ILPC 2027

Against the backdrop of growing economic pressures of recent years public employment services across Europe have been restructured. In an attempt to overcome old administrative structures seen as ineffective and bureaucratic, customer-oriented and service-oriented administrations were established with a strong output-focus. Under this new regime the labour process of the administrative labour force is structured differently, resulting in new and often contradictory realities of work for public front-line workers (Pollitt/Bouckaert 2011; Korczysnki 2009). Taking up on du Gays (1996) conceptualization of NPM as an identity project, my paper examines the impact of activation polices and of the related discourses on employment agents. Therefore, the question is how current upheavals in public administrations influence the working conditions and experiences of the front-line workers. Avoiding the narrow conception of resistance as a reaction to repressive power, I am a particularly interested in how and to what extend public service workers influence (organizational) power relations and what subject positions they actually adopt.

Referring to a “doing state” conception and following Michael Lipksy’s seminal work on “street level bureaucracy” (1980/2010), I aim to analyse how employment agents implement the welfare policies and how they reproduce the state through their practices. My ethnographic study examines the impact of activation policies on employment agents and investigates their “double dynamics” (Newman 2007), demanding the activation of both, the employment agent and the jobseeker. Arguing for a Foucauldian perspective, where the subjectivity of the "whole person" providing a service is at stake in an interplay of organizational demands and constraints, and self-management, I assume that employment agents need to ‘govern’ others but they also need to govern themselves in an entrepreneurial way. In other words, I am concerned with “soft” forms of power that determine the work of employment agents and characterize the interactions between agents and their customers.

Therefore, my paper draws on poststructuralist approaches of labour process theory with a special emphasis on the debate on subjugation and forms of resistant workers’ subjectivities. Furthermore, my theoretical approach is informed by Foucault’s notion of (self-)governance to refer to the wider context of interactive service work within activating states as well as by Stuart Hall’s (1994) concept of articulation.

Empirically, I draw from texts generated in in-depth interviews with public employment agents, from expert interviews with the organisational management as well as from protocols of participant observations of the actual labour process. Interviews with labour union secretaries, document analysis of regulations of conduct and of policy documents complete my empirical data.

Taking the case of two consecutive strikes in autumn 2013 and spring 2014 of an important number of employment agents working in the canton of Geneva as a starting point for my analysis, the paper contributes to the debate about resistance and power in organisations and it illustrates the micro-politics of resistance within the institutional normativity and their impact on public policymaking. Thus the paper aims at contributing to a fuller understanding of state transformation and post-Fordist gouvernementality that also encompasses the subjective site of labour. 

References

Du Gay, Paul (1993): Entrepreneurial management in the public sector. in: Work, Employment and Society, 7(4), 643-648.

Hall, Stuart (1994): Die Frage der kulturellen Identität. in: id.: Ausgewählte Schriften, Band 2. Hamburg, 180-222.

Korczynski, Marek (2009): Understanding the Contradictory Lived Experience of Service Work: The Customer-Oriented Bureaucracy. in: Korczynski, Marek & Macdonald, Cameron L. (eds.): Service Work. Critical Perspectives. Routledge, New York. 73-90.

Lipsky, Michael (1980/2010): Street-Level Bureaucray: the Dilemma of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 30th Ann. Ed.

Newman, Janet (2007): The double dynamics of activation: institutions, citizens and the remaking of welfare governance. in: International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 27(9/10), 364-387.

Pollitt, Christopher and Geert Bouckaert (2011): Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis – New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo–Weberian. State Oxford: Oxford University Press.