Social welfare executives are expected to see to it, for example, that the core tasks of social program administration are performed competently and in accordance with law for each of their programs. These tasks include determining eligibility for benefits or services; establishing the appropriate level or form of the benefit; designing and delivering services; regulating the quality of service; evaluating results against goals or expectations; and, finally and perhaps most important, maintaining a balance between demands from clients and their advocates for service and the government's capacity to satisfy them.
However, in order for the core tasks to be competently executed-that is, in order for an adequate benefit check to be issued or an appropriate client served in a proper way at a specific location-a number of questions must be answered. What are the social goals or objectives (i.e., what are the specific changes in behavior or circumstances) toward which government efforts are to be directed and against which public managers are to be held accountable? Who is to receive the benefits or services-whose behavior is to be changed or condition improved? What kinds of benefits or services are to be offered in order to achieve the desired changes? How, where, and by whom are services or benefits to be delivered? How and by whom are benefits or services to be paid for? Though federal statutes and guidelines may provide some of the necessary answers, many issues are typically left for the states to resolve.8 Social welfare executives are expected to actively participate in their resolution, especially for programs, such as those affected by the Family Security Act, which are new or for which statutory or judicial mandates have changed.
It is in fulfilling this essentially policymaking role that the impossibilities confronting these executives begin to emerge in clearer focus. The requirements of federal laws and guidelines apart, social welfare executives are not free to do whatever they deem appropriate on behalf of their mandates. They are, in the first instance, agents of the elected executive who appointed them and must take this executive's views into account. But they must also be responsive to the legislators who authorize and commit funds for their programs; to federal officials who monitor their compliance with federal laws and regulations; to subordinate managers, supervisors, and field workers whose efforts produce the actual services; to representatives of particular interest groups, whose expertise, support or opposition may be important to their achieving their goals; and to newspaper and television reporters, who are conduits to a wider public and help shape their message.
Yet social welfare executives are not powerless. Though elected officials may be more powerful than appointed officials in higher-level decisions that establish broad purposes or funding levels, the influence of social welfare executives may be considerable in middle- and lower-level agendas involving the choice of programmatic approaches and the details of program design and execution.9 Despite statutory, political, and organizational constraints and pressures, these executives are in a position to know more about and to have greater influence over their agencies than virtually any outside actor. Moreover, because none of their constituencies has the time or inclination or monitor everything they do, these executives have considerable potential latitude to choose what they will attend to and how they will carry out specific tasks.
Almost any of the issues they face could absorb most of the social welfare executive's time and attention. But in a world of limited human capacity, managerial involvement has an opportunity cost. The problem for the social welfare executive is deciding how to allocate scarce time and attention among the competing demands associated with creating support for and producing social welfare services. A concentration on foster care and adoptions or on the efficient allocation of Medicaid resources, for example, may be at the expense of assuring appropriate conditions in nursing homes or designing work incentives for welfare recipients. Similarly, time spent generating support for promising new ideas may be at the expense of making certain that performance of agency routines is competent and efficient.
Because it is at the middle and lower levels of power that social policies acquire meaning for the public and attract the loyalty and support of agency constituencies, the executives who are influential at these levels are at the same time vulnerable to the kinds of focused conflicts and divergent concerns that continually arise in resolving programmatic issues. Executives become lightning rods for discontent emerging from every direction. Thus what strategy they choose to guide their actions in inherently controversial matters is probably vital to their effectiveness.
The kinds of mandates for which social welfare executives assume responsibility reflect the collective exercise of choice by citizens who pay for or benefit from social welfare policies, by their elected representatives, and by other actors in the policymaking process, such as interest group leaders, judges, and staff members in the executive branch and the legislature. Inherent in the institutions and processes of collective choice are a number of difficulties.
- The taxpayers who provide the budgetary resources for agency services and the recipients of these services are not usually the same people. Thus, social programs generally involve redistribution, almost always a politically controversial activity.
- The recipients of social welfare services are often people-drug abusers, child molesters, unemployed welfare recipients, teenage mothers, destitute residents of urban ghettos, minority-group members-who are either unpopular with or of little concern to many voters and taxpayers, whose sympathy, patience, and loyalty to the social service enterprise cannot, therefore, be taken for granted.
- Equally often, program administrators, advocates for clients, direct service providers, and others whose efforts are necessary to the delivery of services disagree among themselves over the most appropriate help, treatment, or cure for those judged to be needy. Because they are accountable to different constituencies-supervisors, boards of directors, professional peers-these actors are often under no obligation to cooperate with one another or to subordinate their self-interest in favor of a more inclusive view.
- "Service" is typically the product of the interaction between service provider and client. Thus, the actual result when the "service" is "delivered"-e.g., the "treatment" received by a poorly motivated welfare recipient from an effective caseworker-is often difficult to observe. Moreover, since the goals and incentives of the two parties, as well as those of taxpayers, administrators, and advocates, often differ-clients seeking the assistance they "want," providers offering the services clients "need," others desiring to reduce the welfare rolls-the parties involved, as well as such outside observers as program evaluators, may interpret whatever transpires in quite different and conflicting ways.
