The location of resistance: Understanding tactics of resistance in the welfare office

• Published date: 2008--
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046006
• Pages: 149-167
• Date: 2008--
• Author: Karen McCormack

THE LOCATION OF RESISTANCE:

UNDERSTANDING TACTICS

OF RESISTANCE IN THE

WELFARE OFFICE

Karen McCormack

The process is just like a pain in the butt, but the service workers themselves, um, they

have a job they have to do . . . that’s their job to make sure that I’m not manipulating

them or conning them, you know? (Angela Lewis)

I’ve had problems, not as much getting the assistance as the people that I got to deal with

to get it .. . the arrogance, some of them just try to talk to you like you’re nothing . . . I

hate going up to [the welfare office]. My mood can be alright until I walk through that

door and you’ve got the receptionist, I tell you, I said if I wouldn’t go to jail I would

probably leap back there and, excuse my French, just beat her down. (Alice Brown)

My grandma used to cry when she went down there [welfare office]. Did it ever upset you

that much? No, because I can get nasty with them. I really can, because I feel as though if

we weren’t on social service, they wouldn’t have a job. (Carolyn Barnes)

Angela Lewis, Alice Brown, and Carolyn Barnes all received welfare

assistance in 1997, one year after the passage of the Personal Responsibility

and Work Reconcilation Act (PRA) to reform the welfare system. Each of

these women encountered representatives of the welfare system, recep-

tionists, caseworkers, and supervisors, who at least at times treated them

poorly. Yet in the quotes above we see very different responses to this poor

treatment. Angela sympathizes with the caseworkers even while she is

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 46, 149–167

Copyright r2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046009

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suspected of manipulation. Alice responds in anger, challenging the

hierarchy between the recipient and the representatives of the system.

Carolyn offers a fundamental challenge to the dominant logic of welfare

receipt: not only does she challenge the hierarchy, she subverts the relation

of dependency.

These three responses represent positions on what we might think of as a

continuum of resistance to welfare discourse and bureaucratic practices. On

one end of this continuum is acquiescence and acceptance. In Angela’s

remarks, her own skepticism of welfare recipients excuses poor treatment by

caseworkers. In fact, Angela acquiesces not only to the facts of the welfare

bureaucracy, its hierarchy, procedures, and penalties, but also to the spirit

of the welfare system. Residing somewhere in the middle of the continuum,

Alice recognizes the personal affront and claims that she is not deserving of

such treatment. She does not ‘‘beat down’’ the receptionist, but she does

‘‘get nasty’’ and in doing so articulates a claim to better treatment, a

protection of her identity as a good person, citizen, and mother. On the

other end of the continuum, Carolyn rejects both the facts of the

bureaucracy and its spirit. In doing so, she utilizes an array of tactics

designed to procure her basic needs and protect her identity. What allows

some recipients access to resistive tactics while others are only able to

accommodate the indignities of a system that places them at the bottom?

This chapter examines the resistive practices employed by women in the

welfare office and examines when and how these practices may be used.

Through a comparison of resistance tactics employed by women experien-

cing high and low levels of welfare stigma within their communities, we can

trace the importance of social location and physical space for enacting

resistive practices, even in a space that remains similarly constricting across

locations. What we see in Alice and Carolyn’s accounts is the possibility for

the weak or powerless to articulate an alternative set of meanings on which

they can, and sometimes do, act. I want to argue here that a systematic

analysis of when actors are able to access and mobilize alternative, resistant

practices enables us to imagine the structural conditions that make

resistance possible.

Examining these ‘‘tactics’’ (de Certeau, 1984), or ‘‘weapons of the weak’’

(Scott, 1985), requires attention to the mundane practices of everyday life.

Everyday resistance practices challenge power and domination in an

unorganized and often invisible way. These resistance practices are

‘‘conscious attempt(s) to shift the dynamics or openly challenge the

givenness of situational power dynamics’’ (Ewick & Silbey, 2003, p. 1331).

Rarely are these practices coordinated or clearly designed to alter long-term

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