The purpose of this study is to examine the perceived freedom of discretion and emotional labour of travel service officers in relation to the austerity in political decisions. The study aims to raise the importance of travel service officers' role in people with reduced mobility lives and ability to move freely and without obstacles in society. The study uses Lipsky’s theory of Street-level bureaucracy to highlight what kind of work travel service officers do, and to analyse their perceived freedom of discretion. Together with Hochschild’s thoughts on emotional labour, which aims to point this study in the right direction when it comes to travel service officers' outlook on emotional labour in their work. The study’s empirical data consists of 10 qualitative interviews lasting approximately 45-60 minutes each. Since the aim is to gain an understanding of how the travel service officers experience their discretion and emotional labour, a phenomenological approach is utilized. The justification for the qualitative approaches is that the focus of the study is on the lived experiences of the travel service officers; human behaviour. The analysis of the collected material of the interviews resulted in 3 themes, The relationship in conversation with customers, the importance of work experience and different roles in the work of travel service officers. The study shows how work experience at the travel service government as an officer affects which role an officer takes on, and how that role affects how they view their discretion and essentially how they perceive their emotional labour as well. The study finds that officers with longer experience tend to have a more personal role with the customers, and the officers with shorter experience tend to take an approach of more authority.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-125209 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Norén, Idalie |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsstudier (SS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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