that reducing compliance costs for administrators by clarifying and easing statutory requirements led to improved outcomes for program applicants. However, these improved outcomes were largely invisible to applicants, who continued to experience long wait times and limited communication from a program scrambling to meet a tremendous need. We contribute to the administrative burden literature by emphasizing the administrator's experience of burden in an emergency setting, providing evidence of the effectiveness of direct rental assistance for single-family and low-density dwellings, and pointing to a gap in the literature about disaster response and recovery programs.
Although harm reduction's effectiveness is rooted in decades of advocacy and community-led research, recent US federal support has directed unprecedented funding toward expanding this approach's evidence base through the randomized controlled trial (RCT). Applying the RCT's evidentiary standards to harm reduction, however, exposes a fundamental tension between the movement's calls for structural change and the methodological and political constraints of clinical trials, particularly within criminal-legal settings. Drawing on a 2-year ethnography of the Harm Reduction Peer Recovery clinical trial in midwestern jails, this article examines how researchers and practitioners negotiate calls for structural change while navigating the evidentiary demands of RCTs funded by the US federal government. The study finds that the established institutional and epistemic commitments of RCTs, including alignment with the institutional priorities of criminal-legal administrators and the quest for politically neutral evidence preferred by policy makers, constrain pathways for social change. Ultimately, I show how the features of the RCT that foster credibility with policy makers and criminal-legal systems-political neutrality and clear causality-can also undermine efforts to address the structural issues, such as naloxone criminalization and housing insecurity, identified by frontline practitioners and researchers themselves.
This ethnographic study examines how class struggle unionism-a conflict-oriented advocacy model-transformed participant identities and organizational strategies during a labor strike at a US university. Based on 6 months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 11 interviews with core labor movement leaders, this study demonstrates that repression encouraged union members to engage in more disruptive forms of protest and reinforced an "us-versus-them" mindset among union members. At the same time, I show that community-building events such as mutual aid or spaces for socialization were essential to alleviating the stress of such a high-intensity campaign. Findings illuminate when and how disruptive protest actions are effective, tracing when disruption served to empower union members and when it served to demobilize them. By looking at a high-intensity campaign, this ethnography offers practitioners a model for achieving tangible wins through conflict-oriented advocacy while underscoring the necessity of participatory democracy and community building to sustain movements that rely heavily on hostility, disruption, and conflict. The article also discusses directions for future research on radical organizing.
In 2021, there was a historic, although temporary, expansion to the Child Tax Credit (CTC), shifting it to a near-universal monthly child allowance. Building on previous literature that suggests a growing heterogeneity in family structure intersects with access to safety net programs, we examine how household structure and race/ethnicity independently shaped the patterns of receiving and spending the monthly CTC, and how they jointly shaped the receipt and spending patterns during the second half of 2021. Using the Census Household Pulse Survey and multivariate regression models, we find population-level evidence among CTC-eligible households that unmarried women and unmarried men were both less likely than their married counterparts to report receiving the monthly CTC, with significantly larger gaps observed for unmarried men than for unmarried women. The interaction effect analysis reveals a more nuanced finding that such disparities between married couples and unmarried women are more pronounced among White populations. Analyses on spending show that the monthly CTC played a particularly important role in helping unmarried women of color meet their basic needs and child-related expenses. The present study demonstrates the potential benefit of having a child allowance policy, while highlighting ongoing inequities in access to the CTC despite its near-universal expansion. Findings underscore the need for more targeted outreach efforts, accessible tax filing support services, and a more simplified tax filing process.
A large body of literature has documented the effects of work scheduling practices, such as nonstandard shifts, long work hours, and unpredictable schedules, on worker and family well-being. However, work schedule quality is a multidimensional concept, and few studies operationalize and comprehensively examine how distinct dimensions of work schedule quality affect these outcomes, including in interaction, and particularly related to parenting time and parental stress. Using survey data from working parents at 140 large US food and retail firms, we build on prior literature that illuminates the multidimensionality of work schedule quality. We use fine-grained measures to compare the effects of five dimensions of work schedules-duration, timing, variability, predictability, and control-on parental stress and parenting time. We find that frequent exposure to work schedule instability has a profound impact on parents, triggering heightened parental stress and limiting time with children, but the results vary across dimensions. Duration, predictability, and control are significantly associated with both outcomes, whereas timing only affects stress, and variability only affects parenting time. We also find some limited evidence of the moderating effect of schedule control. These heterogeneous impacts across dimensions emphasize the importance of a multidimensional conceptualization of work schedules, especially for working parents.
Employers have a direct financial interest in the federal-state unemployment insurance (UI) system. Employer taxes, which generally increase when an employer's former employee receives benefits, usually fund UI. Employers may contest workers' eligibility, aided by a growing claims-management industry. Yet scholars know little about this practice's relationship with benefit receipt, in part because we lack publicly available administrative data. To fill this gap, we draw from an original, nationally representative survey of US workers who experienced unemployment between 2019 and 2024. In our national sample, a quarter of jobless workers report contestation-a figure higher than past studies focused on single states. Yet more than a third of these workers go on to claim benefits successfully, suggesting that employers frequently contest likely eligible claims. Further, employers more often contest less-educated workers' claims, which may help explain disparities in access to UI by educational attainment. Workers who report contestations are less likely to claim benefits and report higher rates of material hardship and administrative burden. Our analysis provides a fuller picture of employers' role in UI administration and suggests that policy makers should consider the trade-offs associated with the employer role in UI benefit administration.
Despite increased attention to the phenomenon of administrative burdens, we know less about efforts to minimize these burdens, particularly how those efforts affect frontline staff. This article addresses the gap by analyzing documents gathered and generated by the authors as they implemented a guaranteed-income pilot in Ann Arbor, Michigan, intentionally designed to lessen administrative burdens on applicants. The findings highlight the challenges of putting burden-reducing practices into place and the tensions that emerge, including those between reducing administrative burdens and being accountable for the spending of public dollars. Moreover, we contribute to the literature on administrative burden by uncovering an additional role that administrative burdens can serve-namely, as a device to protect an organization's professional reputation.
Child protective services (CPS) involvement is common among American families; more than a third of all children and more than half of Black children experience at least one investigation by age 18. However, studying the causes and consequences of CPS involvement is challenging. National data on children involved with CPS lack a counterfactual group, and state-level administrative data often miss key family and child factors. The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study provides detailed data on CPS involvement and family and child factors but relies on self-reports, which may underreport involvement. We develop a Bayesian method to correct for this underreporting and estimate the probability of CPS involvement by a given age. We then apply the adjusted measure in empirical analyses of young adult disconnection and compare the estimates with those produced using the unadjusted measure. Results suggest that CPS involvement may be associated with a higher likelihood of disconnection in young adulthood. We find differences in the estimates produced by each measure, suggesting that empirical estimates based on unadjusted self-reports may lead to erroneous substantive conclusions regarding the associations between CPS involvement, potential precursors, and subsequent consequences.
In service provision, some interorganizational relationships face enduring conflicts where boundary work is necessary (e.g., when one partner works to mitigate the potential harms caused by another). Current understandings of boundary work, often focused on either shoring up or breaking down boundaries, do not capture how actors manage such conflicts. This study uses qualitative data to explore how social service organizations and providers engage in boundary work to mitigate harm in their conflicting relationships with police. Applying institutional logics theory to boundary work, the article identifies four interrelated boundary work mechanisms: segregation, which separates conflicting parties; bridging, which maintains collaborative ties amid conflict; demarcation, which protects from excessive separation or collaboration; and shaping, which modifies the character of the entity causing harm. By comparing two cities and multiple service areas, this study shows how institutional demands and organizational structures shape these mechanisms. This article illustrates the interplay of boundary work mechanisms across organizations and individuals, advances understanding of boundary work as actions to manage ongoing tensions between coexisting institutional logics, and offers recommendations for supporting interorganizational boundaries, particularly when the risk of harm is substantial.
The Fight for $15 launched a resurgence of the US labor movement. Little research has examined the impact of unions established through this movement, particularly in the health-care industry, which has faced nearly a century of political hurdles to union organizing. Using longitudinal qualitative data collected with low-paid hospital workers in Pittsburgh, we examine perceptions of their wages and union over the 3 years of their first contract. We found that workers whose wages reached a threshold of $19 per hour described the positive impact of the wage increases, including increased financial security, less stress, and more free time. As a result, many entered an engagement cycle, whereby they became more involved in their union, developed an understanding of the political nature of their challenges, and cultivated solidarity with other workers. On the other hand, workers whose wages remained below the threshold were likely to enter a disengagement cycle, where they became increasingly disengaged with the union, resented union dues, and viewed other workers as competitors rather than allies. As union organizing among care workers continues-including, we hope, expansion to social workers-an understanding of empowerment as a cyclical process can be useful in guiding organizing efforts.
