Involvement of industry in academic research is widespread and associated with favorable outcomes for industry. The objective of this study was to review empirical data on the attitudes of researchers toward industry involvement and financial ties in research. A review of the literature for quantitative data from surveys on the attitudes of researchers to financial ties in research, reported in English, resulted in the 17 studies included. Review of these studies revealed that investigators are concerned about the impact of financial ties on choice of research topic, research conduct and publication, but this concern is less among investigators already involved with industry. Researchers approve of industry collaboration and financial ties when the ties are indirectly related to the research, disclosure is upfront, and results and ideas are freely publicized. However, their trust in disclosure as a way to manage conflicts may reveal a lack of awareness of the actual impact of financial incentives on themselves and other researchers.

The impact of policy changes on the local delivery of services has been overlooked in several decades of largely unsuccessful efforts to “reform” welfare. This article uses one case of state‐level welfare reform in the early 1990s to examine the implementation of policy changes in local welfare offices. Direct observation of transactions between welfare workers and clients suggests that policy reforms were not fully implemented by street‐level bureaucrats. The instrumental transactions that continued to dominate interactions with clients were consistent with processing claims and rationing scarce resources, but they were poorly aligned with new policies aimed at changing the services and message delivered to welfare clients. The failure to fully implement reforms on the frontlines has implications for the achievement of policy objectives and for equity in service provision. Implementation issues will have even greater urgency as welfare is devolved from federal to state governments.

The way frontline workers in human service organizations implement policy is greatly influenced by how their jobs are structured within particular organizational settings. Although scholars of street-level bureaucracy have provided important insights into this relationship in specific situations, they rarely move beyond case study findings toward a more general research approach. Through cross-case analysis of fieldwork from California welfare and welfare-to-work programs, the authors inductively developed a framework for investigating how organizational setting mediates between policy goals and frontline behavior. The authors illustrate the use of this framework for welfare programs and street-level studies more generally using illustrations from their prewelfare reform study as well as from more recent postreform/Temporary Aid to Needy Families studies.