ABSTRACT
In the contemporary version of welfare reform, instead of processing claims for benefits, welfare organizations become agents for change, responsible for moving recipients and potential recipients into jobs and self sufficiency. This requires a shift of organizational culture from one that views clients as victims needing support and help to one that views clients as responsible for their needs, requiring encouragement, motivation, opportunity, and services to accept that responsibility. All of this grows out of the dramatic change in welfare policy initiated in welfare-to-work experiments of the early 1980s, facilitated by the Family Support Act of 1988, and conclusively championed in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOR), or Personal Responsibility Act, of 1996.[1] To accomplish this transformation of welfare from an emphasis on entitlements to an emphasis on work and self-sufficiency, states had to accomplish several things.
