...for-profit provide welfare services. Advocates of privatization claimed that private sector efficiency would offer poor families better service for less money. Critics worried about firms profiting from the impoverishment of others. Ten years after this reform, it is time to ask how for-profit services have responded to the needs of poor families and the exigencies of street-level work. PRWORA gave states broad latitude to reorganize welfare delivery in order to make work its focal point (Brodkin 2000). Nonetheless, 1 decade later, we still know remarkably little about what occurs within these private agencies.

Using a private for-profit welfare-to-work training program serving long-term welfare recipients as our site of inquiry, this research extends previous studies by giving greater transparency to a set of managerial and frontline practices and routines that have remained otherwise opaque. Few studies examine for-profit agencies, and most welfare studies choose to study managers (Lurie 2001), street-level workers (Sandfort 2000; Gais et al. 2001; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Watkins 2003), or clients (Edin and Lein 1997; Soss 2002; Hays 2003). By combining these issues, this study broadens the research agenda and highlights the connections and implication of the "work-first" philosophy of welfare reform legislation and the subcontracting of government services on the service delivery process.

Much of the existing welfare reform literature evaluates the caseload declines and factors that contribute to recipients' outcomes (Council of Economic Advisers 1997; Brauner and Loprest 1999; Schoeni and Blank 2000; Ziliak et al. 2000). Welfare organizations have not been central to these discussions. Yet long-standing studies on human service agencies have shown that what occurs during the enactment of policy is central to understanding both policy successes and failures (Lurie 2001) and the operational procedures and interpersonal relationships within these agencies are equally important to understanding such outcomes (Lipsky 1980; Handler and Hasenfeld 1997; Lurie 2001; Brodkin 2002). Issues of managerial-staff relations, line worker discretion, and goal congruence are essential parts of the policy process, and the literature on public agencies and street-level bureaucracies maintains that client outcomes can be explained in part by frontline discretion as exercised by street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers, police, and teachers (Lipsky 1980; Goodsell 1981; Hasenfeld and Steinmetz 1981; Scott 1997; Cohen 1998; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003).

The paradox of the new welfare legislation is that although it has afforded widespread latitude and discretion to state administrators and their intermediaries, it may have simultaneously created greater constraint at the bottom. An underlying paradox--some would argue "a fundamental contradiction"--of welfare reform is that although states and localities are encouraged to innovate and adapt programs to their communities, the individuals who deliver these services to clients, the street-level workers, may be constrained in their discretion when applying program policies to individual needs. This paradox may be most evident in for-profit delivery of welfare as the cost-cutting incentives for management confront the client-focused attention of frontline workers.

Contracting was promoted as the antidote for the organizational problems of public bureaucracies. Contracting, as a form of privatization, has been used since the 1960s by the government as a way to create greater efficiency at a fixed lower cost (Brodkin and Young 1989; Kamerman and Kahn 1989). However, prior to the 1996 welfare reform, the traditional approach to providing welfare services was in the form of noncompetitive, quasigrant arrangements made directly and primarily to nonprofit organizations (Nightingale and Pindus 1997). PRWORA, by allowing states more flexibility in service provision, made it possible for states to remove many of the existing contracting restrictions. Some states opted to contract out services, primarily job training, and to use performance contracts where payment is based solely or primarily on placement outcomes or quotas. The institutional consequences of these changes are largely unknown.

Current research on performance contracts show that contracts typically stipulate a focus on short-term deliverables, such as immediate job placement outcomes or quotas, at the expense of longer term goals like employment quality and job retention (Autor and Houseman 2005). Contract language appears to encourage some welfare programs to invest their resources only in those activities that contribute directly to the financial "bottom line" (Brodkin et al. 2002; Thiel and Leeuw 2002, 267). Such efforts are likely to clash with the case management perspective.

Drawn primarily from social work, the case management approach is based on individual assessment; it demands detailed, emotional interaction with clients, taking time to discover their areas of interest and identifying the obstacles preventing them from accomplishing their individual goals (Anderson 2001; Segal, Gerdes, and Steiner 2004). In theory, the work-first and case management philosophies complement welfare goals (Anderson 2001, 167). But in program practice, reconciling the process-oriented philosophy of case management with the work-first demands of "take a job, any job, now" may be difficult. The work-first approach assumes that clients have few obstacles to employment beyond personal motivation, and any work--even low-wage work with no benefits, little security, and limited chances for advancement--is viewed as the best antidote to welfare dependence. Case management, on the other hand, recognizes that individuals face diverse barriers to employment; it sees good jobs, not just job placement, as the outcome, not the treatment.

The difference in philosophy may be exaggerated when coupled with contracting out to for-profit agencies where management is called upon to maximize output while also minimizing costs. (1) These goals are likely to conflict with the casework goals that many service staff bring to the job. Under the new accountability model, frontline staff, (2) who are trained as case managers and deliver services in these new, for-profit welfare-to-work agencies, may find themselves trapped between their understanding of clients' needs and the demands of their supervisors to place clients quickly and cheaply in jobs.

At the organizational level, the existence of these different perspectives is expressed in normative conflicts over how best to move recipients from welfare dependency to selfsufficiency. Using the narratives of managers, line workers, and clients, we examine the ways these managers, street-level workers, and clients interpret the welfare directives to better understand how the new policy imperative of work first merges with case management approaches to help recipients. We present new findings on the competing demands between policy demands and practice.

Using data from an intensive study of one for-profit job-training program, a local subsidiary of a national program, we provide a detailed account of how the focused attention to work-first service goals and contract compliance produced a performance paradox. We examine how the performance contract contributes to tensions within this program and produces unintended consequences for program practices and its long-term welfare participants. We investigate how this job-training program responds to the competing demands of state regulators, executive management, frontline staff, and poor women recipients. We ask, how do conflicting interests shape the ways frontline work is conducted and the way frontline discretion operates?

Though focused on a single site, we maintain that the findings of this study may be generalizable to other private job-training welfare programs similarly structured. Likewise, our results have bearing on the nature of the gulf between policy ideals and policy implementation. After a discussion of the methodology, we present the background of the jobtraining program and discuss the implementation of the performance contract mandates. Having laid out the key areas of programmatic conflict, we then offer three sets of narratives from the managers, line staff, and clients. We conclude by offering some explanations for why these programmatic conflicts occurred and some policy recommendations.

METHODS

The data for this article come from an 18-month qualitative study conducted between October 2002 and April 2004 (3) of four welfare-to-work training programs (Johnson 2004). This article focuses on one site, WorkOpts, a for-profit welfare-to-work training program for long-term welfare recipients. (4) Given the focus on issues of process and the relations between people and organizational practice, we employ a grounded theory approach.

The grounded theory approach demands a dialectic relationship between data gathering and theoretical analysis. Developed by Glaser and Strauss (1999), grounded theory relies on the interactive process wherein the researcher is constantly comparing theory to what he/she has learned from the data-gathering process. Simultaneously, the information she gathers transforms the kinds of questions she asks.

Data Collection Strategies

The research involved multimethods: organizational, interview, and observational. Organizational data include contract stipulations. Interview data come from 22 clients, 17 street-level workers, and 5 program supervisors and managers. Data were also gathered from over 1,200 h of participant observations of orientation sessions, classrooms, lunchrooms, and lobbies. The three different levels of information allow for triangulation and depth of information on the relationship between the actors and their environment.

The 60 semistructured individual and group interviews provide information on the individual perspectives of these actors. Some participants were interviewed twice. Generally, interviews lasted between 1 and 2 h. The majority of interviews were tape-recorded and followed a formal protocol, but some discussions were impromptu. Most interviews took place in a private room at WorkOpts, although several occurred at coffee shops, and one interview was conducted in the respondent's home. Group talks were equally important to the study because these conversations allowed respondents to share individual experiences in a large setting while allowing for explication of "the group's point of view" and the contrasting perspectives of the interviewees (Agar and MacDonald 1995, 81).

Beyond interviews, the study also included observations that allowed us to make sense of the interview data. Lincoln and Guba (1985) argue that observations permit researchers to acquire the fullest understanding of the phenomenon they are studying because the researcher must interact with participants in their natural context. To guard against having a biased view of the program, observation times varied about every 6 weeks. Typically, observations occurred on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but over the course of the study, observations also took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays and Fridays were the busiest days at WorkOpts; however, the program appeared to work in similar ways throughout the week.

We also collected contract information as a way to understand how the larger organizational structure shapes office relations and influences service delivery. Denzin (1989) posits that this kind of data gathering can be helpful in elaborating the observational framework, and Drasgow and Schmitt (2002) suggest that this process of exploring agency documents, particularly the formalized rules, can be useful in developing a theory about how process mechanisms impact outcomes.

Data Analysis

Each transcribed interview was analyzed using ATLAS.ti, which offers the ability to manage, extract, compare, and explore meaningful excerpts from extensive amounts of data. Data collection and analysis were iterative. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed as soon as they were completed, and these findings would, to a degree, shape subsequent interviews. In this way, new information was collected as the research...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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