The Proximate Contexts of Workfare and Work: A Framework for Studying Poor Women's Economic Choices

Abstract

This article provides a framework for examining how the conditions of urban, low-income, single motherhood and the resources available through personal networks shape mothers' conduct in work-welfare programs. It suggests how research on welfare programs ignores work-family linkages and misses the ways economic action is embedded in social structures and communal constraints. Three rubrics of proximate context, referring to personal networks, urban environments, and moral economies, organize material indicating how patterns of personal life shape work efforts. Data from a qualitative study of mothers in AFDC work-welfare programs provide illustrations.

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