Welfare recipients or workers? Contesting the workfare state in New York City

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structural op portunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare r ecipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opp ortunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of work fare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural an alysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to cu lture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement thi s structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing process is br oadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.