Affective Labor of Employment Agents

The study examines the processes of state transformation towards entrepreneurial governance and enabling states, and focuses on the emergence of new "activate" labor market policies since the mid-1990s in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The transformation process shows in institutional changes like the conversion of state employment offices ("Arbeitsämter") into public service centers, in the introduction of market-type competition into the public sector to increase the efficiency and quality of services, and in new regulatory frameworks to improve the employability of job seekers. Supposedly rational state bureaucracies are transformed into citizen-friendly services, where citizens ought to be treated like costumers and where public employees have to rely more than before on personal communicative and affective properties in the work process. In that context we conceive affective labor as the centerpiece of contemporary service work and contested area of new public management. Hence, the study will shed new light on state transformations by focusing on the work process of public employees and by investigating their affective labor in the area of labor market policies. We adopt a praxeological approach and intend to reconstruct changes of the bureaucratic field by analyzing the relationship between public authorities and citizens at the micro-level of public service agencies, i.e. by studying the interaction between agents and their clients. There we are mainly concerned with the affective implications of agents` double role, as they are subjected to state reform processes and constituent part of the state apparatus by enforcing state policies. Documents that regulate affective aspects of the work process and define the affective culture of employment agencies constitute important sources for our project, and direct observation of interaction processes through a unique methodology: qualitative video analysis will provide us with a sense of pre- reflexive, embodied aspects of affective labor in state transformation. We argue that the affective work regime of state institutions changed remarkably during the past two decades, resulting in an entrepreneurial utilization of affects and entrepreneurial management of the self due to the above indicated institutional and policy changes towards enabling states. Comparison of documents regulating the work process (from a bureaucratic order towards service orientation) and biographical accounts of public employees about shifts of the affective culture in employment services will have to proof whether those interconnections between state regulation of a policy field and affective work regime exist. At all levels of research the comparison of three countries between Austria and Germany with a similar welfare tradition and Switzerland with a different history will decide if we either reconstruct nation specific strategies and special paths of labor market policies or if we are able to detect converging state roles among the two EU-member states and Switzerland as an indication of transnational economic and political forces that are usually labeled "neoliberal".

The rise of activation policies and the restructuring of public administrations into modern service providers or, more generally speaking, processes of state transformation towards entrepreneurial governance and enabling states provide the context of our research project. In the midst of these developments the project focused on the emergence of a new work regime, i.e. affective labour, in public employment agencies in three German-speaking cities, namely Vienna, Munich and Berne. Due to the overall changes the former supposedly rational state bureaucracies were transformed (since the 1990s) into service organizations with a strong costumer orientation paired with enhanced efficiency requirements. New Public Management became the organizing principle of state services, and front-line workers, employment agents, are supposed to address job seekers in new ways according to a dual responsibility: to advise, support and motivate job seekers and to control their effort in finding paid work. In accordance with the rising demand to assist, motivate and morally support job seekers interactive affective labour became the core issue of the counselling process. Hence, we consider affective labour as the centrepiece of contemporary public service work (and as a contested area of New Public Management) The research project empirically examined the interactions between employment agents and their customers especially the affective facets of the work process. In order to grasp affective labour we carried out qualitative video-based research of the relational practices between employment agents and jobseekers. Ethnographic observation of the actual work processes, document analysis of regulations of conduct and biographical accounts support our visual data. The comparison of three cities showed similarities in the affective labour of all front-line workers in particular a combination of affectivity and entrepreneurial spirit that we consider as typical for the contemporary (neoliberal) mode of governance, i.e. typical of affective governmentality, as we termed it. In their interactive service work employment agents affect their customers, and they wield power over their customers in affective ways. By doing so, they engage in various, sometimes contradictory technologies of affective governance also to resolve the contradictions between efficiency and customer-orientation , that range from empathy and building a comfort zone for their customers to dis-affection and feelings of resignation. Paying close attention to affects and affective labour in the study of state agents and street-level bureaucracies, our research contributes to a better understanding of state transformation i.e. the governmentalization of the state and contemporary governance that also encompasses affectivity.