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An Ethnographic Case Study Of The Organization Of Care In A Transitional Housing Project For Pregnant And Parenting Teens: Program And Policy Implications Author: Donna Rubens Dissertation School: State University of New York at Buffalo Pages: 653 Publication Date: September 1997 Availability: Access Number: 9962 Abstract: This ethnographic case study examines what happens when pregnant and parenting teens come under the authority of a residential living program for young homeless families. Spawned by the de- institutionalization movement in the 1960s, transitional independent living programs operate within an "empowerment" paradigm. This strengths-based approach to clients potentially mystifies and veils the full range of organizational power. By foregrounding "power with," this bracketing leaves out two other faces of power, "power for" (paternalism) and "power with" (authoritarian control). By conceptualizing the organization as a social engineering process, the research moves behind the story that family-like residential facilities tell themselves about who they are and their approach to care. The study uses analytical conventions of organizational ethnography to examine how power in all its manifestations inheres in routine features of organizational ethnography to examine how power in all its manifestations inheres in routine features of organization life. Meetings, case management, and other organizational elements become circuits and nodes of power, the sites where organizational legitimacy and authority are created, reproduced, and challenged, and where clients are made, unmade, shaped, and channeled. By linking internal micro-level dynamic with external, macro-level processes, the study moves beyond a focus on either victims or powerful others, to locate the tendency toward authoritarian control in the logic of a normative "domestic order," which articulates the individual, the state, and the economy around the notions of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. These discourses are shored up and sustained by social constructions of the family, motherhood, child abuse, and by disciplinary practices characteristic of professional social work. A series of schematics comprise the "deformation of care" model, which maps a field of forces and multiple interpretative domains that compromise the empowerment ideal. The model implicates the professional service business, social work theory and practice, the residential service delivery design, social and legal ambiguities that surround teen motherhood but only as these factors are symptomatic of a deeply embedded Foucauldian economy of power. The study cautions policy makers against a wholesale proliferation of "second chance homes" for young mothers in response to welfare reform, yet simultaneously points to the potential of residential care for empathetic connections that can disrupt the disempowerment context. Policy makers are urged to reconfigure residential programs in the new policy context, incorporating anti-poverty asset-based strategies. Advisor: Mr. Donald K. Pollock |
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