Post-bureaucratic encounters: Affective labour in public employment services

Abstract

This article explores the activation regime in three European countries-Austria, Germany, and Switzerland-and the related transformation of state bureaucracies into customer-oriented service providers. In the case of employment services affective labour tends to characterise the work process, in which public employees seek to guide, motivate, and control jobseekers. Our study focuses on organisational mechanisms, which govern the affect management of employment agents; we ask, how these actors are affectively subjectivated at the workplace and how they develop affective self-technologies to effectively govern jobseekers in counselling sessions. We conclude that state power and social policies increasingly revolve around subtle, affective means of governance, and we regard 'affective entrepreneurialism' as the dominant mode to govern public employees as well as citizens. The findings of the study are based on ethnographic fieldwork in three cities, where we conducted

Bureaucratic encounters “after neoliberalism”: Examining the supportive turn in social housing governance

“…The sense of fear and distrust observed amongst tenants resonates with the previous research on the impacts of welfare conditionality, wherein sanctioning practices alienate welfare recipients from street‐level bureaucrats (Fletcher & Flint, ; Penz et al, ).…”

“…In contrast to the traditional bureaucratic commitment to impersonal engagement (Du Gay, ; Weber, ), street‐level bureaucrats are encouraged to deploy empathy and other “affective” techniques to build trust and rapport with clients, and to mitigate clients’ fear and distrust of welfare bureaucracies. For example, Penz et al (, p. 552) describe how European employment agency workers adopt empathetic techniques to “make the ‘customer’ feel comfortable, to reduce anxieties and allay fears, and to establish an atmosphere of mutual trust … in order to make jobseekers susceptible to suggestions and to raise their motivation and employability.”…”

“…A key aim of contemporary conditionality and sanctioning practices is to prevent welfare dependency and encourage clients to actively work towards independence (Watts & Fitzpatrick, ). In the employment context, this gives rise to encounters wherein street‐level bureaucrats employ sanctions, or threat thereof, to compel clients to look for work or attend training programs (Penz et al, ). Here, the threat of sanctions is deployed to complement the post‐bureaucratic practices described above by incentivizing proactive engagement with support workers (Flint, ); however, studies show that it can also have the opposite effect: alienating clients from service providers and undermining the trust/rapport the latter seek to establish (Fletcher & Flint, ; Penz et al, ).…”

“…To overcome this reluctance, the “post‐bureaucratic” techniques typically associated with neoliberal efforts to orient clients towards welfare independence (MacDonald & Marston, ; Penz et al, ) are redeployed to encourage tenants to disclose their private troubles and seek additional state‐funded support. This work was largely carried out by the STP partner organizations, who used “affective” techniques to imbue tenants with the skills and confidence required to recognize their needs and vulnerabilities, and to “confess” these to housing staff.…”

“…Street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) working on the frontlines of state and (increasingly) non-state services are tasked with instilling these entrepreneurial capacities in their clients (McDonald & Marston, 2005). They do this through a mix of facilitative practices aimed at enabling responsible self-governance, and punitive measures that enforce compliance with increasingly stringent welfare conditionality measures (Penz, Sauer, Gaitsch, Hofbauer, & Glinsner, 2017).…”