What can social policy makers and
policy implementation analysts learn from understanding welfare exchanges in
terms of “classification struggles” between the interests represented by workers
and those held by service users?
In the welfare field, agents such as workers and service users occupy roles or positions within overlapping fields
of social relations. Field boundaries are hard to define (x in Grenfell
2012 (Grenfell 2012)) (Grenfell 2010) therefore the “field” is not strictly
bounded, meaning agents will use resources and strategies they have learned
from different parts of their socialisation in social relations.
The social relations of welfare
exchanges are always dynamic because they are co-created in situ and hold temporally contingent (i.e. point in time) specific
characteristics.
Imagine the service exchange of
employment services as part of the broader “field” of social welfare. The field
boundaries are unclear because they overlap across several dimensions of
activity including possible relationships with Centrelink, housing, mental
health and other services; their policies being defined across multiple
government services agencies and with staff whose professional commitment and
ethos vary according to the nature of the work and their attitude towards it.
Service users or clients perceive
these networks of services differently. In some cases they separate them into
distinctly different spheres, but in others they are the networks with which
they are enmeshed by virtue of some hardship or inheritance that have caused
them to need the assistance of human service agencies. In other words their relations to these
fields is defined by their subjective apprehension of boundaries of the field and the role or identity (position) they occupy within it.
It is useful to understand
worker-client relations from this perspective because it enables us to see the
multi-dimensionality of the exchanges, and perhaps to better understand what
factors are at play in these encounters.
Importantly it enables us to diagnose the reasons why these exchanges do
not play out in the ways policy makers imagine (and where certain assumptions
about human behaviour and motivation are the basis of service model design).
Workers too perceive the
boundaries of the field differently depending on their education and the degree
to which they believe their work is part of a humanist project, or specific to
a certain program (refs). Boundary
disputes are part of professionalisation of occupations shared by social
workers, educationalist, psychologists and a range of human service
workers. These boundary disputes help to
define practice and theory for these separate disciplines. Workers are driven
by their own personal motives and attitudes towards others which also help to
define their position in the field.
Ultimately, in practice, workers’
activity in the field will be (to some extent) constrained by organisational
resources and the rules which define how they are used. These rules are critical to determining how
capital and resources are distributed and have far reaching implications for
all the agents involved in welfare exchanges.
The rules reflect government’s intentions to create certain outcomes
from the rules based on (often untested)
perceptions and construals of the social problems they wish to ameliorate.
As such all the players on the
field occupy relative positions of
interest which are intersubjectively produced and reproduced in welfare
exchanges. One of the most critical elements that define outcomes is the way in
which capital is legitimated
intersubjectively and in which subjective attachment to symbolic positions
and values occupied and held by the different players on the fields influence
those outcomes.
In this research I have regularly
encountered how service outcomes are dynamically constructed because of the way
forms of capital hold value that are relative to the positions held by the agents
in the exchange.
To illustrate the importance of
these relative values and the way they affect the dynamic construction of
welfare exchanges, this section focuses on Desmond’s story. Desmond is an artist in his mid 60s and was
recruited via an advertisement in a bookshop in inner Melbourne. The particular
bookshop is associated with Melbourne’s intelligentsia, and the area was the
hotbed of intellectual activity in the 1970s a period of student activism and
the pursuit of alternative lifestyles.
As an artist, Desmond associates
the area and the bookshop with these cultural dimensions and gravitates here
because of the attachments he has formed to some of the cultural institutions
in the vicinity. In a sense, he finds the area comforting as it is his “field”
(ref x in Grenfell 2012), and he is at ease there. A far cry from the
Macdonald’s we met in in a run-down part of the city, where we both agreed, the
coffee was not worth contaminating our bodies with. (Research note: An
observation which demonstrates how as a researcher I am both complicit in and
conscious of the symbolic reification with Desmond, being part of, and apart
from, the research exercise – in Bourdieusian terms).
The location of recruitment is
significant because it is representative of the symbolic dimensions of the
position Desmond holds socially. He is
not a financially successful artist, and has struggled to make a living from
his work and that associated with his craft, yet it holds a certain “prestige”
or “distinction” that is reified in artistic circles or fields, that provides
Desmond with confidence in his identity and interests he capably defends in his
welfare encounters.
His capacity to maintain his
lifelong investment in his status as an artist is derived from the possession
of significantly high levels of cultural capital the symbolic value of which he
struggles to have mutually validated in modern welfare exchanges.
Desmond’s story reveals the
unfolding of changes in the external environment (in the form of rules around
welfare conditionality and activation) and the way these intersect with the strategies
he has sought to obtain legitimation of his role as an artist within these
rules. He has experienced the transition
from the CES, Job Network and to JSA, and circumstances have changed so that he
has found it increasingly difficult to have his creative work recognised as
legitimate and valid.
Desmond’s story is made even more
complex because of the variations in the way his status is treated by different
workers, according to the degree to which they intersubjectively validate his
voluntary work and/or identify him as an “unworthy” welfare recipient.
He reports how he encounters
variation amongst the workers he deals with in their own perception of the legitimacy
of his work, sometimes showing an interest in looking at the website he
maintains, and sometimes not.
They also apply requirements for
him to report his work differently which
becomes extremely complex when he is required to report as a sole trader
because of a trivial amount of income he has earned from some research which as
a “spin off” from some other work he has
done for a gallery.
While some workers take the
complexity of the sole trader reporting seriously, others are able to minimise
it, and help him complete the profit and loss statement for nil income for the
quarter, apparently realising the daunting nature of the job and his own
bewilderment at the requirements.
In this case there appears to be
more empathy for his position from a worker who is getting off the phone to
sort out her own child care arrangements, and who simplifies the process for
him and tells him sympathetically at concluding the appointment that “she has
wasted enough time on him already”. There appears from this worker at least to
be recognition of his work as an artist, but also as an older man, for whom the
reporting requirements have become simply overwhelming.
This approach stands in contrast
to that of other workers he refers to in unflattering terms and who say things
to him like “we can make you do anything we like”. Although he had expressed no interest,
aptitude or physically capability he is referred to a job in a plastics
recycling factory, even though, as he explained, the employer took one look at
him and knew he was not right for the job.
This judgement may have been based on his age, but also his physical
appearance is “bohemian” and carries symbolic value which the employer may have
recognised.
The precarious nature of the
legitimacy of his status as an artist leaves him constantly exposed to
variations in the way in which he is treated. It is doubly confounded by the
discretion that applies to the way in which his activity as a volunteer in the
Mature Age Participation program is legitimated and validated. This volunteer work has enabled Desmond to
function legitimately as an artist within the parameters of social security
legislation because he has been able to comply with the requirement for the
activity to be signed for by a representative from the external body.
He also finds increasing
reluctance amongst the external people he must refer to have his voluntary work
legitimated because of a new requirement for Centrelink or ES staff to have
documentation verified more frequently.
When asked about his experience of
stigma, Desmond refers specifically to the way he experienced it when
encountering this reluctance to sign the form, and the attitude expressed by
the arts administrator that he had to sign forms for all these “bludgers” now.
The requirement of the agency for
a higher degree of external verification of the activity appears to have
altered the arts administrator’s own perception of his role in signing the
form. As if he was aware of the
significance of the higher level of scrutiny being applied to the nature of the
activity being undertaken, and becoming aware that exposure to this scrutiny
was making him complicit in legitimating “bludging”, regardless of how much
legitimacy this activity had held previously.
It is perhaps as if the arts
administrator found himself in a position in which his role of legitimation was
conflicted, and that he was being asked to provide legitimation for activity
that was outside of his field of arts project administration. In any case, this
worker was the vehicle for the communication of a mainstreamed perspective regarding bludging that was deeply
offensive to Desmond.
Desmond’s perception of this shift
was felt acutely as stigma and symbolic violence. Stigma is closely associated
with the symbolic violence of misrecognition.
Desmond feels the pain of
misrecognition, but says he does not spend much time worrying about or much
care about what other people think, suggesting he possesses a high degree of
confidence in the value of his own position on the field. In this respect Desmond is able to dismiss
the symbolic violence, because he does not value the symbolic position (or
prestige) of others who may be judging him in the field of welfare, unlike for
example, the view of the arts administrator which distresses him.
Although the welfare workers are
capable of withholding the source of his sustenance and he has been cut off
several times, it seems as though Desmond possesses confidence in his
advantages which had been able to exercise with high levels of success
throughout his career on welfare.
He says rather than worrying about
their perceptions of him, he applies himself to developing “tactics” or strategies
to find resolution to the barriers he encounters. This involves being available to invest the
time required to resolve these problems and the long suffering patience
described by others such as Leanne to get to resolution. In fact Desmond’s perseverance
is dauntless to the extent he escalates complaints to the Ombudsman and the
Social Security Tribunal.
His complaint centred around a
matter in which discretion as has been applied to a decision in relation to his
voluntary activity and where there is no system documentation to support
whether the decision is right or wrong.
Desmond’s capacity to escalate his
complaints is based on resourcefulness derived from the forms capital he
possesses. He does not possess a high
degree of economic capital, hence his need to survive on welfare and deal with
the authorities in charge of meting out payments. However disputing the decision clearly
involves the use of cultural capital, to research and communicate the basis for
his dispute.
Age related recognition appears to
be a factor in some of the treatments Desmond experiences. He reports a
tendency in some cases for people to be sympathetic towards him, since they all
know “he is heading towards the aged pension anyway” (a legitimated form of
welfare), and a mutual view that trying to get him into a job is a waste of
effort and everyone’s time.
Yet the workers are sometimes
compelled by system rules to behave in ways they know are wasteful, and cannot
override system settings to relax appointment frequencies and activity
requirements, which result in Desmond being breached, cut off, or once again on
the phone to sort the system out.
Everyone body knows that his exposure to Workfare system settings is
inappropriate but they are unable to create the flexibility using their
prescribed systems to accommodate this. Accommodation from workers is present as
much as it is in welfare subjects.
Desmond expresses dismay to be his
predominant emotional response to his experiences of welfare settings under
Workfare. Dismay is an emotional that
evokes a sense of something having changed, that has a reference point an a priori state that has been lost. In Desmond’s case he uses it to reflect that
there must be a perception that things have really become that bad in order for
system settings to become as they are.
He artfully notes that policy
makers must be responding to a construal of a problem that is not perhaps, and
definitely not in his case, an accurate one. Reflecting on others on welfare he
says the policies may be right for some others but not for him.
His reality is not one of
idleness, he is quite active and keen to report it, nor even of wilful welfare
dependence, but of a mismatch between his vocational aspirations and those
available in the labour market.
Theoretical stuff on Classification struggles
Another useful way of
understanding what occurs in welfare service exchanges is based on the idea of
classification struggles for legitimacy in welfare decisions which result in
ever narrowing definitions of worthy and unworthy activity and welfare receipt.
Goldberg notes how classification
struggles often emerge as the result of changes in policy settings, in which
they
provide a window of opportunity to define the status
and rights of the policy’s clients relative to other clients in the field.
Since the standing of clients is relational, already existing policies serve as
important benchmarks in these classification struggles, providing models to be
avoided or standards of treatment to which clients can aspire. Furthermore,
policies and their elite patrons frequently stand in a competitive
relationship, which may contribute to classification struggles as well.
He
cites Bourdieu’s own words (to be)
more precise, they are struggles
to class claimants as citizens or paupers. At stake in classification struggles
is ‘‘the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and
recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social
world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups’’ (Bourdieu,
1991, p. 221). (p.88- 89)
These classification struggles
also reflect the battles occurring in administrative back rooms where workers
find themselves in conflict with one another and which are observed by service
users when they are transferred between workers, an experience Desmond
reports.
In policy administrators and
development circles, classification struggles also provide battle grounds over
expert opinion where individuals compete to obtain higher legitimacy for their views
in battles for prestige (x in Grenfell 2012).
Classification struggles, conflict and resistance
Crossley (Crossley 2003)also explores the ways in
which classification struggles are the source of crises which result in
collectivisation of interests and the mobilisation of capital in pursuit of new
political arrangements (or power arrangements).
References
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