Patterns of coping: States and counties

Chapter 3 Patterns of Coping:

States and Counties

Society assigns to social service departments some of the most complex and perplexing tasks facing any public authorities. Everywhere, resources are inadequate and public, legislative, and media pressures are enormous. We Nobody claims to have achieved optimum mastery of the situation. report, instead, on alternative patterns of coping, by which we mean the different approaches to social service delivery that states and counties have developed in response to the political, economic, social and ideological pressures of the 1980s. Our data come from field studies, interviews, analysis of reports, and collateral contacts. State-Administered and County-AdministeredlState-Supervised Systems As we began our review of social service programs for families and children, we assumed that we would find identifiable advantages and disadvantages to state-administered and/or state-supervised, countyadministered systems. Nationally, while the movement since the time of the Nixon presidency has been toward decentralization from Washington to the states, there has been a gradual parallel increase in centralization at the state level. Thus more and more state social welfare (human resource or human service) programs are now state administered than at any point in American history. At our last count, only about one-fourth of the systems remained county (locality) administered. But especially relevant here, and of some surprise to us, we could not identify particular coping patterns as more likely to occur in stateadministered or in county-administered systems. Nor,on reflection, should this be surprising; for although formally and legally these are two major types there is in fact a continuum. The reality is that some stateadministered systems are tightly organized and managed at the center, for direct operations in the field, and some are not. Moreover, county and 39