Governance Undone: Bureaucratic Churning in the Case of Child Welfare

• In Event: Macro Determinants of Inequality: The Role of Politics, Policies, and Institutions (Co-sponsored by Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section)

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the social safety net has become increasingly punitive, conditional, and fragmented. Expansions for children and families run counter to these trends, yet gaps persist between select supports and those meant to benefit from them. Canonical explanations argue that punitive and paternalistic governing strategies drive people away from assistance, but these accounts risk overstating the coherence of governance. In response, I develop the concept of bureaucratic churning to capture how the rise of precarious work further destabilizes the bureaucrat-recipient dyad central to poverty-governing institutions. I make my argument by drawing on over 18 months of fieldwork across Chicago’s child welfare system and youth aging out. Leveraging this case, I show how churning constitutes an organizational and lived norm for people navigating the safety net. Churning requires youth to chronically renegotiate their needs with new workers, contributing to institutional and emotional whiplash and pushing them toward alternatives, often destabilized family ties. As family ties struggle with racialized precarity, youth, and especially youth of color, face downstream consequences like homelessness. Accordingly, this article argues that bureaucratic churning, reflective of the precarious work pervasive to poverty governance, creates the conditions that drive limited uptake and reproduce social inequality.

Author

• Loren M Beard, Harvard University