Postmodern Policy Analysis: Discourse and Identity in Welfare Policy

Postmodern Policy Analysis: Discourse and Identity in Welfare PolicyAuthor(s): Sanford F. SchramSource: Policy Sciences, Vol. 26, No. 3, Democracy and the Policy Sciences (Aug., 1993), pp. 249-270Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4532290Accessed: 13/05/2010 17:01

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analyze and make various public policies. This is so for all public policy, whether domestic or international in orientation, whether social, economic, or military in emphasis, and whether primarily directed at states, nations, organizations, groups or individuals. The politics of identity is pervasive in analyzing and making public policy.

In particular, social welfare policy in contemporary 'postindustrial' Ameri- ca participates in the construction and maintenance of identity in increasingly insistent ways, so as to affect not just the allocation of public benefits but also economic opportunities outside of the state. Contemporary practice, including welfare, remains mired in the invidious industrial and even pre-industrial distinctions of independent/dependent, contract/charity, family/promiscuity, etc., that are used to affirm some behaviors and identities while denigrating others, even, or especially, as these age-old distinctions become harder to sustain in an increasingly postindustrial, globalized political economy that the state increasingly cannot control (Connolly, 1991). Welfare policy today helps to recreate the problems of yesterday. In the process, poor female-headed families get constructed as the alien 'other' we all are not supposed to be. The 'feminization of poverty' is established policy reinforced by the gendered biases of the questionable distinctions embedded in welfare policy discourse. It is important to recognize that much has been made in the past of how welfare benefits as material resources are largely available only for one-parent families and therefore are a disincentive to the creation and maintenance of two-parent families (Murray, 1993, 1984). Yet, this stress on the materiality of welfare overlooks how it operates as a cultural force reinforcing the two- parent family through the negative symbolic significance attached to welfare- taking by female-headed families.

Following a review of the. statistical evidence regarding why mother-only families predominate among the poor, I interrogate the discourse of contemporary welfare policy so as to highlight how it has been a critical constitutive factor in reproducing women's poverty. The goal is to promote a destabliza- tion of these increasingly insistent and anachronistic distinctions of welfare policy discourse so that we can increase the chances of making public policy in a more democratic way, one tolerant of the variety of families and the diversity of circumstances they confront.

Postmodern policy analysis

As disputes about the term and its definition recede, it is possible to see postmodernism as a growing intellectual and cultural sensibility that is being insinuated into popular and academic thought (Anderson, 1993). This sensibility takes many forms but in common is the appreciation that reality as we know it is socially constructed and discursively constituted - i.e., that there is a politics to how we go about making sense of the world and the ways in which we communicate those understandings to others. The postmodern sen-

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sibility stresses perspectivism. In other words, we always understand things from a partial (both in the sense of incomplete and biased) perspective. The postmodern sensibility also stesses textual mediation: our understandings of the world are always mediated through texts and we need to be attentive to how discursive practices help constitute the partial perspectives we rely on for making sense of the world.

As Jean Francois Lytoard (1987) suggests, postmodernism turns the modernist stress on rationality and objective knowledge on itself so as to interrogate the politics of modernist ways of constructing knowledge in art, science, philosophy, literature, law, etc. Rather than trying to find truth, the postmodern investigator seeks to highlight the practices involved in the constructing representations of truth. An ironic positivism emerges which seeks to do no more than to amplify how it is that various ways of representing the world implicitly mask their biased and politically-charged role in making these ostensibly objective representations. The preferred technique for doing this is called deconstruction, which involves pointing out how any text must necessarily invoke various implicit discursive practices to preserve its coher- ent character. To deconstruct a text is not to repudiate it, for all texts, if we read them closely enough, deconstruct themselves (Edelman, 1988). Yet, deconstruction has allowed investigators to highlight the constitutive practices a text uses, to make these moves visible and offer them up for interrogation.

Postmodernism includes a post-structural orientation that encourages the dematerialization of structures into discursive practices (Shapiro, 1993). This poststructural perspective denies structures their materiality as things that can be experienced independent of discourse. Dematerializing structures involves interrogating them as prevailing systems of interpretation. These stabilized structures of interpretation serve as the basis for structuring the activities of daily life which, in turn, cycle back and reproduce these stablized structures, be they, e.g., social, economic, or governmental. From this perspective, value gets created when discursive structures are stabilized sufficiently to serve as the basis for enabling people to value some identities and interests over others. Identities emerge out of textually constructed differences. Preferring some identities over others converts differences into 'otherness.'

Postmodern interrogations therefore help in contesting prevailing structures as to how they allocate value and privilege some identities on the basis of invidious distinctions. Destabilizing these distinctions has a democratizing potential in the current period. It comes with destabilizing the increasingly insistent structural constraints of the late-moder state as tries to impose standards of normality, conformism, and regulated behavior in the face of a growing globalization of social forces beyond its control (Connolly, 1991). Resisting these insistences can create more opportunities for alternative, more tolerant and more democratically pluralist distinctions for structuring society.

In the last few years, these postmodern efforts on behalf of what can be

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called 'agonal democracy' have infiltrated policy analysis often through the back door by way of the writings of people outside the field who raised questions that had direct implications for the practice of policy analysis. Post- structural social theorists, relying on the writings of earlier critics, decon- structed the economic reasoning on which much policy analysis relies (Block, 1990). Still other social theorists investigated how public problems were themselves socially constructed representations that needed to be questioned rather than accepted unreflectively as a pre-given reality to be attacked by public policy (Best, 1988). Feminist theorists, while problematizing gender categories, highlighted how public policy was often made in ways which reinforced rather than challenged these invidious distinctions between male and female (Fraser, 1989). Yet, policy analysis literature itself has come to include works that reflect a postmoder orientation (Shapiro, 1988; Hawkesworth, 1988;. Stone, 1988; Schram, 1992). A postmodem policy analysis is already a reality.

Not so much rejecting as deconstructing positivistic approaches to policy analysis, postmodem policy analysis involves highlighting how policy analyti- cal work is implicated in its own representations of reality. This orientation throws into question key distinctions created by positivist policy analysis, such as those between theoretical and empirical, objective and subjective, interpretive and scientific. Policy analysis is at best insufficient and at worst seriously misleading if it fails to examine the presuppositional basis for what are taken to be 'the facts' of any policy (cf. Hawkesworth, 1988). As an alternative, post-modern policy analysis examines how policy discourse is itself constitutive of the reality upon which it focuses. Postmoder policy analysis, therefore, may be understood as those approaches to examining policy which emphasize how the initiation, contestation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation of any policy are shaped by the discursive, narrative, symbolic practices which socially construct our understanding of problems, methods of treatment and criteria for success.

A postmodern policy analysis holds out the potential of inverting the dominant policy paradigm that assumes public problems are part of pre-given reality to which public policy simply responds (Weiss, 1977). Political scien- tists have for some time toyed with inverting the linear, rational problem-policy response paradigm. E. E. Schattschneider long ago (1935) noted that 'new policies create a new politics.' Aaron Wildavsky years later (1979) stressed that 'policy becomes its own cause' in the sense that, once in place, public policies are administered in ways that legitimize the need to expand and develop them. Frances Fox Piven (1992) has reminded us that programs create political constituencies at least as much as the other way around. Yet, there is a latent literalism in these attempts to invert the positivistic policy paradigm. While the causal arrows are reversed and policy precedes problem formation, these efforts underestimate the extent to which policy is constitutive of the reality against which it is directed (Hawkesworth, 1988; Stone, 1988).

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Modernist perspectives in social thought, such as the dominant policy ana- lytical paradigm in particular, take the material constitution of society as given. The discursive practices in which state actors are centrally implicated are not seen as important factors in producing and reproducing that material reality. Poverty, for instance, is viewed as a pre-existing problem. The decline of the two-parent family, to take another example, is from the dominant perspective a relatively autonomous reality - its trajectory from a marginally troubling problem to an accelerating crisis of postindustrial society not seen as dependent on state action. The dominant perspective allows for an indict- ment of existing public policy on the grounds that it fails to address the material or structural sources of the problem being attacked whether it is e.g., hunger, homelessness, joblessness, or poverty. Yet, such a perspective ob- scures the extent to which it itself fails to address how the discursive practices involved in the analysis and making of public policy themselves contribute to the reality being addressed.

Modernist perspectives do offer critical possibilities for showing, for instance, how welfare policy is a form of denial in that it defers recognition of how problems of poor families are today intimately connected to structural shifts of postindustrial transition. Such perspectives, however, fail to highlight how welfare policy is a form of denial in another sense in that is denies how state practices are themselves critically involved in constituting and reproducing the very problems those policies ostensibly are designed to attack (Con- nolly, 1991).

A postmodern orientation allows for the possibility that welfare policy discourse and the practices of the welfare state are actually constitutive forces, contributing to the conditions of poverty which are supposedly addressed by such public policies. Stone (1988) argues that implied policy solutions ani- mate policy discourse and unavoidably get insinuated into the representation of policy problems. Edelman (1988) emphasizes the political limitations which constrain the state so that the policy solutions that prefigure the political representations of problems are necessarily self-serving and politically conservative. He argues that the state has a vested interest in ensuring its own legitimacy and therefore cannot actually solve its problems by attacking their systemic causes. Necessarily committed to not rocking the political boat, it must content itself with managing problems and keeping them within politically acceptable limits. The net result is policy which cannot eliminate problems, but is instead partly a contributor to their perpetuation. Policy, therefore, as an ensemble of discursive practices, does not just create its own politics and does not just become its own cause, but contributes to making up the reality it confronts.

Ann Schneider and Helen Ingram (1993) have thus written of 'the social construction of target populations' in a manner especially pertinent to welfare policy:

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Social constructions become embedded in policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and participation patterns. Policy sends messages about what government is supposed to do, which citizens are deserving (and which not), and what kinds of attitudes and participatory patterns are appropriate in a democratic society. Differ- ent target populations, however, receive quite different messages. Policies that have detrimental impacts on, or are ineffective in solving important problems for, certain types of target populations may not produce citizen participation directed toward policy change because the messages received by these target populations encourage withdrawal or passivity. Other target populations, however, receive messages that encourage them to combat policies detrimental to them through various avenues of political participation.

Only in this most ironic sense is there, perhaps something in the right-wing view that welfare causes poverty. The inadequacy of welfare policy for poor women with children is, indeed, part of a self-fulfilling prophesy which makes it hard for these families to be successful. This paradox reinforces the idea that these families are the cause of their own problems. Yet the growth of poor female-headed families is not so much a cause of increases in poverty as it is a symptom of a postindustrial welfare state.

Welfare policy is constitutive of the reality against which it is directed (Schram, 1992; Hawkesworth, 1988; Stone, 1988). Contemporary welfare policy helps usher in the 'postindustrial reality' of low-wage work and families pushed to the limit (see Schor, 1991). In its commitment to the two-parent family as a fundamental constitutive element of the market system, 'postindustrial welfare policy' resists providing assistance to alternative families even as the dynamics of the postindustrial economy and accompanying cultural changes increase their numbers (Connolly, 1991). These practices are likely to continue the bias in favor of the two-parent family as the route out of poverty and are just as likely to accelerate the trend toward the 'feminization of poverty.' For Nancy Fraser (1989), this is a discursively constituted reality that is reproduced through public policy:

Of course, the welfare system does not deal with women on women's terms. On the contrary, it has its own characteristics ways of interpreting women's needs and positioning of women as subjects.... Clearly, this system creates a double bind for women raising children without a male breadwinner. By failing to offer these women day care for their children, job training, a job that pays a 'family wage,' or some combination of these, it constructs them exclusively as mothers. As a consequence, it interprets their needs as maternal needs and their sphere of activity as that of 'the family.'... Yet... instead of providing them a guaranteed income equivalent to a family wage as a matter of right the system stigmatizes, humilates, and harasses them. In effect, it decrees simultaneously that these women must be and yet cannot be normative mothers.

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The feminization of poverty as established policy

There is no better evidence that welfare policy discourse is constitutive of the problem it addresses than its counterproductive effects. This is especially the case with the 'feminization of poverty,' which reveals the deleterious consequences of gendered distinctions in welfare policy discourse. While much has been made of the 'feminization of poverty' as an recent and increasing phenomenon, the welfare state has historically been built on gendered distinctions that work to the disadvantage of female-headed families in ways which make it seem to be their own fault. Indeed, as we shall see, the persis- tence of poverty among mother-only families is a historically embedded phenomenon, not just a recent development; and prevailing discursive practices have sought to reinforce the inferiority of female-headed families by blaming them for their own problems. Welfare policy discourse has helped to reproduce the impoverishment of mother-only families by structuring policy in ways which constrain the extent to which the state assists them.

The oft-cited material circumstances of mother-only families tell a depress- ingly familiar story. Single-parent families headed by women have historically had much higher poverty rates. The 'feminization of poverty' - the growing proportion of poor families which are female-headed - is indeed real, but it is a long-standing phenomenon. The proportion of poor families headed by women has increased from about one-fifth to over one-half in the last thirty years. During this time, however, compared to other families, female-headed families have consistently had a larger 'poverty deficit' (i.e., amount of income needed to be lifted up to the poverty level). Women with children have always had a high incidence of poverty, have always been among the poorest of the poor, have probably without too much overinterpretation not benefitted from economic growth and related social policies as much as other families, and are therefore likely in need of different strategies for creating the resources that are more effective in enabling them to escape poverty (Pearce, 1990; Baca Zinn, 1989).

The growth in the 'feminization of poverty' is due both to the increase in poor female-headed families and the decrease in other, especially two-parent, poor families.3 The former is somewhat overstated due to a Census Bureau undercount until 1983 of teenage mothers who lived at home with their parents (Piven and Cloward, 1987). The latter is itself a contradictory phenomenon, in part due to the increases in out-of-marriage births, divorce and related trends (e.g., growing sexual permissiveness) (Jencks, 1991).

Therefore, the 'feminization of poverty' is actually reflective of a more per- sistent reality which has in large part only become more visible due to different trends at different times. First, a number of teenage single mothers were poor for years without being counted. Second, during the years of substantial economic growth in the 1960s until the early 1970s, the growth in the proportion of poor families from female-headed households came more from a shrinkage in the number of poor families that were not female-headed than an

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increase in the number of poor women with children. Third, from the mid- 1970s to the current period, the growth in the proportion of poor families headed by women stems mostly from a relatively recent growth in the number of poor single women with children. The number of two-parent poor families, however, also increased in this period, especially from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. The net result of all these developments has been the 'feminization of poverty' - i.e., the growing percentage of the poor coming from single women with children (See Figure 1).

John Schwarz and Thomas Volgy (1993), however, have added the important point that the much-discussed alleged radical changes in the composition of the poverty population (see Mead, 1992 and Murray, 1993), such as and including the growing proportion coming from single women with children, are in good part due to the way the poverty level has distorted estimates of the prevalence of poverty over time. The original 1963 poverty standard devised by Mollie Orshansky was innovative as a technique for estimating poverty at the time. Yet, with changes in consumption patterns, it no longer related to the proportions that different basic necessities comprised in the current standard of living for the average family. Food costs went down as a proportion of the family budget while heating and housing costs rose. Therefore, over time it became less and less valid to use the orginal standard's formula of estimating food costs for a minimally adequate diet and multiplying them by a factor of three to determine the poverty line for families of different sizes and compositions. Food is now more likely to be one-fifty or even one-sixth of the total budget for the average family. Therefore, multiplying food costs by the

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inverse of the current proportion food takes in the average family budget (between 1/5 and 1/6) would produce a higher poverty line. Once this is done, we find that there are approximately 62.8 million poor families (26 percent of the Nation's population) as of 1989, or twice the number of poor families compared to the government's estimates. Most important for our analysis, we also find that the poverty population has not come to be comprised more of non-working, welfare dependent, or female-headed families. Instead, only an increasingly irrelevant offical poverty measure had led to this conclusion. Therefore, the alleged recent 'feminization of poverty' is in good part an artifact of the government's poor statistical accounting. Conservatives have much to worry about in these data, for the 'feminization of poverty' is not new, but a problem embedded in the structure of society and the opera- tions of the welfare state.

The much touted 'feminization of poverty' is not so much new as something that has become more visible due to declines in poverty for other families. Its visibility is in part the product of declines in poor two-parent families and outdated poverty statistics. The 'feminization of poverty' has long been a per- sistent problem, embedded in the structure of society, the economy and public policy. Poor women with children had always been relegated to mar- gins of society by the prevailing structures of discourse that valorize two- parent families and stigmatize one-parent ones, imputing to mother-only families an inferior status not deserving of social and public support.

Materializing family structure as impoverishing

The culturally biased character of social policy beings to gain visibility when we see social policy as a discourse that imparts value in socially significant ways to some families over others. This process of value allocation however needs to be dematerialized and denaturalized. Dematerialization involves recognizing how embedded structures as stabilized interpretations get to impart value in relatively uncontested ways. Welfare policy operates as a cultural formation that needs to be shown out for its politically partial reading of family practices. On this reading, welfare policy operates to reproduce two- parent families by stigmatizing and denigrating mother-only families for being the cause of their own problems.

A critical dimension to welfare policy discourse is the presumption that two-parent families have at least the potential for being 'self-sufficient' and are therefore 'deserving' while mother-only families are 'dependent' largely due to reasons for which they must assume responsibility and therefore are not 'deserving' of as much support. Invidious distinctions of self-sufficiency/ dependency, deserving/underserving, responsible/promiscuous are deployed in gendered ways.

Welfare as a cultural formation provides female-headed families benefits but does so under punitive and stigmatizing conditions that in the end have

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made it easier for these benefits to be reduced in buying power, especially as the current agonizing over female-headed families has intensified. The symbolic significance of welfare lies in its denigration of mother-only families in the name of affirming two-parent families. Welfare policy as a system of symbolic signification serves to reduce the extent to which social institutions, markets and state policies feel pressure to structure their practices to accommodate mother-only families, only to increase pressure on such families to conform to dominant norms which have become harder to sustain in a changing postindustrial society that fails to develop political-economic arrangements necessary for all families to thrive (Connolly, 1991). The main way it does this is be reinforcing the idea that mother-only families are the cause of their own problems.

Conservatives argue that two-parent families are better than one-parent families for a variety reasons, including a greater ability to provide necessary parental attention to children as well as a male role model, specifically for young boys (Whitehead, 1993; Murray, 1993 and 1984). This argument is particularly a concern for poor minority families which have distinctively high rates of female-headship; and these themes have in fact recently been emphasized by moderate and conservative African-American politicians, such as Sharon Pratt Kelly, the Mayor of Washington DC, and Douglas Wilder, Governor of Virginia (Mayor Dixon's Call to Action, 1991). Others have sug- gested that it will be extremely difficult to build political coalitions with the white working class unless there is a shared commitment to valuing the two- parent family (Edsall, 1991). Yet, the growth of female-headed families among whites has also been a cause for concern in recent years (Murray, 1993).

The growth in poor female-headed families among both whites and blacks is indeed a troubling development in certain respects, most significantly posing increased risks for children regarding such matters as schooling com- pleted, earnings potential, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and future welfare dependency (Jencks, 1991; Danziger and Ster, 1990). There is evidence that children in two-parent families are much less likely to be poor and that the growth in female-headed families is strongly associated with sharp increases in child poverty especially among minorities (Eggebeen and Lichter, 1991). Yet, the genesis and implications of the growth of female-headed families are more complicated than universal condemnations suggest.

Divorce often reduces the number of poor two-parent families while increasing the number of poor mother-only families. Even the issues of births outside marriage and especially unmarried teen births are more complicated then two-parent family advocates imply. While close to 30 percent of children are now born outside marriage and over 65 percent of black children are born to a mother who is serving as a single-parent (Murray, 1993), the supposed epidemic of unmarried and teen births is largely a statistical artifact of declining fertility rates, especially for married women (Jencks, 1991). While expected lifetime births for unmarried women has risen slightly over the last 30

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years, the expected lifetime births for married women has decreased marked- ly, making the percentage of births occurring outside of marriage to rise sharply, especially for black women. It is important to note here that the sharp increase for black women is in no small part due to the fact that the lifetime birth rate for married women declined from 3.49 to 0.87 between 1960 and 1987. The teen birth rate is actually declining for 1960-1986, from 40 to 21 per 100 white women and from 80 to 51 per 100 black women. The percentage of lifetime births occurring in the teen years has remained basically static for white women over this period (going from 11.3 to 12.1) while it has risen only slightly for black women (from 17.6 to 22.9). The net result is that increases in the percentage of children born out of wedlock or the percentage of women living with children and without a husband are in part due to declines in fertility among married women. Therefore, even if single-parenthood is assumed to be bad or at least problematic for children, it needs to be stressed that, while an increasing percentage of children are so situated, the rate at which women have children outside marriage - and especially in their teen years when this is apt to be the most troublesome - is not skyrocketing. In- stead, the statistical reality is quite different. Static and declining rates for births outside marriage combined with steeply decreasing births for married, non-teenage women to increase sharply the percentage of children born to single mothers throughout the 1980s (Jencks, 1991).

There is evidence that births to unmarried women have increased in the years 1985-1990, especially among African-Americans (Robins and Fron- stin, 1993). Yet, Arlene Geronimus (1990) has emphasized how this trend, especially for poor, young African-Americans, is not so irrational as many critics would have it. Geronimus' point is that the longer poor younger women wait to have a child, the more they risk ill-health and infertility along with the chance their mothers will not be alive to help rear their children. Kristin Luker (1991) reinforces this perspective when she says, relying on the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, that 'a little over 70 percent of the pregnancies to teens were reported as unplanned; the teenagers described the bulk of these pregnancies as wanted, just arriving sooner than they had planned.' Therefore, while the rise in births to poor, unmarried women - and especially teenagers - is undoubtedly an issue of significant concern for society, the growth in this phenomenon has been exaggerated and, when not exaggerated, has been placed within the all-too-convenient and insufficiently challenged perspective that this trend signals an increase in irrational and irresponsible behavior. There is a need to specify instead the cultural, political and economic changes in postindustrial America that are making for the growth in births outside marriage. When this is done, the trend becomes more a symptom than a cause of poverty.

Even if one accepts the view that the increased percentage of children born outside marriage to young, poor women is a bad thing in and of itself, a cor- relation between family structure and poverty does not prove causation (Eggebeen and Lichter, 1991). According to some analysts (Bane, 1986; Hill,

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1983), changes in family structure may not be critical in producing poverty, especially for minority families. Instead, it may be that female-headed families are, due to changing mores, now more than before a consequence of how people respond to poverty that already confronts them (Jencks, 1991). In the face of difficult economic circumstances and declining access to adequate public assistance, it may now be more convenient for two-parent families either not to form or to dissolve.

There is reason to think that the causal arrows between family break-up and poverty run both ways. Emphasizing how family structure causes poverty backgrounds the critical reality that poverty itself does much to erode family ties. The U.S. Census Bureau 1993 report concluded that poverty was at least as much a factor in the dissolution of two-parent families as the reverse. The report also noted that the effects of poverty on family break-up varied by race and ethnicity. The Census Bureau found that '12 percent of poor white two- parent families had dissolved within two years but only 7 percent of white families above the poverty line had broken up. Among black two-parent families, 21 percent of those who were poor broke up within two years, compared with only 11 percent of those who were not in poverty. Among Hispanic families, the dissolution rates were about the same for poor and nonpoor households: 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively' (Herandez, 1993). Many new, poor, one-parent families were already poor as two-families before break-up had occurred: 26 percent of the white families and 39 percent of the black families. These figures should remind us that class and race differences are more important in determining poverty than family structure (Hill, 1983). Therefore, it should not be too surprising to find that poor black children in two-parent families were likely to spend approximately as long in poverty as their counterparts in female-headed families (Hill, 1983).

The feminization of poverty occurs not because two-parent families are better or will always prove a more effective institutional structure for escaping poverty. The trend to single-parent families is the product of a confluence of various factors, some negative and others positive, some even more complicated including the trend toward leaving abusive marital relationships, as well as the growth of pregnancies outside of marriage (Baca Zinn, 1989). The problem is more the reverse of what proponents of 'family values' wish to suggest: poverty creates female-headed families more than female-headed families create poverty (Herandez, 1993). For instance, a number of recent studies document that teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock childbearing are higher for children who were raised in low income, less educated, more mobile families (An, Haveman, and Wolfe, 1991; Danziger and Stem, 1990). Poverty often leads young poor males as well as females to a lack of information about birth control, a lack of understanding about skills in parenting, and a general sense of hopelessness that might make having a child attractive even as an unmarried teenager. Young males in particular may feel reluctant to form a two-parent family, even after the birth of a child, just because of the lack of economic opportunities available for them (Wilson, 1991). Yet, as

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long as the prevailing discourse helps recreate the idea that family structure causes poverty more than the other way around, many people will continue to accept the invidious distinction that sees single-parent families as the cause of their own poverty rather than recognizing poverty itself as a major cause of the problems that beset poor, female-headed families.

Welfare policy recreates its own reality

Existing social policies and the institutional infrastructure with which they are associated are implicated in this problem. They have helped construct female- headed, single-parent families as a marginal 'other' suited for inferior benefits and punitive therapeutic practices. Policy, as an interpretive practice that allocates value, has been constitutive of the reality against which it is ostensibly directed, systematically working to privilege two-parent families over others in ways which reinforce existing power hierarchies and inequities. From this perspective, it is a mistake to see the growth in female-headed families as an autonomous 'pathology' generated independent of policy and social institutions. Instead, it is more important to address how welfare policy is a critical constitutive factor reproducing the female-headed family as a stig- matized and disadvantaged social formation.

Dematerializing welfare policy to make it the readable text that it is, deconstructing its invidious textual distinctions so as to highlight the politically con- testable character of how those distinctions signify and value some families and practices over others - these moves open up the possibility of contesting those distinctions and interpretive practices, of resisting how they work to the greater advantage of two-parent, male-headed families than female-headed families (Pearce, 1990). Women with children are be less able to escape poverty because social practices and public policies are less geared to helping women with children. The implicit assumption behind much that goes on is that the family in question is not, or should not be, a single woman with children. Gordon (1989) calls this the 'family wage' system, which structures all related institutions and practices to be consonant with the assumption that families are to be two-parent and the male is to be the breadwinner. Diana Pearce (1990) argues that even the public assistance program which primarily serves women with children - Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) - is organized along the lines of the 'Male Pauper Model' and would solve poverty by pressing people into the labormarket under the assumption that any job will do. In these circumstances, two-parent families are more likely to benefit from economic growth or from jobs programs which tend to be designed with the two-parent family in mind. While neither males nor females are likely to do well in a labor market increasingly comprised of low- wage jobs, single mothers will lag behind as they struggle to make do with policies and programs not designed to accommodate their particular needs and circumstances (Fraser, 1989 and 1993).

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Policies geared towards women with children tend to offer inferior benefits or are lacking in commitment to the services and strategies, such as child care and pay equity, that women often need in order to become self-sufficient (Baca Zinn, 1989). In particular, a major reason for the increased poverty of women with children is that AFDC has been less effective than programs such as Social Security and Unemployment Compensation in lifting families out of poverty (Nelson, 1990; Abramovitz, 1988). The debased value of public assistance programs focused on poor women with children is a major factor in explaining the sharp increases in their poverty rate in recent years (Danziger and Ster, 1990). The average cash benefit in constant dollars received from all public assistance programs over the 1973-1987 period has declined dra- matically. Also, benefits to female-headed families have flagged relative to those going to other families: female-headed households went from a mean cash transfer of approximately $7000 in 1973 to $4400 in 1987 - a 37 percent decline, compared to a corresponding drop from approximately $8000 to $6000, a 25 percent, decline for male-headed families (in 1987 dollars).

These trends exacerbate a historic divide. Programs focused on poor women with children have been historically inadequate in lifting their recipients out of poverty. There is a marked discrepancy in the rates at which families and the elderly are lifted over the official poverty line by cash assistance. While the elderly's rate is quite high due to Social Security, female- headed families have a very low rate with no more than 10 percent escaping poverty today through government transfers (Danziger and Ster, 1990). This discrepancy is almost entirely the result of the extent to which welfare programs focused on these families continue to offer benefits well below the poverty level for most families (Gordon, 1989; Fraser, 1993).

Linda Gordon (1989) has emphasized how historical distinctions embedded in policy have served to discriminate against women. She points to the 'contradictory... rhetoric that welfare represents deplorable "dependence," while women's subordination to husbands is not registerd as unseemly':

This contradiction should not be surprising, for the concept of dependence is an ideological one that reflects particular modes of production. For example, in traditional societies only men of substantial property were considered independent, and not only women and children but all men who worked for others were considered dependents. Only in the modern era, where wage labor became the norm for men and voting rights were extended to all men, did employed men begin to be 'independent.' Women, for whom wage labor was not the majority experience until recently, and whose earnings are on average much less than men's, continued to be considered as dependent. Indeed, women's dependence (e.g., their unpaid domestic labor) contributed to men's 'independence.'

Rather than the growth in female-headed families causing poverty, it is the persistant lack of adequate paying jobs, the deterioration of needed services

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and, most especially, the low value of public assistance for women with children which are the major contributing factors to their poverty status. There is a need to highlight how the emerging postindustrial economy and the limited nature of welfare policies designed to be consonant with the emerging low- wage labor markets of that economy work together to promote more poverty. The growth of female-headed families in poverty is symptomatic of this discursively reproduced reality.

Reencoding otherness in contemporary welfare policy

Even the Clinton Administration's promise to 'end welfare as we know it' continues to reencode the active rewriting of social policy history that sup- ports this orientation against providing the poor with the assistance they need. The strategy of the Clinton Administration stesses moving welfare recipients into the workforce and then marginally subsidizing the benefits derived from employment. It is a strategy that sounds fine in principle but in practice it refuses to deal with the extent to which economic reorganization necessitat- ed by a deindustrializing 'postindustrial' economy must take place before the poverty that persists in the United States will abate. Inoculation programs, Headstart classes, nutrition assistance and job training only prepare families to confront a possible economic future that might include them. Ensuring their inclusion is quite another, more ambitious matter.

This move is unlikely when policymaking continues to be made in terms of an active rewriting of social policy history that reencodes old invidious distinctions between the 'worthy' and 'unworthy' poor in the context of a new 'postindustrial reality.' Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1989) has heralded the new policies that focus on reducing welfare dependency as 'postindustrial social policy.' Yet, these policies perpetuate the historic distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving, the 'self-sufficient' and the 'dependent' only now concentrated on welfare mothers and their children rather than the poor in general. Worse yet, the old canard that the poor are different when it comes to work and family becomes a sick joke in the context of deindustrialization, the evaporation of decent paying, low-skill work, and the decline of wages (Piven and Cloward, 1993). This reading of the poor as 'other' is only bound to intensity in an increasingly globalized postindustrial world as concern about illegal aliens, immigrants and refugees getting public assistance is added to the questions of who is a 'citizen' in the United States and to what extent 'others' are entitled to public benefits (Connolly, 1991). Such an active rewriting of social policy history enables welfare dependency to be seen as a cop-out when in fact it is often nothing more than an inadequate last resort for those how cannot find the mean of even basic survival in deindustrializing economy and a fissuring society (Fraser, 1993).

As the gap widens between haves and have-nots, it becomes harder for the privileged, including those in policymaking roles, to envision just what it

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would take to enable those dependent on welfare to rely on other means for their well-being. With the rhetoric of family and work as forms of self-sufficiency, it also becomes harder to suggest that welfare dependency is not just another dependency. Rewriting social policy history to highlight welfare dependency as dependency, backgrounds now it is in many cases an act of self-assertion to flee abusive relationships or to extract value and meaning from economic circumstances that deny other, more acceptable ways. Rewrit- ing social policy history to stress welfare dependency helps silence attempts to highlight how taking welfare is more symptomatic than causal.

Consequently, certain critical topics remain understudied. Studies on the availability of work that could substitute for welfare benefits remain in the minority while studies on the effects of work programs in moving recipients into jobs irrespective of their wages mushroom. Studies on the extent to which women take welfare as a means to escape abusive relationships are nonexist- ent.

The preoccupation with work will, if pursued aggressively and with an eye to ensuring worthwhile employment for those who are prepared to take to it, be the solution for many of those currently in need of assistance. Yet, two important points get lost as policymakers pursue this strategy under the sign of the 'worthy' poor. First, for many people these efforts require much more than just job training or even the guarantee of placement in jobs (Jencks and Edin, 1990; Jencks, 1992). Ensuring self-sufficiency through work will often require extensive efforts to promote a job structure that can provide long- term opportunities for people with relatively low skills to advance. This means a job structure which includes opportunities to earn well more than the minimum wage so as to cover health care, child care and related benefits that are at least marginally covered under existing public assistance programs. In addition, policymakers must consider the possibility that for women with children, who are often the main target of these efforts, work will not always be the solution. Combining work and single-parenthood is a more difficult task than is recognized in the assumptions embedded in current policies. Laboring under the sign of the 'worthy' poor will ensure that some critical concerns will be left unaddressed. The preoccupation with work as the solution to welfare will confront its limits in the persistance of a welfare dependent population. Reencoding self-sufficiency through work will recreate its 'other' rather than redress the needs of those so marginalized. Yet, this ironic twist, characteristic of the history of welfare policy discourse, continues to be the dynamic of welfare reform, even in the more liberal moments of the current period.

'Postindustrial welfare policy' continues to reflect the old emphases on punishing welfare-taking while rewarding work and promoting the two-parent family over alternative arrangements. The changes in tax credits and child care reflects a shift to giving emphasis on rewarding 'earned income' through tax credits. This emphasis is superior to punishing welfare taking; however, it further reinforces the marginalization of poor families whose heads are not in

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the paid-labor force. The stress on rewarding paid labor may further drive divisions between families who have jobs and those that do not. These divisions are likely to persist when public policy that rewards paid labor continues to do very little, if anything at all, to create jobs for those who need them.

These divisions are likely only to be reinforced by policies which fail to account for the fact that work itself is less able in the postindustrial present of today than industrial past of twenty years ago to ensure independence and self-sufficiency. Schwarz and Volgy (1992) estimate that there are 30 million working poor and that there are seven million poor working full-time year- round. Public policies that insist that work and welfare distinguish the independent and the dependent only help recreate the ugly reality of a poverty based on neglect and indifference. Such neglect conveniently reinforces the old theme of the 'worthy' versus the 'non-worthy' poor in a way which further discourages extension of aid to families whose heads do not have paid jobs. In turn, this invidious distinction reinforces the bifurcated character of the welfare state which in turn often breaks down along gender, race and class lines with women and minorities being relegated to programs with inferior benefits (Gordon, 1989).

At best, welfare policy seems to be committed to applying solutions appropriate to the two-parent family to other families with the likely consequence of perpetuating the bias in favor of this family formation while producing counterproductive program requirements for one-parent families. In the end, many needy families will therefore still have a social policy which leaves them with only deteriorating welfare benefits as the basis for coping with their problems. 'Postindustrial welfare policy' remains mired in such invidious industrial, even pre-industrial, distinctions as independent/dependent, contract/charity, family/promiscuity. Welfare policy today helps to recreate the problems of yesterday. In the process, poor female-headed families get constructed as the 'other' we all are not supposed to be.

Conclusion

Postmodern policy analysis offers the prospect of interrogating how public policy discourse helps construct identity and difference. Such analysis is part of what William Connolly (1991) sees as the democratizing potential of 'critical histories of the present,' or what Michel Foucault (1991) called 'genealogy' or 'eventualization.' Analyses such as these highlight what discursive practices have made it possible for things to happen and do so in such a way as to denaturalize those discursive processes, thereby leaving them open to contestation. For Connolly, agonal democracy thrives on genealogy. Rather than accept the 'official story,' or the state's version of how policy relates to problems, analysts examine public policy for how it is implicated in the reality it ostensibly takes as given. Interrogating welfare policy for its constitutive role

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in the marginalization of single women with children provides a basis for rethinking social policy and the biases it helps reinforce. Without such an examination, welfare policy can continue be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Without an interrogation of the embedded distinctions of welfare discourse and how they help reproduce prevailing structures in society, welfare policy will continue to be part of the discursive practices serving to blame female-headed families for their problems. This insight points toward the necessity of a discursive politics as a first step that paves the way to challenging existing welfare policy, not just as benefits but as a cultural formation. Such interrogations can open up possibilities for alternative understandings of self-sufficiency/dependency, deserving/underserving, family/promiscuity and other dichotomies in less gendered and less destructive ways.

This not to say that change will flow easily once welfare politics comes to be a cultural politics centered on what welfare signifies about families. Given its active involvement in promoting two-parent families, the welfare state has vested interests in perpetuating its own cultural construction. To recognize the legitimacy of affirming and supporting, rather than marginalizing and blaming, alternative family arrangements would necessitate seriously enter- taining alternative policies. Therefore, welfare policy discourse continues to construct poverty as a problem of family structure and seeks to find its solution in the two-parent family. In fact, discursive moves on behalf of the two- parent family intensify especially as that ideal becomes harder to sustain. Denial of the economic and social forces at work during the current postindustrial transition confine policy space to the familiar discursive structure. Insisting the family breakdown is a cause rather than a symptom of growing poverty allows social policy to continue to legitimate itself even as it becomes less and less able to address the social problems it is ostensibly designed to attack. To be sure, blaming female-headed families for growing poverty provides a convenient and culturally ascendent way to deflect attention away from the deleterious effects of postindustrialism on poorer segments of society (see for instance Murray, 1993). The scapegoating of family structure for problems embedded in the sexist, racist and economic exclusionary practices of the 'contemporary postindustrial society of economic decline' propels popular resistance to public assistance and aggressively silence attempts to articulate a family policy which could ensure that all families have the resources to be able to avoid poverty. Moving from a 'culture of poverty' argument which blames the poor for their problems, policy discourse stresses what could be called a 'culture of single motherhood' (Thomas, 1992) to further promote a punitive approach to poor women with children. The dwindl- ing economic opportunities associated with the current economic transition can thus be ignored. In the current climate, the prospects for affirming support for all families is not good. Yet, challenging the embedded biases welfare policy discourse therefore remains an important part of attempts of achieving a more equitable, pluralistic and democratic welfare state.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to Fred Block, Don Culverson, Theresa Funiciello, Chuck Green, Kenneth Hoover, Phil Neisser, Joe Peschek, Frances Fox Piven, Anne Sisson Runyan, Joan Schram, Ryan Schram, Michael Shapiro, Daniel Spicer, Deborah Stone, Carl Swidorski, and Doug Torgerson for commenting on earlier versions of this analysis. The research assistance of Tom Flood, Michael Hecht, Davi Ottenheimer, Zeke Shortes, and Mark Walden is greatly appreciated.

Notes

1. It is entirely appropriate to suggest that 'postmodernism' as an emerging sensibility can be characterized as emphasizing some concerns over others. This essay seeks to do just that and to offer an example of what a postmodern policy analysis looks like. I, however, want to resist the idea that we should try to define the essence of what postmodernism, or for that matter anything else, is. In fact, if one were to try to specify what we the core, essence or critical focus of postmodernism, one would probably have to adopt the ironic position that postmodernism is at its essence about how there are no essences.

2. 'Discourse' and 'identity' are two very popular terms in postmodern writing. The term discourse is often used to get at something beyond specific texts and narratives and to suggest a systematic way of using language to make sense of things. Languages themselves can be considered discourses for they are linguistic systems that operate according certain rules. Less formalized discourses can be imagined such as dominant cultures or hegemonic ideol- ogies as e.g., in the form of 'Americanism,' the dominant way of talking about life in United States. In this essay, I want to suggest that it is meaningful to talk about something that we can call 'welfare policy discourse' - i.e., the dominant way in which people talk about welfare policy in the United States today. 'Identity' is perhaps less difficult to grasp and is most often used to suggest the categories, labels and distinctions discourses provide for making distinctions among people on the basis of various personal characteristics such as class standing, skin color, gender differences and sexual orientations. On the basis of these differences, identity is formed. From a postmodern perspective, identity and difference are inextricably entwined. You can not have one without the other - e.g., there cannot be an upper class without other classes, or whites without blacks, or men without women, or heterosexuals without gays and lesbians. Interrogating identity is to highlight how 'otherness' is constructed. For examination of issues of identity in politics, see Hoover (1975), Connolly (1991), Edelman (1988), and Shapiro (1988).

3. Eggebeen and Lichter (1991) add that the growth in child poverty is due in part to both the decline in the number of children in nonpoor two-parent families as well as the increase in the number of children in poor female-headed families. Jencks (1991) also notes that the increase in proportion of babies born to unmarried women is a result of a decline in the number of babies born to married women from 1960-1975 and to a rise in the number of babies born to unmarried women thereafter.

4. In fact, according to a 1993 Census Bureau report on data concerning the last decade, 'poor two-parent families were about twice as likely to break up as were two-parent families not in poverty' (Hernandez, 1993). Poor female-headed minority families are often the product of a 'reshuffling of poverty' from already poor two-parent families not forming or splitting up and creating poor female-headed families (Hernandez, 1993; Bane, 1986). It is also important to recognize that the formation of poor female-headed families may in part be due to women seeking to avoid abusive relationships; it is a mistake to then suggest that the prob-

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lems of female-headed families should be solved strictly in terms of reconstructing the two- parent family (Amott, 1990).

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Documents

Postmodern Policy Analysis: Discourse and Identity in Welfare Policy