The third level of US welfare reform: governmentality under neoliberal paternalism

US welfare reform involves more than dramatic caseload reductions and a shift from cash assistance to services. Its operations today reflect significant changes in poverty governance as a disciplinary regime. Welfare policy has been transformed by the rise of a ‘new paternalism’ that is deeply entwined with the globally ascendant market-centered philosophy of ‘neoliberalism.’ In this paper, we explain how ‘governance’ under this new system enacts a particular logic of ‘governmentality’ in which the state acts through nonprofit and for-profit agents to advance the project of ‘governing mentalities’ in low-income target populations. In this system, diverse policy tools are deployed to produce a form of self-discipline that is consonant with the need for compliant low-wage workers in a globalizing economy. Relying on field interviews of case managers in the state of Florida, our analysis follows a chain of disciplinary relationships which runs from the national government through states, down to local contract agencies, and finally to frontline workers and clients. We highlight how performance management systems function to discipline private provider agencies and welfare case workers. Likewise, we explain how sanctions (financial penalties for client noncompliance) figure prominently in such systems as tools deployed to teach self-discipline to recipients. Our field research, however, shows that the new system of poverty governance is one that is fraught with its own tensions and contradictions. We conclude by considering whether poverty governance today relates to what is being called the ‘pedagogical state.’

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