Abstract
As a public servant, it is incumbent to maintain a professional demeanor and leave the public feeling they were well “served.” The way in which this human interaction takes place (where the bureaucrat displays a combination of restraint, professionalism, positive demeanor, reassurance, trust, and even acting to some degree) is essential in the communication between servants and served. It may be learned, taught, experiential, a gift, or a combination of those—but necessary to do the job. This conscious action by the bureaucrat is referred to in the literature as “emotional labor.”
Now, let’s make our bureaucrat a first responder who is attending to the victim of what will become a fatal traffic accident. Our first responder is a street-level bureaucrat making a policy decision, albeit under dire circumstances, to employ emotional labor as a means to comfort the victim in his final moments of life. This is how Mastracci, Guy, and Newman have opened Working in the Razor’s Edge. This book aligns emotional labor with public servants who may be paramedics, law enforcement officers, child protection specialists, among others, and who must provide a vital public service in very difficult situations. First responders have to make those types of decisions at events, often without the benefit of consulting supervisors and managers, and often in a compressed time frame. The vast majority of people, thankfully, will never face a situation like this in their lives—except possibly through a media account or fictional portrayal.
Working in the Razor’s Edge builds upon the authors’ 2008 book, Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service and, to some degree, a journal article on “affective leadership” drawn from interviews with “social workers, 911 operators, corrections officials, detectives, and child guardians” (Newman, Guy, & Mastracci 2009, p. 6). Two caveats must be noted, in that I served for more than 30 years in public safety before moving to academia and, second, this area did not previously fall into my research interests at all. During a casual conversation with one of the coauthors, Meredith Newman, I immediately connected to the subject and identified with the research on a personal level. The authors have taken a complex topic and made it very “readable.” This is an example of exactly where the theory and practice in public administration should meet.
Chapter 1 introduces an extreme incident placed on public safety and how emotional labor plays an important role in handling the situation. The authors clearly and concisely lead the reader through their take on emotional labor and move away from the “traditional” scientific management/rationalist model of inquiry to a more qualitative approach. Despite growing up in the “traditional,” I concur with them that public administration research should be looking to other methods of inquiry. Excellent guidance can also be found in as Farmer’s (2010) “multiple lenses” approach and Riccucci’s (2010) varied theory building models. The gap between public administration theory and scholarship with the practice of public service is recognized further and in a stark manner in chapter 2. The authors note the three “strains” of study for emotion have been through “motivation, leadership, and emotional intelligence” (p. 21). Emotional labor does not fit neatly into the other strains, so our authors have opened a new one. Rather than work with the results of the interaction between the citizen and public servant, which included emotional labor, the authors study how the outcome was achieved. This is a critical point to following their position. Emotional labor comes up a number of notches in more extreme crisis situations.
Human capital is the subject of chapter 3. The public sector is not about producing widgets, rather service and service requires people to provide it. The authors discuss a self-care plan for the employee and recommending traits to consider during the recruitment and hiring process of potential applicants. While the discussion on Public Information Officers (PIOs) in chapter 4 is sensibly described, this is the only chapter I am not necessarily in agreement. PIOs are thoroughly trained and knowledgeable in using neutral terms and presentation methods. Public safety executives are also taught media “savvy” techniques in executive development courses. It should not be understated that PIOs are critical to the public safety mission. PIOs may practice/display emotional labor, but not on the spur of the moment or in the “extremes” like first responders. Perhaps we can settle for “emotional labor-lite”?
In chapter 5, we see “responsiveness” versus “accountability,” terms that are not synonymous. Responsiveness is generally straightforward for public safety—especially in crisis response—allocate resources, triage, and so forth. Accountability is a more complex system in political (external) and professional (internal) terms: How money is spent, the quality of service, perceptions, and so forth. The authors provide the big picture of different types of accountability in public safety and how they are interrelated. Chapter 6 describes those who actually perform emotional labor. People have to trust their public servants and can reasonably expect them to do their jobs properly, as well as the government fulfilling its obligations to recruit/hire, train, develop, and regulate employees that provide services. Public safety is generally White male dominated (though this is changing). The authors confirm the experiences where men and women approach emotional labor and its effects. For years, women were not permitted into firefighting or police work (in meaningful ways) and when they made inroads, it was into the masculine environment and sometimes at the cost of their femininity. The societal “norm” of men keeping feelings in while women are more expressive is amplified in the male dominated field—emotional expression is a sign of weakness.
The discussion of discretion in chapter 7 could potentially open an entirely new area to explore. One cannot overlook how experience comes into play with discretion. The addition of “liability” being drummed in from the training academy on and levels of “second guessing” after an event builds the base for the use of discretion. There are few jobs so filled with rules, regulation, and standards, but the reality of the day-to-day first responder is actually filled with discretionary decision making. The rules are the result of court decisions, changes in laws, practices, but often when someone made a mistake and the agency decided there had, “to be a rule about that.” Command and control and the paramilitary rank structure come into play—some agencies and cultures are more formal than others. Discretion still exists because there are never enough resources to go around (particularly in a disaster response), so discretion decisions have to be made on allocation of services and resources.
Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, argues for the need to recognize that emotion skills are as important as the physical and cognitive ones—and it must be considered in throughout one’s career. In this chapter, the authors continue to sidestep “traditional” scholarship on management in the Taylor and Weber vein and line up with Mary Parker Follett to explain the relationships. It is a road less traveled, but well worth the trip. Human behavior does not necessarily fit neatly into the highly structured setting of public service: This notion is amplified by crisis response when behaviors are subject to other than normal pressures.
What is the contribution of this work to the field? In a word: “substantial,” but with much yet to be done. In learning more about emotional labor to write this review, what became clear is how it crosses many disciplines. The concept of emotional labor is credited to the work almost 30 years ago of Arlie Hochschild (a sociologist). Emotional labor research has since crossed from sociology to psychology, criminology, child and family studies, business, and organizational behavior—to name a few. Emotional labor has certainly been studied in law enforcement for some time. The authors have provided an extensive resource list and have written on this topic in the past. Emotional labor is practiced across service jobs and those studied include nursing and health care, American higher education, paralegals, magistrates, parenting, Indian call centers, clergy, beauty salon workers, even prostitutes and exotic dancers, and many more.
An old adage in law enforcement is that under stress you will react the way you were trained—and there is a lot of truth to that point. Training does not stop at an academy, but continues on a regular basis, especially in high liability areas (driving, use of force, and self-defense—all potential emotional labor events). As the first responder learns his or her new role, they become more seasoned with time and experience on how to handle situations. Without knowing it, they are practicing emotional labor. This is why I believe this contribution is so significant. Only very recently have we begun to deal with first responders as themselves being victims in crisis events or subject to overexposure to stress in a prolonged crisis event (i.e., hurricanes).
I believe the authors have clearly articulated the notion of emotional labor and have aptly applied it to public safety. This is significant, because police and fire rescue services comprise the most visible face of local government. In the book, theory and practice met. To follow through with our authors’ intent, the next logical step for emotional labor and public safety is to have theory inform the practice.