Affective Labor of Employment Agents

Austrian Science Fund

Affective Labor of Employment Agents. Transformation of Public Services in Austria, Germany and Switzerland
The work of employment agents has become an increasingly difficult task ¿ due to growing unemployment and the reorganization of public services. The study examines the processes of state transformation towards entrepreneurial governance and enabling states, and focuses on the emergence of new ¿activate¿ labor market policies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Since the mid-1990s supposedly rational state bureaucracies are transformed into service providers, where citizens ought to be treated like costumers and public employees have to rely on personal communicative and affective properties in the work process. In that context we conceive affective labor as the centerpiece of contemporary service work and as a contested area of New Public Management. The empirical focus of the project lies on the interaction between public employees and their clients ¿ especially on the affective labor of employment agents. The project starts from the premise that the affective work regime in employment services has changed towards marketization of affects and entrepreneurial self-management of employment agents ¿ developments, which might impact on processes of state transformation. The comparison of three countries with rather similar welfare-state regimes investigates if state transformation is guided by national path-dependencies or by the convergence of state roles.