The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organi
zations 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 Aus
tria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gender
ing of public service work. We discovered four typical
modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and
female employment agents follow feminized service work pat
terns 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 activa
tion paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work
or by still adhering to affect-neutral male bureaucratic work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6435 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Glinsner, Barbara, Sauer, Birgit, Gaitsch, Myriam, Penz, Otto, Hofbauer, Johanna |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12263, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5852-3299, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6435/ |
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