The Irresponsibility of Clients
Throughout this study, a strong theme is vividly manifested in the impossible jobs: the tension between dependence and independence in client groups. It is very difficult for many members of the client population to make the transition from dependence to independence, a matter closely related to the state's perennial lack of sufficient funds to implement programs effective in accomplishing the transition from dependence to independence. Further, the public is angered by client populations who are persistently unwilling to help themselves or to respond to the helping attempts of others. Attribution theory, sketched in the following paragraphs, provides a convincing portrait of the antecedents of this theme.
Current explanations of the findings of such students of social cognition as Susan Fiske maintain that all members of a society fit the social roles of the society to commonplace cognitive models. Like all cognitive models, the boundaries are not sharp, and the linkages of the components range from strong to weak. Each cognitive model, however, often has a central prototype that is surrounded by more or less similar variations. Social psychologists have discovered the importance of the attribution of causes of behavior in the cognitive models of the plight of people. The distinction between the attribution to causes internal to the person and causes external to the person has been especially important. Such causal attributions have been shown to precede and underlie feelings of pity, anger and guilt. Another analysis holds that two of the components of the commonplace cognitive model are, first, the attribution to internal or external causes of the clients' problems and, second, the assignment of internal or external responsibility for solving or managing those problems.
To the public, then, some clients did not cause their problems and cannot solve or manage them without help from the society. Examples include farmers in flood or drought, the genetically handicapped, victims of epidemics, veterans of wars, especially traumatized veterans, and people who have been clearly unjustly oppressed or neglected in the past. The causes stem primarily from the environment, and in the eyes of the public, the responsibility for remediation is primarily of the society. Such clients are seen as legitimately in need of help, and the use of public funds to help them is popular. Commissioners charged with serving such clients find their jobs very possible.
Some clients are close to the foregoing prototype but may not always fit it. They may or may not have caused their own problems, and they may or may not be able to solve or manage them without help from the society. Families dependent on welfare, AIDS victims, truants, habitual criminals, alcoholics, the harmless mentally ill-all these are examples of clients in this ambiguous category. Their legitimacy as public charges is sometimes in doubt to the public, and because of that doubt, the use of public funds to help them is acceptable when money is plentiful and unacceptable when money is scarce. Commissioners who serve such clients find their jobs quite possible in good times and in periods of reform; quite impossible in bad times and periods of stabilization.
Apart from the question of whether the locus of an attributed cause is perceived as internal or external, B. A. Weiner has considered the stability and controllability of the attributed cause and found them to be powerful additional components of the commonplace cognitive model of a client's plight! In his experiments on pity, anger, and guilt, he showed that uncontrollable causes of negative events gave rise to pity, whether the cause was in the self or in others. On the other hand, the causes of some troubles were indeed internal but also stable and controllable. Those gave rise to anger. Problems caused by laziness, lying, impulsiveness, and persistent dependency in spite of ability-all causes perceived to be clearly internal, stable, and controllable but not controlled-are fitted to a model of moral irresponsibility and seen as illegitimate. Persistence over time and situation in spite of social pressures to change has been shown to be a very important basis for attributing behavior to stable, internal causes. Clients of commissioners in impossible jobs often become clients because their problems persist over time and situation despite social pressures to change. The use of public funds to solve or manage such problems is very unpopular.
Not only do the commissioners face the social-psychological attribution of internal, stable, controllable-but-not-controlled causes of the plights of the irresponsible, they also face a special political-economic conflict. The commission must follow redistributive policies, yet American society has a profound and painful ambivalence about programs that redistribute resources from one group to another. The redistribution may be politically mandated, because the transfer appears to benefit all-as in public works, research and development, or protective tariffs. But the redistribution is unacceptable when commissions reach down the social ladder to help those who are perceived as persistently bringing on their own problems and persistently failing to responsibly develop the resources they do receive. The American self-help ethic is affronted. Welfare policies of all kinds are often seen as burdens on the community, thus the programs are underfunded, unpopular, and exceedingly difficult to administer.
Moreover, commissioners in those jobs are charged by law to supply public goods that are mythically idealistic, and they are therefore vulnerable to political scape-goating. A commissioner also provides private goods and can use them as incentives for contributing to the work of the agency.
Commissioners who serve illegitimate, intractable clients, who have many polarized constituencies, and who have very limited professional, legal, reward, or coercive powers are simply in impossible jobs. Their only hope lies in combining professional, expert power with political entrepreneurship and reward power. They thereby have a chance to recruit the legitimating and supporting of the dominant coalition that appointed them, a coalition that tends to be unstable and changing as focal concerns change. Responding to intermittent successes that keep their hope and commitment alive and resistant to extinction, commissioners cope with such impossible jobs. Often, their tenure is short and their accomplishments are limited, but they persist in pursuing the impossible goals until they burn out or are fired. We must also analyze the approaches to coping that present themselves under these conditions.
