Fighting fires: three essays on human capital and program outcomes in child welfare

This dissertation unpacks how human capital instability and external control policies interact to influence outcomes in the context of stressed policy environments. Stressed environments are introduced as having high ambiguity, environmental complexity, vulnerable recipients, a chronic lack of resources, and work turbulence. Child welfare agencies are used to represent one such organizational context. The three subsequent essays explore how different human capital elements and external reform policies come together to affect child welfare outcomes. The first essay focuses on frontline caseworker turnover in the Texas child welfare system, and a human resource policy reform to address the chronically high turnover rates. The second essay focuses on another salient aspect of human capital in stressed organizations - frontline worker discretion - specifically in the policy reform context of privatization. The final essay continues to explore the implications of privatization, particularly on citizen perceptions and the attribution of blame during a crisis in child welfare service delivery. This essay further focuses on how the communication of managerial actions could mitigate or enhance the relationship between privatization and blame. The findings have implications that are relevant in other similarly stressed but understudied organizational contexts in public management literature. This includes juvenile justice systems, substance and mental health counseling, adult protective services, prisons, and policing. The dissertation highlights the alarming lack of ability of caseworkers and agencies to shape service delivery in child welfare. To combat this, the findings emphasize the need for more holistic contracting decisions that better encompass implementation and human resource policies that allow the people closest to the problem to have the best possible chance to perform their job and affect outcomes. Contracting is shown to bring additional instability to nonprofits and increased blame attribution to the government, pointing to the need for more research on the contracting-implementation interaction and the feedback of these findings to decision-makers that govern contracting policy. Human capital reforms, especially in stressed policy environments, need more long-term strategic planning and the development of an organizational identity, so that such organizations can move beyond just fighting fires to meet their outcomes effectively and equitably.