The insufficiency of fairness: The logics of homeless service administration and resulting gaps in service

Abstract

This paper reports on discursive justifications of homeless service institutions in the USA, illustrating a conceptualization of service founded on economic logics of industry and the marketplace. Emerging from ethnographic data, we found that homeless service administrators utilized economic logics of justification to legitimize the exclusion of the street homeless by framing delivery within western notions of fair exchange and efficient production. When these logics are used exclusively to frame justifiable criteria for receiving services, certain people are empowered to participate in social welfare institutions, while others are disfranchised. We conclude that addressing gaps in service requires legitimizing varied administrative models, which, although underpinned by different, perhaps even oppositional, justifications, will engender a service sector responsive to the diversity of the homeless population.

Keywords:

• homelessness
• shelters
• ethnography
• logic
• discourse
• medicalization

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a UAB Faculty Development Grant. The authors thank Margaret Elbow and Mark LaGory for their helpful comments on the drafts of this paper.

Notes

While the order of presentation in this paper is in contrast to our actual grounded research process – where these ideas emerged from the data first and then later found to be conceptually allied with the substantive and theoretical literature – we utilize a more standard presentation to promote wider disciplinary clarity.

The ‘logic of industrialism’ is not a new phrase. However, while Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) conceptualization of it intersects with others, they more than others isolated the way of thinking that attends industrial production, whereas others have focused on more substantive issues such as how industrialization created urbanization and disrupted traditional social systems (see Piven and Cloward 1971 [1993]).

A more complete narrative of our experiences gaining access to the field, along with developing and maintaining rapport with participants, can be found in Wasserman and Clair (2010). The Institutional Review Board of our university approved this protocol.

While we utilized a coding and conceptualization process rooted in the grounded theory methods of Glaser and Strauss (1967) and further developed by Charmaz (2006) and Clarke (2005), we amended the classic version of grounded theory to include a fractal logic structure that organized emergent concepts and themes (see Wasserman, Clair, and Wilson 2009). However, our insights here are sufficiently focused on to be adequately substantiated by the emergent themes themselves without the additional analytic techniques.

We note here that this quote, unlike most others, is based on field notes that were written one day after the event and, therefore, may not be verbatim.

We leave aside here the methodological question about the validity of the survey, since, of course, anyone of us might rank food high as a ‘need’, even if we had plenty of access to it.