Assessment of County Welfare Office Goal

The County Welfare Office (CWO) of Midwest City appears to have encountered gaps between its jurisdiction and discretion on one hand, and between its institutional traditions or attitudes and the structure of other welfareservice institutions on the other, as far as its providing services for Mrs. Helm is concerned. Diffusion of duties, authority, responsibility, and knowledge is one aspect of this. This is indicated by the statement by the social worker, Mrs. Stern, to the effect that she had "many contacts" with four different persons in the CWO, each of whom had different areas of responsibility for Mrs. Helm's case. Unfortunately, the upshot of the many contacts was that the CWO would withhold its portion of a nursing home allowance for Mrs. Helm "until February 1, since the proper form had not been sent to the State [Welfare] Office on December 12" (13). Mrs. Stern cites "the Welfare Office's administrative and computer convenience" (13) as the reason her client organization must, for one month, at least, contribute the difference between what the CWO would have paid and what it did pay toward Mrs. Helm's nursing home allowance. The major significance of the bottleneck, however, is that it points up the fact that the CWO bureaucracy in Midwest City must coordinate its clientservice activities with the time lines of the State Welfare Office, as well as with internal computertracking capabilities. Addition

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titutions as regards Mrs. Helm's case can be seen in the relationship between the Midwest City Association of Charities (MCAC) and the County Welfare Office (CWO). Both organizations share the potential for direct interaction with the individual welfare client (Mrs. Helm), yet neither organization, as per Martin and O'Connor's discussion of horizontal linkage (228), has authority or power over the other. It follows that in the formal scheme of things, the most MCAC could affect CWO is via moral suasion or horizontal influence. In this regard, Mrs. Stern complains to Dr. Pepper of the negative attitude of CWO workers and administrators toward clients and the client population in general, while noting that the limited resources of MCAC and the greater overall influence and manpower of CWO in the community justifies her "trying to shift much more of the responsibility for the services to Mrs. Helm to her County Welfare Office worker where I strongly feel such responsibility belongs" (9). The progress of Mrs. Stern's involvement in Mrs. Helm's case, indeed, shows the mechanisms that Mrs. Stern employs in order to influence the CWO to assume such responsibility, concomitant with the authority it exercises over Mrs. Helm. One element
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Approximate Word count = 3988
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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