Employees’ Managed Resentment: Public Procurement and the Part of Emotions in Social Change

Introduction

The fragmentation of working lives, created by public procurement among other forms of service delivery, provided Richard Sennett (1998) and other theorists (e.g. Elliott and Lemert 2006) with the opportunity to inquire about the association between emotion and social change. In these accounts, the process through which citizenship weakens its bond with participation, giving way to more privatized forms of citizenship (Elliott and Lemert 2006), has proved particularly intriguing. This transition may be succinctly explained as the replacement of social citizenship (Lister 2004; Marshall 1973)—based on social protection and rights—with market citizenship (Fudge 2005; Gazso 2012), based on the adult worker citizenship contract (Daly 2011; Lewis 2002) namely, the expectation that all citizens are financially independent and self-reliant in attaining all forms of services and support through the market. During times of social citizenship and standard employment, labor market participation embodied an inclusionary aspect of citizenship for women (Orloff 1993). It is unclear how changes occurred in this respect during times of nonstandard and poverty employment (Jacobs and Padavic 2015). Moreover, macro-level social change in citizenship and employees’ entitlements was surely associated with emotions. What are the emotional components of such social change? How do citizens learn of these privatized forms? I suggest that dealing with these questions provides an opportunity to engage in debate concerning emotion and social change.

The debate begins with Jack Barbalet’s (2001) accusation that Arlie R. Hochschild’s (1983) notions of emotional management and emotional work are conformist and miss the potential of resentment to energize resistance and social change. If this is indeed the case, if Barbalet’s conceptualization of resentment is more applicable to empirical findings, we may anticipate action and struggle—based on a sense of entitlement—against exclusionary aspects of the relevant jobs. If Hochschild’s emotional work offers a more accurate understanding of how emotions change, we may expect to see corrective emotional work, wherein negative emotionality is replaced along the lines of the workplace ideological environment. If resentment can be found to be managed, I suggest that it may shed light on the way Hochschild’s notion of emotional management is echoed in the current transformation of resentment and can help to understand barriers to employees’ action. However, I nuance this debate by introducing the concept of ‘managed resentment,’ that incorporates aspects of both theories to introduce an analytical processual view of emotion and social change that neither focuses necessarily on collective action nor does it portrays an employee totally attuned to workplace ideologies. My concentration on resentment distinguishes among three theoretical possibilities.

As a starting point, resentment is assumed to be associated with the realization that past entitlements, defined as a reward, advantage, or benefit granted in recognition of one’s status or contribution, were replaced. Past entitlements, either to remuneration or to forms of direct participation in the sense of having a say about work processes (Gallie 2013), are no longer publicly recognized. In the context of the current, polarized power relations (Vosko 2010) typical of workplaces, engendered by outsourcing and contracting-out procedures (Sack and Sarter, forthcoming), formal replacement of past entitlements could have had one of three implications for employees’ emotional response. First, entitlement could have disappeared: Estrangement, a form of alienation that hinders one’s ability to experience the full range of human feelings, leading to partial functioning (Weyher 2012), could have signaled a sharp turning point at which employees accept their new, deprived situation and their low levels of remuneration and participation. Second, entitlement could have been transformed: Resentment, an emotional response to deprived entitlement and lack of recognition of one’s value and the worth of one’s contribution, could indicate employees’ refusal to accept the situation created by their structural weakness. This refusal would mean that they do not succumb to their definition as not entitled to appropriate remuneration and participation. Rather, their resentment would indicate that they may still believe in their entitlement, but their survival needs require its transformation, exclusion from employment relations and privatization. Privatized entitlement in this context is the phenomenon by which people hold on to past entitlements but understand that others do not recognize it and that it may never be validated. Third, a similar process could take place to preserve entitlement in a privatized form, but workplace barriers to occupational routines would expose it to estrangement. Once estrangement develops, it may overlap resentment, creating an emotional state that hinders one’s ability to experience participation and belonging. It leads to partial functioning, wherein employees are unable to believe in their chances to make an impact. All three possibilities embed negative evaluative judgments of how employees are treated in terms of what they value and what they consider as affecting their wellbeing. Nevertheless, clarifying the dynamics of estrangement in the process may be crucial for understanding options for social change.

Moreover, clarifying empirically which of these three possibilities best describes how employees in contracted-out services and state administrators overseeing these services experience the association of estrangement and resentment allows for new insights into emotional management in times of polarized power relations in the workplace and transitions in citizenship contracts. Could resentment fulfill its potential as an engine of resisting action directed at social change (Barbalet 2001) in this context? Or would workplace power relations enforce emotional work (Hochschild 1983) and the management of resentment in ways consistent with Brian S. Turner’s (2014) suggestion that resentment is transformed and unable to herald political action and social change? To discuss employees’ emotions, I borrow Turner’s phrase ‘mute resentment’ and introduce a related concept, ‘managed resentment,’ that allows for more than one phase of resentment. In discussing women’s feelings, Turner’s phrase could imply an historical reverse, but this is not my argument at present. Nevertheless, I do use Turner’s suggestion that resentment is transformed, considering its potential for shedding light on social change. I offer a systematic examination of this potential by raising the research questions of what are the relations between estrangement and resentment and, what are the implications of these relations for social change particularly changing citizenship contracts. By the latter, I refer specifically to the transition introduced above between social citizenship that recognizes a range of rights and ensures participation and market citizenship that is based on assuming self-reliance and autonomy associated with isolation.

Employees in Israeli Contracted-out Services

Women’s employment in social services in Israel, as in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, has not followed old discussions of wage work as estranged and focused instead on intrinsic rewards (Hebson, Rubery, and Grimshaw 2015). The emotional basis of caring relations and embedded involvement (e.g. Baines et al. 2014) were in fact suggested to be crucial to workers’ ability to perform their specific tasks well. Employees’ dedication at work has not alleviated their undervaluation nor affected budget administrators in their battle against the costs of professionalization and certification (Armstrong 2013). In Israel, one aspect of this confrontation has been the extensive use of public procurement in the social organization of state service provision. The transition from a mode of service delivery that relies on the state to a mixed economy of service delivery, organized by public procurement, namely, by outsourcing, requests for bids (RFBs) and contracting out, has been promoted incrementally since 1977. It was intensified since 1985 and reached a peak in 1996. Since then, many education, welfare and health care services have been based on contracts with service deliverers. This has diversified the hitherto unionized quality employment in these services that characterized local opportunity structures for Israeli women even though these reflected ethno-national discriminations (Ehrlich 1984).

Contracting out is a general category including public-private partnerships, as well as civil society organizations’ delivery and commissioning. All these types of service delivery are based on a contract—a practice that has been criticized extensively (e.g., Epstein 2013). Among other issues, contracting out has been associated with low-income employment in elderly care and childcare, as well as for nursing assistants and cleaning personnel, that engender a persistent level of poverty and/or dependency (Peña-Casas and Ghailani 2011; Rubery, Grimshaw, and Hebson 2013). Because the Israel Government procures welfare, education, and healthcare services, such outcomes are prevalent, affecting certified social workers, teachers, and nurses, along with uncertified service and care employees.

In Israel, contracting out as part of trade in services has exacerbated the fragmented character of the state (Mundlak 2007). Besides other trends, citizenship has been gradually transformed by the differences between unionized employees—whose entitlements are defined and protected by collective agreements—and marginalized employees in contracted-out services, whose entitlements tend to be blurred by disparities between law and practice. Such disparities are frequently reported for service deliverers who seek to extend their control when the state does not properly cover the expenses of the procured service (Nisim 2015).

As in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, contracting out in Israel implies the absence of an employer in the traditional sense. Although the agency operating the service may be legally defined as an employer, the contract exempts it from responsibility over employment conditions. Instead, these are defined in the contract according to certification level and job duration (number of hours weekly) of the required labor force. In other words, it is the state that determines labor conditions for all intents and purposes. Yet in times of conflict, the state maintains its legal status as a service procurer with no responsibility for labor relations between the contracted agency and its labor force, while formal employers (contractors) argue that they have no influence on conditions and cannot afford to raise pay rates, as they depend on state funding of the project (Preminger 2018). A continuous public campaign engages with these issues protesting against the violations of workers’ rights in this context (Preminger 2018).

Alongside this category of employees, whose employment conditions are defined by a contract between a Government Ministry and a service deliverer, lies another category. It consists of professional women located higher up on occupational hierarchies of Government Ministries or municipalities who hold quality, unionized jobs. I refer to administrators involved in three stages of the contracting-out process: Contract design, contract negotiation with the selected bidder, and long-term contract management. Throughout these three stages, they oversee the occupational standards of the contracted-out service. In other words, they are required to contribute their professional knowledge and recommend labor force requirements, based on their understanding of the service and the needs of its users, grounded in their many years of experience in the field. The occupational standards they require, however, are negotiated with budgeting administrators seeking to lower the costs of service operation. They are under strong pressure to reduce these standards with regard to job extent of certified employees and to replace them with uncertified personnel. In other words, their routine involves a process in which they are asked to act as professionals in their respective fields, but their positions are recognized by budgeting officers only after they trim occupational standards.

Both categories of workers are exposed to encounters in which their subjectively held view of their entitlement—employees to remuneration and occupational standards administrators to professional participation—is not accorded recognition. The analysis presented below elucidates their responses to this lack of recognition, thereby conceptualizing the related transformation of entitlement and citizenship occurring in changing welfare regimes.

Emotion, Entitlement, Resentment

When critical theorists discuss emotion and social change, they emphasize employees’ agency—the power to resist estrangement, to “keep free of the emotional grip of the social structure” (Sennett and Cobb 1972:258; cf. Weyher 2012). In the context of polarized power relations within current labor fragmentation (Vosko 2010), the association between emotion and social change may need to be examined somewhat less optimistically. According to Barbalet, resentment—the emotionally charged perception of another’s advantage that did not appear to be deserved—bears potential for social change because of its deep connection to confident entitlement to that advantage. ¹ Confidence in entitlement is embedded in social relations and depends on others’ recognition thereof (Honneth 1996). Entitlement is related to the feeling of what one deserves as a citizen, employee or esteemed administrator, whereas resentment emerges when one’s perceived entitlement is undermined. As an emotion, resentment becomes closer to anger and rage when confidence in entitlement is high, but not when entitlement is questioned. In transitional times such questioning becomes a frequent characteristic of interactions between citizens and state representatives, between employees and their superiors and so on. When such questioning is encountered repeatedly, entitlement is bound to weaken, with public discourses constantly blurring the boundaries between entitlement and the absence thereof. Barbalet’s (2001) interpretation of Thomas H. Marshall’s (1973) theory of citizenship suggests that once one is deprived of a right, the assumed entitlement cultivates resentment and action. Many collective struggles targeting class, race, and gender inequality may be described as illustrating Barbalet’s analysis of the role of emotions in social change. In today’s workplaces, employees’ sense of entitlement has to rely on past welfare regimes (Fraser 1998; Korteweg 2003) and comparisons with others who still benefit from past established entitlements. This creates a situation wherein one’s sense of entitlement is not necessarily validated at the workplace. Following the failure of attempts at engaging the organization’s negotiated order (Strauss 1978) in restoring entitlement it may be modified, subjecting resentment to new display rules.

In his criticism of Barbalet’s account of resentment, Turner (2014) argues that we no longer live in a time in which we may assume that resentment will become rage and then turn into rebellion. Instead, he suggests the emergence of mute resentment, claiming that

The modern status system appears to be based on the “luck of the draw,” and there is as a result ample scope for disappointment, frustration, envy, and resentment. Such fragile and precarious reward systems create conditions for an inflationary growth of resentment within the modern occupational system and income ladder. Where success is broadcast through prizes, public awards and status-conferring ceremonies, the opportunities for resentment are further enhanced. Institutions where such ritualized rewards for celebrities are still emphasized—the academy and the film industry—will offer occasions for acute, if typical, mute resentment. (Turner 2014:186)

Hochschild’s notion of emotional management fits in well with Turner’s theory of mute resentment. Hochschild’s understanding that specific emotional norms are cultivated within specific ideological environments and that people work to correct their emotions would allow him to connect to the strength of the analytical distinction where deep acting and surface acting, or display rules, remain separate. Her notion of ideological environment suggests that employees who have to encounter daily a range of requirements with little recognition can be expected to act overtly on their resentment only on condition that a social force provides them with the recognition they long for, namely one that creates the ideological environment in which their deprived entitlement would be validated.

Connecting Hochschild’s insights with Turner’s (2014) conceptualization of resentment, that follows the general guideline of Elias’s civilization process, suggests relevance to the call to explore the relations of various emotions with Marx’s notion of estrangement (Weyher 2012). Estrangement is also highly relevant to the discussion of transitions in entitlements and may extend its meaning accordingly, indicating the possibility that it may result from managed responses and isolation. Estrangement, as a partial experience of being, occurs when some aspect of one’s knowledge or feeling cannot be manifested because of the imposed value criteria of a concrete social space. This partiality is closely related to the contemporary transformation of resentment. Consequently, one may debate its relations to estrangement: Is it tamed by the civilization process so that it changes its form? Is it managed as an adjustment to workplace power relations (Hochschild 1983)? Is it disappearing because of the emergence of estrangement resulting from the current requirement to maintain workplace rationality (Weyher 2012)? Despite the potential contribution of these issues to the analysis of emotion and social change, the question of the relationship between resentment and estrangement has not yet been examined. Assessing this relationship in light of “managed resentment,” I contribute to existing research by nuancing the debate about whether resentment catalyzes social action or dissipates when confronted by dialogue failure and estrangement. I address this relationship through employees and administrators facing situations in which they manage their resentment in heretofore unidentified ways. Figure 1 presents three theoretical possibilities of the examined relationship:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Possible role of Emotion in Social Change Processes.

The three processes presented in Figure 1 begin with the emotion of resenting deprived entitlement, resulting in the energizing of action directed at restoring entitlement from its presently unrecognized status. In Process A, consistent with Barbalet’s objection to Hochschild’s argument, respondents react by obeying the feeling structure that allocates fear and shame—emotions that diminish their resentment and forgo entitlement. Were this possibility to be supported empirically, estrangement could be said to override resentment and little future action could be expected. In Process B, consistent with Barbalet’s argument as nuanced by Hochschild’s understanding of managing emotions, respondents can refute the feeling structure by connecting to care-related, positive emotions such as pride. Their managed resentment would then converge with privatized entitlement that awaits recognition and could be translated into action and active citizenship, theoretically speaking, were such recognition to be granted. Here, the potential for social change is the strongest of the three. In Process C, defying Barbalet’s argument and supporting Hochschild’s perspective, respondents experience marginalization of their contribution, exposing them to estrangement irrespective of their privatized entitlement. Future recognition is unlikely to enable them to restore their professional position, rendering the potential of translation of their privatized entitlement into social change as only minimal.

Thus, I undertake to clarify how estrangement relates to managed resentment, using the three suggested processes as ways of understanding their association. Empirically clarifying which of the three is consistent with actual experiences would shed light on the specific conditions under which in times of changing labor relations and citizenship contracts, Barbalet’s suggestion that resentment leads to social change can actually materialize. In addition, studying this association would also indicate the importance of understanding Hochschild’s emotional management for in analyzing the likelihood of an action leading toward social change. I investigate these processes in the field of contracting out as a mode of service delivery and the two types of jobs it involves.

Methodology

The analysis presented here is part of a larger, multistage project in which I aim to study the social organization of contracted-out caring services by clarifying and analyzing the standpoints of the employees operating the services and the administrators involved in contract design. I approached these participants because employees of these services are the ones who know how it feels to be employed in a contracted-out service and whether estrangement can describe their experience. Furthermore, administrators in charge of occupational standards are aware of the feelings engendered by being part of the process of negotiating one’s professional knowledge with budgeting administrators aiming at lowering state costs. Both samples are thus particularly suitable for responding to the research question raised here.

At the first stage, thirty women employees in various care occupations in Israel were interviewed: Uncertified nurses who replaced traditional school nurses in the Vaccination Project, social workers employed in various welfare projects, teachers involved in a second chance project for dropouts, childcare aides, and care providers for elders. To recruit participants, I relied on the social networks of employees participating in unionized struggles, a method that may have yielded overrepresentation of employees who feel strongly about their deprived entitlements; I further relied on social networks of students from underprivileged social categories, primarily immigrants, implying that my participants do not work in the same workplace. Moreover, all interviews were conducted in Hebrew, the mother tongue of most participants but less comfortable to three of the caregivers for the elderly. The breakdown by occupation is as follows: five caregivers for the elderly, two nursing assistants, six youth social work (SW) assistants, one physical training teacher, three primary school (PS) teachers, three youth dropout teachers, two teaching assistants in PS, one welfare-to-work SW assistant, one special needs teaching assistant, one art teacher, two childcare assistants, one sex education teaching assistant, and two autistic spectrum SW assistants. Their ages ranged between 20 and 65; all were Jewish and except for the caregivers for the elderly, all were Israeli born (for more details, see Benjamin 2016).

Interviewers included four women students who were not acquainted with participants in advance and were not employed themselves in contracted-out services. Interviews focused on daily employment routines, the stories behind current employment conditions and relationships at work. Employees described negative feelings when asked “Could you tell me about your work conditions?” or “How is your relationship with your superiors”? Interviews lasted about an hour and a half and were conducted at each participant’s preferred location (often at home); all were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

At the second stage, a research assistant, who was familiar with some RFB (request for bid; also known as “tender”) processes because of his political activism against compulsory tendering of cleaning services but did not know any of the administrators in advance, interviewed 12 (10 women) occupational standards administrators working for the Health, Education and Social Service Ministries, as well as at local authorities. To recruit participants, the latter were asked about the people they worked with and subsequently provided the names of additional prospective candidates. Nevertheless, relatively few administrators were willing to be interviewed, possibly because of the subject’s sensitivity. The same sensitivity is responsible for the lack of information regarding their workplaces and areas of responsibility. Furthermore, administrators’ were reluctant to admit that they are part of the process and that they have relevant information, a tendency that can be explained by the timing of the interviews, that were conducted just as the public campaign against outsourcing of social services was gaining momentum (Preminger 2018) and the administrators did not want to be accused of taking part in the violations of workers’ rights that are attributed to this mode of service delivery. The same reluctance encouraged two administrators to request that they be interviewed together. Other than this case, all other interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis.

Participants were generally asked about the procedures of preparing contracts and their role therein. Administrators’ feelings emerged when asked such questions as “Could you tell me about an RFB in which you were involved?”; “How is the labor force section of that RFB worded?”; “Do you get to deal with labor force issues after the contract is signed?” Interviews lasted approximately one hour in duration. As participants were highly insistent on anonymity, there was no tape recording. The interviewer took notes during the interviews and transcribed them immediately afterwards. All names are pseudonyms to protect the privacy of participants.

First, analysis of the two data sets was separated. Analysis of interviews with front-line employees was guided by grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). During this stage, certain emotional themes emerged, primarily pride and descriptions of being shamed by superiors and at times by care receivers’ relatives. Coding these themes, I noticed the concurrence of these emotions. Analysis of interviews with administrators followed Maarten Hajer’s (1995) discourse interaction approach, in which forms of speech are examined to determine the form perceived as most rational. The findings of this analysis are reported elsewhere. Throughout this earlier stage, however, I noticed the degree of pride associated with occupational identities and shaming experiences and realized the similarity between their experiences and those of the front-line workers. Consequently, I present hereunder the results of a second analysis that followed the participants’ accounts of resentment. I did not possess any systematic observations of emotional displays and instead followed Christine Coupland et al. (2008) in addressing people’s discussions of emotions.

Findings

This Findings section unfolds a learning process for both categories of women: Those operating the services and those involved in designing the contract for their procurement. The process begins at a moment of trust when participants describe their attempt to engage in dialogue, expecting to restore their deprived entitlement. Acting on their resentment in this way, they assume the legitimacy of disclosing negative feelings (Hadley 2014). I use the context of their action to examine my research question concerning the relationship between resentment and estrangement.

Discussion

The learning process I elicited from my analysis supports the possibility that managed resentment can be found in two types of jobs related to contracted-out services but estrangement can be found in only one of them. In my discussion, I follow sociologists’ contentions that emotion can help theorize the connection between the micro and macro levels of social reality (Weyher 2012). The shift to the macro level entails the understanding that once estrangement develops and overrides the form of managed resentment, a very partial functioning emerges with little energy to pursue actions related to social change. When this happens, the emotion of resentment and its relevant cognitive value judgment (Sayer 2005), lose their ability to serve as an energy that propels a social act within a structured relationship. Once an emotion is managed in ways that reduce chances for a social resisting act, it substantiates the idea that an emotion experienced on a micro level at work may become relevant on the macro level of citizenship. More clearly, a learning process that transforms an emotional response on a micro level may shed light on a transformation that occurs on a macro level. In Barbalet’s (2001) view micro-level emotions may consolidate social structures at some future time. As my findings show, these micro-level emotions include pride derived from caring work as much as they include estrangement and managed resentment.

The findings showed that both categories of workers realized that they must not allow resentment to impel them to action, especially when—in confirmation of Hochschild’s expectation—the ideological environment in which they operate does not recognize or legitimize resentment. Actions related to restoring their deprived entitlement are too dangerous, as their superiors do not share their understanding of their entitlement and of its deprivation. This realization did not eliminate their perception of themselves as entitled to remuneration and/or to professionally participate in the work process. By contrast, their entitlement continued to be cultivated in three ways: Knowledge of institutionalized forms of entitlement from the past; manifestations of entitlements in the presence of comparable others who are not excluded or marginalized by the contracts of public procurement and a third way, one that arose in my analysis, related to the valuing of their work by others who are not their superiors. Employees’ sense of entitlement is reinforced daily as they feel devoted to their work and see their success in their caring relations as evidence of recognition. Similarly, the administrators’ sense of entitlement is constantly strengthened by their profession itself. The present source of validation of entitlement was found to operate differently for employees and administrators. While it protects employees from estrangement, it provides no such protection for administrators, whose everyday functioning is accompanied by an estranged feeling, namely their inability to pursue their professional duties appropriately.

On the micro level, then, the question of the relationship between resentment and estrangement is answered by the emergence of managed resentment. Such resentment can override estrangement under conditions of positive emotionality derived from caring relationships. When enmeshed with estrangement in cases of hampered professional functioning, managed resentment was found to take a somewhat different form. But what happens on the macro level? What can be learned by following the relations between resentment and estrangement for the macro level? What can the emotion of managed resentment, found to be associated with a secret sense of entitlement that cannot be shared with others, tell us about the macro level? I deduced two interrelated answers: First, it contradicts Ann S. Orloff’s (1993) belief that labor market participation would consolidate women’s social citizenship by entitlement to a wide range of benefits. While Orloff’s expectations may be true elsewhere in the labor market, those parts that relate to public procurement of education, health, and welfare services, as addressed in my study, are not consistent with such expectations. On the contrary, I found both deprived entitlement and failed dialogue to be the result of any attempt to restore entitlement. Thus, labor market participation in services organized by public procurement, does not support women’s citizenship. Second, it reveals the transformative component that modifies social citizenship, based on a range of rights, into market citizenship, known as self-reliance that is not grounded in any expectation of state support. I believe the learning process that I have elicited facilitates the transformation between social and market citizenship through privatized entitlement, a dimension of excluded citizenship in which entitlement remains a subjective perception of individuals who have realized that others do not share and will not validate their entitlement. Once they have determined that this is indeed the case, they know they must keep it as a secret, to be taken care of in isolated ways. By taking care of their entitlements themselves, they fulfill the most important expectation of market citizenship: They ask for nothing. Managed resentment may be important in clarifying this dimension of citizenship. Indeed, Hochschild’s (2016) notion of “deep stories” allowed her to hear the managed resentment of her interviewees. Thus, based on the change in resentment, privatized entitlement is the facet of social structure that consolidates the social change signified by market citizenship.

My conclusions should be approached with caution, as the lack of a systematic comparison among specific services, countries or cultural settings limits the ability to generalize my findings. More specifically, with the surge of new unionism in the context of trade in services and contract-based service delivery (Preminger 2018), future research should explore the specific ways in which action, its defeats and its successes, feed entitlement in the context of union action.

Nevertheless, the persistence of entitlement raises questions for future empirical research to examine whether it suggests an optimistic future for political action and how social forces that promote recognition discourses for employees and occupational standards administrators would manage to apply the older form of resentment. More questions for future research could examine the relationship between emotional labor required by the workplace and that required by employees’ organized or unorganized interests in the context of the struggle against individualizing citizenship contracts. Such research will be able to shed light on the chances of future political action and its effective “caring with” (Tronto 2013) those in precarious employment whose ability to operate on their own is limited, as I demonstrated above. Research of this type will also have to focus on the contribution of stronger social categories to social change, primarily consumers of care services who depend on quality social services. While Turner (2014) is quick to conclude that contemporary resentment does not lend itself to collective action, he may minimize the importance of consumers’ resentment. It is my belief that current resentment, particularly in caring services, is becoming increasingly more important in people’s lives regardless of their position in the class structure.