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Resistance as Emotional Labour:
The Australian and Canadian Nonprofit Social Services
Donna Baines
Associate Professor
Labour Studies and Social Work
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON Canada L8S 4M4
[email protected]
Conference paper for the ILPC Conference, April 2009. Please contact author before
citing for updated publication details.
1
Introduction
The topic of emotions at work is addressed within a perspective known as emotional
labour. This perspective argues that emotions have increasingly entered the realm of paid
work as a management resource for smoothing and speeding up service encounters
(Hochschild, 1983). Though an extensive literature debates the contours and tensions of
emotions within the workplace, the overlap of values and emotions is less explored.
Unlike highly commercialized venues such as fast food which deliberately suppress
workers real feelings in order to control the customer and speed up the service interaction
(Leidner, 1999), areas of work that have caring and/or social justice at their core, depend
on the emotions inherent in compassionate social relationships in order to accomplish their
work (Karabanow, 1999; Bolton, 2000; Lewis, 2005; Lopez, 2006).
The voluntary or nonprofit social services (NPSS) defines itself as a values- and
social justice-based sector. Core values emphasize equity, client self determination, full
social participation, the importance of human relationships, and the responsibility to
pursue social change and equity. A large body of research affirms the centrality of mission
(values-based statements of agency goals) in nonprofit work, buffering the impact of poor
wages and working conditions and offering workers opportunities to live their values on
the job (Salamon, 1993; Cunningham, 2001, Brisbois and Saunders, 2003; Nickson et al.
2008). The implementation of these values is never easy and restructuring in the sector has
erected major roadblocks to values-based practice. Considerable research shows that
dissatisfaction, stress and job leaving occurs when circumstances do not permit employees
to work in tandem with their values, suggesting personal/professional dissonance and
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disruption (Aronson and Sammon, 2000; Baines, 2004b; Asquith, Clark and Waterhouse,
2005; Seibert, 2006). While some studies have explored care work nursing and similar
care professions, which have „skilled emotion management at the centre of () their labour
process‟ (Lewis 2005: 518), very few have explored values-based care professions such as
nonprofit social service work in which skilled emotion management involves ongoing
management of one‟s own and other‟s expectations about care provision, while
simultaneously challenging and resisting factors that constrain values-based work content.
Drawing on data collected as part of a larger study of the experience of
restructuring in the nonprofit (voluntary) social services in Canada and Australia, this
article will explore the emotional content and values saturating the workers‟ sense of
themselves as caring, ethical beings, the way they wish they could perform their work,
factors that impede their values-based performance, and resistance strategies developed in
response to decreased worker autonomy and increased management control of the labour
process. The article starts by discussing the larger study from which this article is drawn.
The second section sets the context of the study and presents a brief review of the relevant
literature. In the third section, central findings are examined in an ethnographic style in
which description is interlaced with analytical comments and reflections (Geertz, 1973).
The article ends with further discussion and conclusions.
3
The Study
Due to their similar, yet distinct, social welfare states and history, comparisons between
Australia and Canada provided excellent opportunities to tease out the complexities and
subtleties of changes in the nonprofit social services sector. Data analysed for this article
were collected through 66 qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews (Glesne, 2005;
Kirby, Greaves and Reid, 2005) with a variety of players in unionised nonprofit social
service organisations in Australia and Canada (46 frontline workers and 20 agency
managers and executive officers), as well as a surface review of various agency
documents. Research participants were recruited through postings on various community,
social service and union websites and newsletters. When posted notices failed to produce
sufficient numbers of interviewees, a snowball sampling method was utilised (Glesne,
2005). The agencies in which research participants worked were typical of the nonprofit
social services sector providing services such as child welfare and family, settlement,
mental health, shelter for the homeless, housing, home care, and anti violence. Like the
sector (Brisbois and Saunders, 2005), the sample was predominantly female (75%), with
an average of 37 years old (range 22-64) and a mean of 8 years employment in the sector
(range 2 to 31 years). All participants had post-secondary education - - front-line staff
most commonly had two year human service diplomas or four year degrees (Social Work,
Early Life Education, Community Development, Health, Psychology, Sociology, Nursing,
Youth and Child), while managerial staff held degrees or diplomas in psychology,
sociology or management/business related studies.
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Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. In-depth, semistructured interviews followed an interview guide in which participants were asked to
comment on changes they had experienced in the last few years, reasons for working and
staying in the nonprofit sector, changes they would like to see, advice they would give to
others and their experience of working in this environment. A number of documents were
also analysed, including agency flyers, general policy publications, and various
publications around collective bargaining produced by the union local and/or agency
management. A constant comparison method informed by Grounded Theory (Strauss and
Corbin, 1998) was used to analyse the data. NVIVO (a computer-based qualitative
analysis package) was used to organise and manage data, including open coding (Strauss
and Corbin, 1990) and data mapping (Glesne, 2005; Kirby, Greaves and Reid, 2005).
Data were repeatedly compared until patterns could be established and themes confirmed
within and across the data. Informed by critical theory, throughout the analysis I sought to
be aware of the contradictions and tensions between and within the data, my praxis
knowledge and issues in the literature (Madison, 2005; Thomas, 1993).
Qualitative studies can provide rich insights, highlighting tensions and connections
between and among complex seemingly contradictory pieces of everyday social life
(Kirby et al., 2005). However, qualitative interview data represents the impressions of
research participants, and thus encounters limitations in terms of providing partial views of
social phenomenon and situated observations. Though unionization is growing in the
nonprofit sector, this sample is composed entirely of who are members of unions or work
in a unionised environment which may mean that participants are more inclined towards
social equity and solidarity than their non-union counterparts. Qualitative studies are
5
specific to the context in which the data is collected and while they may provide important
insights for other contexts and issues, no claim is made that they should be widely
generalized (Glesne, 2005).
Context and Literature
The widely accepted social welfare state underwent massive restructuring across the
industrialized world, downsizing provision, reducing entitlements, and introducing market
logics in sectors where public service or social care had previously been the modis
operandi (Fabricant and Brughardt, 1992; Clarke and Newman, 1997; Lightman, 2006).
Experiencing significant growth concomitant with public sector downsizing and
offloading, Australian and Canadian nonprofit social services became increasingly
promarket as they ideologically and concretely supplemented, supported, extended, and
legitimized commercialism and corporatism (Baines, 2004a, 2004b). They are
simultaneously nonmarket as most nonprofits do not engage in commercial activities or
generate profits and remain somewhat connected to notions of social care and participation
(Baines, 2004a).
Restructuring in social service work organisations invoked science (such as
evidence-based practice), managerialism (such as New Public Management), or both in an
effort to harness care workers‟ emotional labour and meet „targets‟ such as cost efficiency
or tax payer accountability. Though masked as improved performance and flexibility,
these forms of work organisation regulate and standardise emotional labour, encouraging
workers to follow carefully quantified process from intake, through assessment, service
provision and termination, leaving little room for professional discretion, relationship
building, or the value saturated and open ended processes of social equity and community
6
empowerment (Dominelli, 2004; Lundy, 2004; Baines, 2004a). This tension between
values, care and relationship building is often the focal point of employee resistance.
For many decades, the nonprofit sectors in Canada and Australia have been sites in
which civil society organisations, including in religious, reform and social justice groups,
provided a range of services and advocacy for long term and newly emerging social needs
(Considine, 2000; McDonald and Marsden, 2002; Brainard and Siplon, 2007). These
services included: social housing for the hard to house, addictions services for the under
served, child welfare, settlement services, care for people with disabilities, shelters for the
homeless and survivors of wife abuse, and so forth. The goal of these services was not to
supplant public provision but to extend and challenge it to be more responsive,
participatory and equity-directed. As noted earlier, workers consistently report that they
are drawn to the voluntary sector because of the opportunity it provides to work within
organisations committed to values of social and individual care, social equity and fairness,
as well as broader social justice (Nickson et al., 2008; Cunningham, 2001; Brock and
Banting, 2001). Research suggests that restructuring in the sector has put the value-base
and participatory culture of the nonprofit sector at risk (Weisbrod, 1998; Van Til, 2000;
Brainard and Siplon, 2007). Decreased staff complements and increased workloads mean
that social service workers have little or no time to devote to values-centred work such as
advocacy, outreach or community mobilisation (Baines, 2004b, 2006; Richmond and
Shields, 2004), and increased pace, volume and intensity of work leaves workers
vulnerable to burn out and stress (Lait and Wallace, 2002).
A number of studies of public and nonprofit sector social services employ a labour
process analysis to detail the shifts in power noted above (Harris, 1998; Garrett, 2003;
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Baines, 2004b, 2006; Cunningham, forthcoming), moving beyond Braverman‟s basic
degradation theory to provide a more nuanced analysis of a sector in flux, shaped by shifts
in governance, the market and the state, replete with new processes ensuring increased
managerial control as well as, often limited or subterranean, opportunities for workers to
resist oppressive practices and redefine social provision. Based in, or drawing on, a labour
process analysis, a number of major studies used the concept of emotional labour to
explore the dynamics of service and care work (Bolton, 2000; Boyd, 2000; Guy and
Newman, 2004; Monachie, 2005). Arlie Hochschild (1983) defines emotional labour as
the „management of feeling to create a publicity observable facial and bodily display‟
among workers in order to smooth or speed up service encounters, and/or attain other
organisational goals. Numerous studies have expanded Hochschild‟s original theses
claiming more space for worker agency, resistance and enjoyment of emotional content at
work (Guy and Newman, 2004; Bolton and Boyd, 2003; Mirchandani, 2003; Taylor and
Tyler, 2000). For example, within care professions such as nursing, social work, mental
health and childcare, emotional labour is seen to be the central and often the most
meaningful and rewarding aspect of the job (Henderson, 2001; Boyd, 2000; Shuler and
Sypher, 2000). Others note that within public sector and care work, emotional labour „can
exacerbate dissatisfaction‟ and contribute to burn out or „heighten one‟s sense of
accomplishment and level of experience‟ (Guy, Newman and Mastracci, 2008:180).
Though restructuring has tightened management control over emotion labour and
circumscribed workers‟ capacity to pursue values-saturated work activities, as Sharon
Bolton (2005:3) asserts, workers are „purposive agents‟ who find ways to bring meaning
to their everyday work encounters, and assert integrity in their use of emotional labour
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(also Franzway, 2000; Bone, 2002; Lewis, 2005). Bolton (2005) argues further that new
research strategies are needed to capture the „many faces‟ of emotion work (164) in order
to „acknowledge the potential transformative power of human action whilst also
recognising forces which inhibit‟ it (also, p.153). An exploration of the capitalist labour
process in which emotional labour is a central axis of investigation provides an important
way to explore the everyday processes and structural forms in which emotional labour
takes place (5-6).
The concept of resistance is well known in sociology and labor studies. Studies of
resistance explore the ways that workers are involved in „getting back and getting by‟ in
specific workplaces and workplaces in general (Nichols & Armstrong, 1976). Resistance
involves minor infractions of rules, open advocacy for change, or a combination of both
(Buroway, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Friedman, 1977). Many studies focus on the resistance
strategies in industrial, private sector settings (Buroway, 1979) or provide heroic accounts
of resistance, but less in the way of an analysis of „the ways in which intersecting and
often conflicting structures of power work together „(Abu-Lugod, p. 42).
Unlike industrial workers, NPSS employees often have a gendered and racialised
sense of moral and political obligation to provide care for individuals and communities
despite the curtailment of advocacy and activism in many nonprofit agencies. Workers
often blame governments and wider, uncaring society rather than just employers, for poor
wages and working conditions (Baines, 2004a; Carniol, 2000; Mullaly, 1997) and their
workplace resistance often targets multiple and somewhat abstract powers rather than
focusing on work-specific employers as the exclusive or even the primary target. Though
this broad-sweep approach to resistance is very different from strategies found in private
9
sector work, Aptheker (1989) argues that for many women, resistance flows from the
social conditions and spaces that are available to them. Their resistance strategies must be
judged from within the social context of women‟s lives and work as caregivers and those
responsible for everyday activities that sustain life.
The resistance of non-profit social services workers needs to be assessed from
within the highly gendered context in which care work is performed. Care work is largely
performed by women in paid and unpaid capacities in the home, private, public and
nonprofit sectors. Rather than a distinct set of skills and knowledge, care work is often
assumed to be an extension of what women do naturally, undermining calls for improved
wages and working conditions (Aronson and Neysmith, 1996; Meyer and Storbakken,
2000). At the height of the welfare state, many care jobs professionalized and commanded
reasonable wages and working conditions. However, welfare state retrenchment since the
1980s has pushed many of these jobs back into the unpaid realm of home or the low and
unpaid realm of nonprofit and volunteer work. For most women in the caring professions,
such as the NPSS, caring responsibilities contain a startling similarity of tasks, content,
and intensity whether they occur in the home, volunteer assignments or paid work
(Aronson and Neysmith, 1996; Baines, 2004a). Resistance, paid and unpaid work spill
over into other spheres in continuous and permeable ways, as do the values and emotions
behind them. Hence, resistance strategies may take on forms in which values, caring,
emotion labour and resistance overlap in unexpected and open ended ways in multiple and
seemingly disparate sites.
Drawing on relevant literature and qualitative interview data from multiple
players in the Canadian and Australian nonprofit social services sector, this article will
10
attend to the following question. What has changed in the nonprofit social services labour
process in the last few years, and how is emotion work embedded in these changes,
reactive to it, resistant to it, or all three?
Findings
Findings are discussed under three themes: emotion labour that sustains; restricting
emotional labour; and resistance strategies unique to this sector. Analysis, relevant
literature and the voices of the research participants are interwoven throughout.
Emotion Labour That Sustains: Values and Relationships in the NPSS
Values are deeply held beliefs and feelings about what is important or desirable, expressed
through acts, thoughts and ideas. Those who attempt to live their values through their
everyday actions are thought to achieve emotional integration and a certain level of
emotional well being (Ulrich et al., 2007), while those who experience dissonance
between their values and practices are often frustrated, anxious, and prone to negative
impacts on their health and well being (Lait and Wallace, 2002). The majority of the
research participants in this study cited „values‟ and the capacity to work in a job
consistent with their values and/or politics as the major reason for working in the sector.
As a mid level manager who had previously been employed in the private sector noted,
„I‟m not happy working in place where people just care about profits. I choose to work
here because I get the chance to give back and be part of something better.‟ (Male, multiservice centre, Canada)
A number of respondents noted that another major draw to the sector was the opportunity
to work with „fantastic people‟, by which they meant service users and fellow staff. Their
characterisation of the service users as „fantastic people‟ speaks to the values-based sense
11
of service users as equals and as survivors of oppression rather than authors of their own
difficulties. This characterisation also reflects the idealised, though not always realised,
working relationship between service users and workers in the NPSS. In its optimal form,
this relationship is more horizontal and egalitarian than typical of other sectors, reflecting
the participatory and equity-directed values of the sector. The emotional labour within this
type of reciprocal relationship is notably different than within the more traditional,
hierarchical, expert model common to most professions. In most professional
relationships a certain emotional distance from service users is thought to be appropriate
and therapeutic. Service users, their emotions and problems are responded to with
„professionalism‟ which often involves detached civility, and the avoidance emotional
outbursts or scenes that might slow service delivery or delay treatment (Green, Gregory
and Mason, 2006; Carniol, 2005). The more egalitarian relationships in the NPSS require
emotional participation from both worker and client with the worker taking responsibility
for eliciting joint participation, and establishing a connection with the client that has the
potential to meet the client‟s needs as well as educe social and individual change.
Research participants‟ descriptions of the work involved in this type of valuesbased relationship underscored its intensity as well as their sense of satisfaction and
reward.
The best thing about this job is the great people you get to work with (service
users), their amazing stories, the way they‟ve gotten through unbelievable things
and they‟re still standing. You‟ve gotta respond to that kind of survival with
respect, deep respect, because I have no idea if I could deal with what they have to
face on an everyday basis. (Female, front-line staff, multi service centre, Australia)
12
Various aspects of the relationships with „excellent service users‟ included: being
part of empowering people, helping people find their voice to advocate for themselves,
advocating for service users in situations when a non-professional voice would be
discounted, having service users return to visit workers after having turned their lives
around, and service users who express gratitude to workers. Aspects of the relationships
with „excellent‟ co-workers included: working with „skilled and dedicated people‟, who
„never give up‟, „really care‟ about the service users, have a „total commitment to social
justice‟, „a wealth of knowledge on how to fight back‟ and „organize people to work
collectively‟, and are „always willing to help people out‟. As will be discussed in more
detail in the next section, the negative aspects of the work occur in situations where it is
not possible to work consistent with one‟s values.
Restricting Emotional Labour: Roadblocks to Values and Relationships
The data show that restructuring in the NPSS limited the capacity of research participants
to work in tandem with their social justice values, and that this was a major source of
value dissonance and frustration. Research participants argued that under the New Public
Management models, new, lean working conditions were introduced, thinning out the
workforce and „flexibilizing‟ those remaining into increasingly temporary, part-time, splitshift and casual positions. These changes in work organisation meant that most people
worked largely on their own, with increased caseloads, undertaking repetitive, often
bureaucratic tasks, documenting and processing individual service users, rarely seeing
their supervisors and having limited contact with co-workers. The increased pace,
intensity and volume of work undermined was felt to undermine employees‟ capacity to
work in tandem with their values. A child and family worker commented on her
13
frustration, arguing that although she still wants to do advocacy and community
mobilisation,
We don‟t have time like we used to. I can‟t work with a family to build their skills,
and link them up with what they need and stand up for them when they need it. It‟s
just in the door, quick assessment, promise to call next week with a case plan and
back out the door to file the paperwork. I find it soulless and they (the clients) just
look at me like „what is the point of all this?‟ (Female, child and family services,
Canada)
Some participants claimed that they had been disciplined or denied new positions because
„I tried to live my values in my work‟, standing up for service users and organising in the
community. In the words of one research participant, disciplinary measures „cast a chill‟
over more activist interventions, serving as a warning to others contemplating similar
values-based interventions.
Research participants found it jarring that service users were increasingly „blamed
for their problems‟ and that solutions were increasingly narrow and inadequate. The
literature confirms that public entitlements are more and more residual or targeted only at
those thought to be unable to be authors of their own lives (Rose, 1996; Lightman, 2006).
Rather than the target of social change and political action, research participants observed
a growing acceptable among co-workers that social problems were „unchangeable‟ and
something „that will be around forever‟. Research participants noted that the aspects of
the work that first drew them nonprofit social services and that they felt should have
comprised the central and most positive aspects of their work (values, caring, making
changes, trying solutions, empowering people) have become increasingly absent and/or
negated within new labour processes. Research participants also observed that the sector
seems full of emergency situations and near disasters. Funding cuts in the public and
14
nonprofit sectors have meant that even early and mid-intervention programs often end up
serving as crisis intervention projects in which poorly resourced and sub adequate services
are provided to an increasingly desperate group of service users with few, if any other
options (Mosher, 2000; McDonald, 2006).
Though emotions underlie workers‟ frustration with the new organisation of work
and servicing, these emotions are negative and detract from a sense of satisfaction with the
work. Managing this disappointment became a taxing part of everyday work and an
additional aspect of emotional labour in the NPSS. A child and family worker (Australia)
noted the responsibility she feels she holds for other people‟s emotions and the stress this
involves,
I would say nonprofit work has a unique sort of stress about it. When you deal
with other people‟s emotional health and dreams all day, it is a very intimate thing
you carry around with you, a very intimate bunch of information and expectations.
Not being able to meet these expectations, let alone your own, is probably one of
the most stressful things around. It gets you at an intimate level.
Forms of Resistance Unique to this Sector: The Solidarity-Gift Model
A clear dynamic can be seen to exist between the capacity to work in tandem with social
justice values and the limits imposed by a promarket labour process committed to narrow
notions of efficiency and cost saving. As a mid-level mental health counsellor (Female,
Australia) observed,
Most of us are here because we want to work with people in not just in a way that
makes a difference, but in a different way – we don‟t want to just fill in reports and
push paper…. We want to work in a way that empowers people and challenges
systems that harm people. We want to organize with the community to take control
back, not just put band aids on a few of the more obvious victims.
15
As documented elsewhere, workers have contested the transfer of control from the
front-lines to management, and found a number of ways to retain values-based ways of
working as well as more emotionally satisfying ways of working with service users and
communities within, and increasingly outside, their paid employment (Aronson and
Sammon, 2000; Lundy, 2004; Baines, 2004b, accepted; Carniol, 2005; Smith, 2007).
These practices included: advocating for service users even when told not to; encouraging
service users to advocate for themselves even when it involved risk to the worker; bending
rules and looking for other ways to get service users all they are entitled to and more;
taking on many hours of unpaid, volunteer work in their own agencies and others;
organising service user groups; building coalitions; providing new and innovative services
for free; and using their unions as vehicles for social justice (including: ending the war in
Iraq, campaigning for an end to queer bashing, demanding care for homeless people,
challenging funding cuts and layoffs, opposing sexism, racism and homophobia, and
working to end poverty). The goal of these activities was to redress larger wrongs in the
community and workplace while simultaneously returning a sense of agency and integrity
to the workers.
In Canada1, some NPSS workers were increasingly using their unions‟ as
organisations through which they undertook the social justice activities and debates that
were no longer a part of their everyday paid work (Baines, 2009). The decentralisation of
some of the unions involved in the NPSS, plus their official commitment to social justice
made the local union organisation a vibrant site of values-connected activism and provided
workers with the „voice‟ they felt they lost under neoliberal restructuring. When asked
why they unionised or became union activists, workers in the Canadian NPSS argued that
16
they had „lost their voice‟. This included their voice on policy issues, advocacy,
community development, service delivery, planning and evaluation and most importantly,
service users‟ needs. Lost voice seemed to represent a curtailment of the most meaningful
and rewarding aspects of their job. As one young worker put it, „If you haven‟t got
meaning in these jobs, what else have you got?‟ (Female, settlement services, Canada)
Twinning workplace and non-workplace organising, one local union developed a
core of activists whose goals was to sustain a local spirit that was „creative, effective, and
very positive, not negative and draggy‟ in order to advocate effectively in the workplace
and larger community. Reflecting notions of mutual help, the activists hoped to build „an
oasis for the members‟ or positive space to counteract the frequently negative feelings
associated with working in an increasingly circumscribed workplace.
A number of emotional labour authors differentiate between the masculinised
prescriptive-professional forms of tightly quantified, standardised emotion management
and the more open-ended, unscripted „feminised‟ philanthropic-gift model (Lewis, 2005:
578, also Bolton, 2005, Maconachie, 2005; Guy, Newman and Mastracci, 2008). While
the New Public Management models that dominate the NPSS epitomise the masculinised
forms of emotional labour. In contrast, resistance practices and an ongoing commitment
to work in tandem with social justice values exemplify the gift model where relationships
are other-directed and demand little or nothing from the recipient.
The resistance practices analysed in this paper represents an extension of the gift
model. The data shows that workers valued relationships with service users and
communities in which the parties involved are viewed as peers and fellow travellers in the
struggle for social justice. Going against the grain of professionalism and a society that
17
often vilifies poor and excluded people, these relationships reflected the participatory,
equity-driven values of the workers as well as hard emotional labour on their part. This
symbolizes a form of solidarity between differently positioned equals, embodying inter
connectedness, open ended caring, and forms of intervention that sustain and dignify the
parties involved. These relationships reflect both a unionist model of solidarity between
and among those with more and less power, as well as Apetheker‟s (1989) notion of
resistance in contexts where the odds are stacked against humanistic interaction and yet
people respond with careful, thoughtful actions that induce incremental, ongoing, and life
sustaining change.
This solidaritous-gift model is a dynamic in which workers maintain a consistent
relationship with themselves and their own sense of integrity, by defending the rights of
others and attempting to incorporate emotionally satisfying values-based, social justice
practices into their everyday paid and unpaid work. This ethos becomes a way for
workers to „juggle and synthesize‟ (Bolton, 2005:159) the contradictory realities of their
own and others‟ values and disappointments, as well as the difficulties they experience in
realizing the mission of the agencies in which they work. Everyday resistance practices
uphold this ethos within and beyond the workplace, safeguarding and expanding valuesbased practices and their values-saturated emotional meanings within an increasingly
circumscribed and standardised nonprofit sector. As one worker with twenty two years
experience put it
18
My agency has a policy that we will not replace paid workers with volunteers and I
support this one hundred per cent. But, I have to do out and do volunteer work. If I
didn‟t I wouldn‟t have a real sense of what is going on out there in the community,
I wouldn‟t be able to look my clients in the eye and say, „yeah, I know what you‟re
going through and I‟m with you in trying to change it‟…. I can‟t do it (social
change activities) on my job anymore but it still has to be done. (Male, youth
worker, Australia)
Discussion and Conclusions
At the beginning of this article, I noted that the NPSS is an area of work that has caring
and/or social justice at its core, and is dependent on the emotions inherent in
compassionate social relationships in order to accomplish its goals. Standardisation of
work practices under NPM blocked opportunities for NPSS workers to engage in
meaningful emotional labour (relationships, values-based care, organising for social
justice), replicating the emotional labour found in other service work where the goal is
speed-up and profit maximization. Resistance strategies re-inserted meaningful emotional
labour (relationships, values-based care, organising for social justice), softening the sharp
edges of standardised approaches, oozing into cracks and fissures in NPSS‟ mission and
work, opening new avenues and pathways for socially just ways of working. The research
participants in this study were purposive agents (Bolton, 2005:3) challenging the content
and boundaries of their jobs, working to restore mission and values, and finding creative
ways to assert meaning. These pathways will likely prove to be increasingly important as
the sector continues to restructures in the context of the current recession, generating
growing numbers of service users in dire need of social justice, care and empowerment.
19
Endnotes
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge funding from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council, the generous contributions of the research participants in
Canada and Australia, the conference organisers and the anonymous reviewers of this
paper.
1
The same phenomena was not found in the Australia data, probably because
opportunities still exist for advocacy and voice in the restructured community sector. In
additions, unions and the industrial relations culture operates in a distinctly different way
than in Canada (see Author, under review). Karen Healy and Gabrielle Meagher (2004)
call on social workers in Australia to revitalize their practice through collaborative
strategies and new forms of social unionism.
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