In the 1950s, part-time work gradually became an element of labor policy to activate women to participate in the labor market that could be transferred from one country to another. Support of part-time employment in the Dutch labor market, however, was initially not endorsed as a solution to the problem of low female labor force participation but was the outcome of a more complex set of deliberations, in which the moral economy of employers’ organizations conflicted with broader demands for increased productivity. The article contrasts the initial concerns of Dutch employers about increasing women’s labor force participation with the country’s later international role in advocating part-time work for married women on an international scale. The Netherlands thereby serves as a case study of how employers’ organizations instrumentalized part-time employment for their own moral economy based in the breadwinner ideology.
In traditional administrative models the public servant is emotionally conceptualized in a specific way, namely as a rationally acting and emotionally abstinent person. However, these are also models of observation that are strongly guided on the one hand by normative ideas and on the other by historical master narratives that focus on the development of a specifically occidental rationality. In particular, the emotional turn in historical science inspires us to take a critical view of such assumptions. But other approaches developed in other scientific disciplines also stimulate us to sharpen our historical view of the emotional aspects of bureaucracy: in jurisprudence “Law and Emotions” and in sociology “Sociology of Emotions”. This article presents these scientific approaches and tries to sound out their usefulness for the history of administration. In this way, it also serves as an introduction to this volume of the journal Administory.
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