Doing gender in public Services: Affective Labour of employment agents

Autor(en)

Birgit Sauer, Otto Penz, Johanna Hofbauer, Myriam Gaitsch, Barbara Glinsner

Abstrakt

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front-line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect-neutral male bureaucratic work.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Institut für Soziologie

Externe Organisation(en)

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU)

Journal

Gender, Work and Organization

Band

26

Seiten

983-999

Anzahl der Seiten

17

ISSN

0968-6673

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12263

Publikationsdatum

07-2019

ÖFOS 2012

504014 Gender Studies, 504002 Arbeitssoziologie, 506009 Organisationstheorie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Gender studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/3aa6ae92-be92-4ca4-8ed7-22a10ff6ad03