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DILEMMAS OF HUMAN SERVICE IN A NEW CONSERVATIVE ERA
Abstract
This dissertation brings into sharper focus the crisis of care in our society which underlies the politics of the welfare state. It explores points of vulnerability in the liberal, professional-bureaucratic approach to care which the New Right has been able to exploit in undermining support for much needed public sector human services. It argues that we need to move beyond conservative, liberal, and orthodox Marxist approaches to care, in favor of a socialist-feminist, communitarian approach which recognizes the need for mutual support in dealing with our common human vulnerability. This approach makes the super-exploitation and devaluation of women's caring capacities, within home and state, and the underdevelopment of men's capacity to care, a central issue. The void of mutual supportiveness, combined with prolonged economic insecurity and social disorientation, has given rise to a level of personal anxiety and pain that has reached crisis proportions, outstripping the professional-managerial capacity of the liberal welfare state to contain, and increasing the power of the right. Human service practitioners are caught in a severe bind as they attempt to fill this support void, while being bound by a set of professional-hierarchical and fiscal constraints not of their own making. The thesis concludes with a vision of service in which the professional-hierarchical and gender defined social relations of care are transformed to enhance our capacity to care for one another as an ongoing, mutually shared part of our life activity. It points to the black and white working class women, who are the main providers and recipients of state human services, as an important and underacknowledged source of insight and leadership in undertaking these changes upon which our social survival and growth depends.
Subject Area
Welfare
Recommended Citation
HETZEL, MARY JO, "DILEMMAS OF HUMAN SERVICE IN A NEW CONSERVATIVE ERA" (1985). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8509554.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8509554