Making the Affective Turn: The Importance of Feelings in Theory, Praxis, and Citizenship

Abstract

There is a thirst for meaning in theory, praxis, and citizenship that knowledge cannot quench. It is time for an affective turn in public administration scholarship, toward an appreciation for the pairing of cognition and emotion, rather than a reliance on cognition alone. For citizens to be engaged with government, they must care about it. It is not spreadsheets that cause people to love their country or hate it; it is feelings. Societal faultlines will not be healed by Big Data. The feeling that citizens have for their government must be both the beginning point and end point of the citizen-state encounter. The emotive component to governance is its connective tissue and the articles in this special issue demonstrate how it can inform theory, research, and practice.

As a field of study, public administration is quite good with analysis, proverbs, principles, procedures, taxonomies, and measures. What it is not so good with is emotion, yet there is widespread consensus that we are drowning in information while starving for certainty and meaning, both of which are built on emotion.

Certainty derives from a combination of knowledge suffused with feeling. As aptly stated by Camilla Stivers (2018), “What the world needs now is not science but meaning, and science can play a role in getting us to meaning, but only a partial role.” While Stivers advocates for theory as the glue to hold the pieces of the puzzle—the State—together, we suggest that affect is the gameboard upon which the puzzle rests. We argue for theory that is full, not theory that ignores the emotive dimension to living, loving, working, engaging, experiencing, deciding, suffering, and enjoying.

For too long, the social sciences—public administration included—have been content with a schizoid approach to understanding life. Ca nonization of the cognitive and simultaneous denial of the emotive has brought the literature of the field to where it is today: rich in the cognitive dimensions of collective action and governing, but oblivious to the emotive dimension. Whether public administrators are better at their jobs with this wealth of measures, systems, and rubrics remains an open question.

For citizens to be engaged with government, they must care about it. It is not spreadsheets that cause people to riot in the streets; it is feelings. It is not facts and proverbs that bond citizens to their flag; it is feelings. Emotion factors into the entire administrative continuum, from citizen engagement and participation at the grassroots level (see Selznick, 1949) to frontline delivery of services (see Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003) to the symbols of governance at the top of the flagpole (see Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2015).

When academic programs build curricula to train students in administrative competencies, much of the skill that determines success is emotive while most of the training is cognitive. Whether in leadership development, consensual decision making, employee engagement and teambuilding, or organization commitment and development, textbook pages take the student only a few steps forward, compared to the emotive component of the work. As Stivers says, it is meaning that citizens and workers, alike, seek.

This issue of Administrative Theory & Praxis is devoted to the affective dimension to public administration. Like peeking through a keyhole, each article addresses a unique application that holds promise for additional development. In this introduction, we argue that emotion work is as much a part of public service as is cognitive work. Whether viewed through the lens of theory, practice, or citizen engagement, there is a need for exploration. We turn first to theory.

THEORY

To the extent that administrative theory is a body of explanations for how public servants make decisions and implement policy, affect should be an acknowledged component. Yet this is not the case. Hindy Lauer Schachter explains the scientific management principles that still prevail. They are predicated on five fundamental tenets: top down control, centralization of authority, hierarchical structure, differentiation between management and labor, and reliance on “laws” of human nature” (1989, pp. 21–22). The problem is that “laws of human nature” have been honored in the breach, if at all. And the field has marched happily forward, incorporating networks, teams, and coproduction, while still overlooking the essence of that which motivates people to go the extra mile as they deliver public services and encourage citizen engagement.

The explosion of interest in public service motivation and human performance are indicators that the field is attempting to expand its focus beyond its mechanical/cognitive heritage. The proliferation of research on public service motivation is evidence of the burgeoning interest in questions of what impels workers to pursue careers in public service (e.g., Ritz, Brewer, & Neumann, 2016). The interest in social psychology unearths questions about why people behave as they do (e.g., Grimmelikhuijsen, et al., 2017). With the exception of Hsieh, et al., (2012), however, studies stop short of assessing the emotive challenges and rewards of public service, in terms of how workers experience their joys and their heartaches. Even in reform-minded organizations, Newman and Guy observe (1998, p. 291) that the doctrine of scientific management remains alive and well. Taylor’s legacy is evident in the reform initiatives of reinvention, right-sizing, restructuring, re-engineering, and pay-for-performance. Each of these sets goals to eliminate waste, do more with less, enhance productivity, and make governance more efficient and rational—perhaps effective in a limited sense, but not affective.

Our argument is not a new one; instead, it is one that raises its head but was drowned out decade after decade. The work of Jane Addams (see Shields, 2017), Mary Parker Follett (1919, 1940b), and Frances Perkins (1934), all speak to the “laws of human nature” more clearly than currently accepted theory. Their writings make clear that the exercise of power flows in multiple directions and that it is the whole person who comes to work each day, not just that portion of each person that is cognitive and physical. Addams, Follett, and Perkins have confidence in workers’ abilities, and all come closer to appreciating the fullness of human capacity, beyond just cognition.

Another way to see the illogic of focusing only on cognitive skills can be found in the popularity of needs-based motivation theories. Consider Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy, for example. It is intuitively satisfying and continues to be taught. It specifies five levels of needs, the lowest two of which (physiological and safety needs) impel behavior to avoid the fear of being hungry and unsafe. The three higher levels (belongingness, self-esteem, and self-actualization) impel behavior that brings happiness. They are all emotion-driven because emotions do what the word implies: emovere, which means to move from one state to another or to stir up.

Failure to acknowledge and to incorporate the emotive demands and rewards of work has real consequences. It results in alienation, which O’Donohue and Nelson (2014) attribute to the vestiges of industrial production methods and which Karl Marx attributes to capitalism (1932). Fragmentation of the labor process means that workers perform repetitive tasks without a sense of their contribution to the overall outcome. Their absence of control over work processes, lack of discretion and autonomy, and role ambiguity leave them feeling more like machines than like people. And an emphasis on extrinsic rewards to the exclusion of intrinsic rewards denies the meaning of work. This dilemma has implications for praxis.

PRAXIS

Oblivion to the emotive component of work, both in terms of what workers give and what they get, leaves a black hole where intrinsic rewards are not acknowledged and deleterious effects are not resolved. Engagement, commitment, and job satisfaction are benefits that motivate those in public service to dedicate their careers. Burnout, emotive exhaustion, and discouragement are threats. In public service, alienation has serious consequences because it affects how citizens view government. A public servant alienated from her work alienates citizens from the state because inauthenticity is detectable.

Similar to how Joyce Fletcher (1999) describes the masculine logic of effectiveness in organizations, there is a cognitive logic of effectiveness that obscures the emotive. It is accepted as so natural and right that it seems odd to call it cognitive. This logic of effectiveness suppresses or “disappears” behavior that is inconsistent with its basic premises, even when that behavior contributes to organizational goals. The result is that organizations adopt the rhetoric of humanism but end up disappearing the very behavior that would embrace emotion work alongside cognitive work. For this reason, we urge the affective turn in public administration theory.

As Antonio Damasio (2005) so clearly demonstrates in Descartes’ Error, it is emotion that gives humans the capacity to assign social value to alternatives in decision problems and prevents paralysis-of-analysis. In studies of people with brain damage to the area of the brain governing affect, Damasio discovered that although capable of manipulating concepts and variables in a decision problem, those studied were unable to reach a decision. And as we know, feelings are motivators and drivers of behavior, for they provide meaning.

It is simply not true that the mind and the body are separate entities, unaffected by one another. Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism has driven western scholarly thought and embedded itself into administrative theory, even though it is wrong. We pay the price as we question why our organizations do not run as smoothly as their design predicts; work motivation falters; and citizen engagement does not happen as desired.

Public jobs come with both public demands and personal demands. Officials must sense the emotive state of the citizen, analyze what the desired state should be in order to have a successful encounter, determine what actions to take in order to achieve the desired state, and then modify their own behavior in order to achieve this. This instantaneous sensing and responding is emotional labor and contributes to how the citizen “feels” during the encounter and how the citizen rates the encounter afterward. The teacher who must mollify angry parents, the caseworker who must investigate family members in response to a child abuse report, the emergency responder who must assure a frightened accident victim, the police officer who must arrest an agitator, the zoning regulator who must reject a waiver request, the public information officer who must address an uneasy crowd—none of these encounters will proceed in the absence of emotional labor.

Officials must balance the pressures and constraints of organizational demands and norms against the needs of the citizen and the human-ness of the situation. The official is a discretion-wielding actor who must express or suppress emotions in order to elicit the desired response from the citizen. It is necessary if the job is to be accomplished. The encounter’s outcome is molded by the successful performance of the official.

CITIZENSHIP

Alienation from one’s own government is the estrangement, disconnect, or exclusion from the administrative process felt by the citizen whom government is meant to serve (Timney & Kelly, 2000). Its consequences are no less than this: at worst, antigovernment violence, and at best, antagonistic rhetoric and protests that shut down offices and schools. To use a recent example, the high costs of public pensions are stirring passions across the political spectrum. This creates a dangerous narrative that pits neighbor against neighbor, where the firefighter’s retirement comes at the cost of primary education, and where the police officer’s disability comes at the cost of the school teacher’s raise. Karl Marx theorized about the alienation of labor under capitalism, and while the public sector may seem outside Marx’s scope, in the American context, government, nonprofits, and business operate within a regulated-capitalist system. Most public management reforms introduce the discipline of the market into public service delivery and minimize the role of the state.

Moreover, customer satisfaction and other performance indicators shape government services and therefore incentivize public servants to mimic private sector service delivery. Lauer (2008) traces this phenomenon further back in the history of Western civilization, describing “the post-Enlightenment citizen-cum-consumer” (2008, p. 45) who exerts competitive pressure on local government service delivery and expresses his preferences by voting with his feet (Tiebout, 1956). The market mentality not only produces the citizen/consumer, but also rationalizes shifting public services to unelected and unaccountable contractors. Outsourcing and privatization distances administration even further from the public while elevating the value of efficiency over the value of genuine deliberation.

Even when the importance of citizen engagement is acknowledged, there is little research into the public encounter. Blinders prevent the articulation between theory and praxis. Charles Goodsell (1981) identified this lacuna decades ago, attributing it to the fact that public administration focuses on policy implementation, while leaving the actual encounter to the work of various professions who view it not through the citizen-state lens, but rather through the perspectives of their own disciplinary blinders. Thus, sociologists focus on bureaucracy, roles, and functions. Social work focuses on the therapeutic exchange; education focuses on the teaching relationship; and healthcare professionals focus on treatment. Lost in this is the overarching importance of the state-citizen encounter.

SEEING THE EMOTIVE COMPONENT

The articles in this issue focus on the emotive component in public service work and present a variety of lenses through which the subject can be studied. First, Drury’s paper tells stories, and by doing so, she operationalizes the interplay between emotion, reason, and service delivery, by presenting six vignettes from child welfare work. These demonstrate the applicability of Damasio’s thinking, which is described in the book review written by Patterson and Mastracci. The evidence suggests a close bond between the processes of reasoning and the processing of emotions and vice versa. In short, emotion and reason are not the isolated functions expressed in Cartesian dualism, but rather they comprise an essential, interdependent system. To ignore one is to tell only half the story.

Miller-Fox’s research focuses on training for law enforcement officers and suggests initiatives that can develop resilience and provide officers with the emotional “grit” to be effective in their jobs. Relatedly, Nuriel Heckler’s book review of Cabin Pressure, by Louwanda Evans, highlights how race factors into expectations for what it takes for the “other”—in this case, African American airline pilots—to smile and carry on with their jobs when their expertise is challenged. The book makes plain that there are many workplace encounters that require extraordinary suppression of feelings. Whether a cop walking the beat or an African American airline pilot, emotive displays are scripted and required in order to get the job done.

While most research on emotional labor looks across-the-board at multiple occupations, the Miranda and Godwin contribution offers a model for how a single profession practiced in multiple work settings and types of interactions can be studied to advance theory development. The Mastracci and Adams article offers a different perspective on emotional labor by linking Karl Marx’s categories of alienation to the emotive demands of public service. They use their analysis to address the consequences of unsupported emotional labor, in other words, work that is not supported by organizational structures and support mechanisms.

Guy and Azhar demonstrate how comparison across cultures reveals both similarities in terms of emotional labor understandings as well as subtle differences. Combining questions of both gender and culture in Korea, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, the U.K., and the United States, their research shows that linguistic nuances cause meanings to differ for women and men in some cultures but not others. In other words, gender matters, emotion matters, and culture matters. While obvious on its face, this begs for further exploration and understanding. In sum, all the contributions in this issue poke the sleeping bear, raising questions for inquiry, theory development, and improved praxis.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

To get to the heart of the matter, the articles demonstrate how the emotive component in public service work can inform theory, research, and practice. Casting aside the shackles of traditional approaches to public administration theory, which overlook the prime movers of behavior—the unmeasurable, invisible, emotive components—they come to terms with the intersubjectivity that arises when people encounter and engage one another. Both civic mind and civic heart must be addressed in our theories of administrative action. Theory that is practicable must account for the emotive connection between citizen and state, even though it may not be tangible. Otherwise, it is incomplete theory. It matters not that emotion may not be “objectively real.” What matters is that it sculpts and motivates action.

The establishment of processes, procedures, rules, objectives, benchmarks and outcome measures are important, but they represent only the civic mind. Improving life-in-community and how people feel about their government are important dimensions to public administration. They constitute a springboard for broader understanding of what public service is and does.

The emotive component to governance is the connective tissue that makes the cognitive work. The feeling that citizens have for their government must be both the beginning point and end point of the citizen-state relationship. Societal faultlines will not be healed by Big Data. They will be healed with meaningfulness and a feeling that things are working okay. The articles that follow describe various perspectives on how the emotive component provides civic nutrition and how the affective turn will illuminate the darkness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary E. Guy

Mary E. Guy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado—Denver. Her research focuses on the human processes involved in public service delivery with a special emphasis on emotional labor. Recent books include Essentials of Public Service: An Introduction to Contemporary Public Administration (with Todd Ely) and Public Administration Evolving: From Foundations to the Future (with Marilyn Rubin). She is past president of the American Society for Public Administration and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Sharon H. Mastracci

Sharon Mastracci is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. She researches the experience of working in the public sector, specifically emotional labor in public service. Projects in progress include assessments of interventions to sustain resilience in emergency responders and in corrections. She also researches gender in organizations, personnel administration, and organizational behavior. She was a 2014–2015 Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom.