Power, Politics and the Emotions

Hunter, Shona

doi:10.4324/9780203798041

Cited by 69 publications

(42 citation statements)

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“…Even though our study is surely explorative in nature, our findings suggest that it is important to pay more attention to the emotional dimension of frontline work. Recently, scholars from various disciplines have pointed to the role of emotions in policy‐making and public service delivery (e.g., Graham, ; Hunter, ; Jupp, Pykett, & Smith, ). With regard to the transformation of the German welfare state, it has been argued that welfare reforms have engendered emotional states of fear, and that these feelings of anxiety, in turn, enforce compliance with the expectations of increased individual responsibilities (Betzelt & Bode, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion, persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

2018

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Following Michael Lipsky's well‐known argument that policy is made in the daily encounters between street‐level bureaucracy and citizens, a growing body of research emphasizes that actors and organizations delivering social and labor‐market policy play a crucial role in welfare‐state politics. Using qualitative data collected at three local employment agencies in Germany, this article explores worker‐client relations as a crucial mechanism through which activation policies are translated into practice. The analysis investigates how caseworkers define their role and their relationships with clients. The findings show that it is essential for caseworkers to achieve client compliance. In such a context, building relationships of trust is a strategic instrument in overcoming possible barriers to co‐operation in the caseworker‐client interaction. Caseworkers develop strategies to create the impression of trustworthiness and to motivate both unemployed clients and employers to become trust‐givers in the caseworker‐client relation. While research has often stressed the dichotomy between disciplining and enabling elements of activation policies, our explorative study shows that persuasion and trust‐building are a further important dimension of the frontline delivery of activation policies. These strategies reflect the importance of emotional aspects of frontline work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion, persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

2018

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“…Thus, what at the outset could be defined as a democratic and participatory meeting may become a meeting between actors who are positioned differently along the axes of power and who can/cannot draw on various resources within the existing power structures. It is their interplay, underpinned by the interacting power and emotion structures, that both brings institutions to life (Hunter 2015) and brings life to institutions (Bolton 2005).…”

Section: Emotions and Power In Institutional Meetingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Participants in such interactions are prescribed definite roles. However, seen through the perspective of relational politics discourse (Hunter 2015), institutions do have lives, and these lives are actively recreated and enacted by lived actors who bring their diverse subjectivities to an institutional space to transform institutions or to be transformed by them. Messiness, unpredictability, and dynamism rather than order, stability, and flattened images of institutional life come to the fore.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion ability - practices of affective citizenship in the work rehabilitation process

Wilińska

Bülow

2018

Critical Policy Studies

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This article introduces the concept of emotion ability to illuminate the process whereby institutional meetings become an arena for testing, evoking, and regulating emotions that are deemed necessary to meet institutional goals. It focuses on the relationships and practices that are collaboratively constructed by welfare workers and clients when they interact within the context of institutional meetings. Based on an interactional analysis of a multi-party meeting, this article demonstrates the ways in which clients' ability to read, interpret, and follow specific feeling rules becomes the focal point of attention. Using video recordings, we illustrate that this process is highly collaborative, and it involves both language and body. The ability to act in accordance with the expected and required 'right feelings' emergent in the institutional encounter is, thus, a result of highly interactive processes. We discuss the concept of emotion ability as a concrete micro-level mechanism through, which practices of affective citizenship are realized in the context of institutional interactions.

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“…This is because complicity is part of the wider conditions of living, working, existing and investing in states of domination, and the ways that these are patterned through human actors' multiplicities, biographies, and relations, and link to individual and collective questions of power and nationhood. Shona Hunter's (2015) critique of state relationalities expands Probyn-Rapsey's argument, because the author theorises multiplicities to demonstrate the social relations of governance as constituted by, and constitutive of, racialised, gendered and classed power and inequalities. Hunter thinks about everyday interactions, actions and practices as "negotiating already existing entities and the negotiations themselves as bringing the entities into being" in a material and moral, ethical and political sense.…”

Section: Conclusion: Shame and Complicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Recollection-as-method in social welfare practice: dirty work, shame and resistance

Dobson

2017

QRJ

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, "recollection-as-method", and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.Design/methodology/approach -The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author's experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.Findings -The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.Research limitations/implications -Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.Practical implications -The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across "front-line" social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.Social implications -This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.Originality/value -The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

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Power, Politics and the Emotions

Cited by 69 publications

References 0 publications

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion, persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

Practices of activation in frontline interactions: Coercion, persuasion, and the role of trust in activation policies in Germany

Emotion ability - practices of affective citizenship in the work rehabilitation process

Recollection-as-method in social welfare practice: dirty work, shame and resistance

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