Abstract
Drawing on 200 hours of observation at The Help Desk, an IT Support (ITS) unit at a medical school, and interviews with 30 ITS workers from across the university, this article shows how organizational-level IT rationalization was affected at the microlevel through ITS workers’ extensive emotional labor and involvement in meaning-making projects. Successful implementation required ITS workers to function as shock troops, introducing and enforcing new policies, and shock absorbers, encouraging compliance and insulating administrators from discontent about those changes. This article contributes to inhabited institutions theories of organizational change by demonstrating the importance of service workers’ interactive and emotional labor to the coupling of institutional myth, organizational policy, and the interactions and practices of constituent members.
Introduction
Once protected from the vagaries of the free market, higher education has over the last few decades endured the withdrawal of government funding as well as demands from politicians that universities become more efficient and accountable in their spending and operations. Critics have encouraged universities to operate more like for-profit businesses, including streamlining operations and thinking about students as customers (Tuchman 2009). These critiques and related state mandates have catalyzed organizational change, including the creation of Technology Transfer Offices to take advantage of the commercial potential of faculty patents (Berman 2012) and hiring nonfaculty administrators from private industry (Ginsberg 2011). In general, the push has been toward “rationalization,” or the importation business-derived logics meant to “measure and formalize” organizational activity so as to “ostensibly improve accountability and efficiency” (Hwang and Powell 2009, 271). A common form of rationalization in higher education are shared services units that standardize and/or deskill back-office work processes, moving support workers from individual departments into centralized units, reducing duplicate effort and thus the number of staff (Howcraft and Richardson 2012).
Though administrators may imagine rationalization as a fairly straightforward process of implementing new policies meant to increase efficiency, sociologists of work and organizations have long understood that the seeming rationality of bureaucracies belies a “dark side” more Kafkaesque then Weberian (Hodson et al. 2012). For every formal organizational chart, there is an informal shadow structure that must be understood to get anything accomplished (Dalton 1959). For any set of codified rules, exceptions are made and rules routinely broken in the pursuit of individual and organizational goals (Martin et al. 2013). For each attempt to “eliminat[e] from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation” (Weber 1946, 216), there is a stark reminder that organizations are suffused with emotions (Anderson et al. 2019; Putnam and Mumby 1993), like the studied cheerfulness of front-facing workers (Hochschild 1983; Tracy 2000) or the “turmoil” engendered by organizational changes that threaten workers’ epistemic certainty (Hallett 2010).
Organizational change can be a deeply emotional event, as alterations of policy and protocol may spark enthusiasm in workers’ who support the changes but fear or resistance in those who feel threatened (Eby et al. 2000; Smollan et al. 2010). Managing employees’ emotions is thus often necessary to ensure effective adoption of changes promulgated by organizational leaders. Using the example of IT support (ITS) workers at an elite public university, I present an inhabited institutions (Hallett and Ventresca 2006) analysis of emotional labor as a core interactional processes by which policy established at the organizational level is made real through the practices of workers at the microlevel. Politicians’ institutional myths about accountability and efficiency are manifested in universities’ specific organizational policies of rationalization. Those policies remain abstractions until they are communicated, encouraged, and enforced through the interactional labor of employees tasked with their implementation (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020; Lipsky 2010). Though not often envisioned as change agents in their own right, I show how interactive service workers may play a crucial role in organizational change by not only explaining and enforcing new policies but also by doing the emotional labor necessary to ensure compliance and obscure discontent.
Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data about the experiences of ITS workers engaged in the rationalization of IT services at their university, I demonstrate how extensive emotional labor by ITS workers both on users and themselves was necessary to ensure the uptake of new procedures for requesting services and interacting with ITS staff. Though IT is rarely imagined as a site of emotional labor, ITS workers are interactive service workers for whom the management of users’ emotions is indispensable for effective service calls (Seeley 2019). In the context of rationalization, ITS workers’ emotional labor took two forms: First, as shock troops, they introduced users to new policies and secured their compliance, employing emotional labor to defuse resistance to unpopular changes. Second, as shock absorbers, they deployed emotional labor on users and themselves that insulated administrators from users’ discontent with the new policies as well as ITS workers own frustrations, masking many of the difficulties of turning administrative policy into worker practice. Significantly, this emotional labor was discretionary, not dictated by management, and oriented toward minimizing negative impacts of new policies they sometimes disagreed with, not just as means to secure consent. Though ITS workers experienced the cross pressures of implementing administrators’ often unpopular policies while managing discontent from users, their skill as emotional laborers made them effective change agents indispensable for both the real and perceived success of rationalization.
Literature Review
Inhabited Institutions and Organizational Change
Inhabited institutionalism (II) is a mesolevel framework for understanding the “recursive relationship between the cultural ideals that exist in the institutional environment and the interactions through which people—inside of and across organizations—respond to these cultural pressures, and in turn shape them” (Hallett and Meanwell 2016, 376–377). Drawing on the basic tenets of symbolic interaction that people act toward things based on the meanings they give those things and that those meanings develop only through interaction with others, II attempts to repopulate macrofocused institutional theories without recoursing to the individualism of purposive rational actors common to management studies (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). The solution is a focus on interactions, because interactions are dynamic, generative of something greater than the individual, and provide both constraint and the possibility for change. By focusing on interactions, II shows how the impact of institutional myths (i.e., cultural ideals about how organizations should work) on organizations are mediated through the interactions of constituent members as they enact, contest, and/or redefine those ideals based on local resources and meanings (Cobb 2017; Hallett and Hawbaker 2020). While new institutional theory emphasizes loose coupling, or how organizations may give the appearance of adhering to institutional myths in order to access legitimacy and resources despite slippage between proclaimed and substantive practices (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), II pushes scholars to identify a greater variety of “coupling configurations” (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020). Institutional myths, mesolevel organizational policy and practice, and actual interactions of those associated with those organizations are “connected and exert force on each other, and also retain partial autonomy” (2020, 11), resulting variation in the strength with which any one element is coupled with the others. Tight or loose coupling between any two elements is neither absolute nor determinate of the strength of coupling between and among the other elements. A significant literature has developed as scholars elaborate these insights. For example, Aurini (2012) examines for-profit tutoring centers, showing how organizational goals of customer retention in competitive marketplaces intersect with narratives of accountability for educational institutions. While tight coupling to standardized practices predominates, loose coupling of tutor practice to instructional protocol occurs. Ironically, a for-profit orientation causes loose coupling to be in service to, rather than disruptive of, organizational goals of customer retention. As a whole, II shows the importance of interactional meaning making processes for how institutional myths are contested, altered, recombined, and realized imperfectly in organizational practice.
II generally focuses on “how change is possible in an institutional context that constructs the very conditions for such actions” (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020, 2). By centering on interactions, II theories can attend to agency and change without giving primacy to either the individual or the institutional (Hallett and Ventresca 2006). A variety of studies have demonstrated how organizational change resulting from changing institutional myths is anything but straightforward. Educators have been of particular interest, as observed efforts by schools to implement rather than circumvent institutional myths of accountability calls into question new institutionalist wisdom that loose coupling between institutional myths and practice is the modal response to external pressures (Aurini 2012; Hallett 2010). Instead, loose coupling can coexist with strong coupling as some elements of institutional myths are internalized while others are subverted or contested. For example, Kameo’s (2015) study of Japanese bioscientists’ response to universities’ formalization of policy about licensing patents documents both classic instances of decoupling (e.g., refusing to follow new protocol) and loose coupling (e.g., creative integration of old practices and new rules) in order to maintain the informal gift relationships that had structured faculty-industry relationships up to that point.
As key figures in translating institutional myths into organizational protocol, focus is generally on managers, administrators, and professionals. Investigations of nonprofessional workers, including service workers, have been less common; when present, they are rarely the center of attention. In schools, more attention has been given to principals, with teachers appearing more as change recipients engaged in resistance and negotiation over meaning rather than change agents in their own right, even when their instructional practice is discussed (Hallett 2007, 2010). Haedicke (2012) shows how natural food coop managers responded to market pressures to incorporate mainstream practices by drawing on local understandings of coops’ missions to craft novel forms and practices that made survival more likely. Due to his sample, though, front line workers appear briefly and only through eyes of managers, usually in instances where they stymie or influence policies that managers try to implement. Binder (2007) focuses on the department managers of transitional housing agency in her analysis of how the multiplicity of funding streams and related regulations relied upon by a given department combined with variation in department head’s professional and practical understanding of their work to preclude any uniform bureaucratization of the organization. Low-level, nonprofessional workers are mostly hinted at, like references to “Anna and her staff” (558). Sauder and Espeland’s (2009) analysis of how the structure and practices of law schools are shaped by pressures to increase their rankings focuses mostly on deans and faculty. While their sample includes seven lower-level employees, like librarians, they receive little mention. One exception is Aurini (2012), who, while not focused on organizational change, shows that front-facing tutors are shown to play a crucial role in how organizational policy conditioned by market dictates is realized in interaction with clients. What is generally missing is attention to the interactive labor through which low-level employees attempt to introduce policy and induce compliance in other organizational members. Ultimately, II provides a strong framework for conceiving of organizational change and (de)coupling as products of the concrete interactions of organizational members, from the managers and professionals that have been the focus so far down to low-level front-facing and service workers that play an often-unacknowledged role.
Emotion and Organizational Change
Management scholars demonstrate the importance of emotion in organizational change, though, perhaps expectedly, they focus on emotions as individual even when catalyzed externally. Research notes that emotions can be both an effect of organizational change and something that can stymie and/or encourage implementation (Gunnarsdottir 2016; Huy 1999). Change may induce positive emotions, like enthusiasm, in employees who support the innovations and do not experience them as threatening to their jobs, positions, and/or autonomy (Smollan et al. 2010). Negative emotions may also arise, including fear of losing one’s job or organizational status and anxiety due to uncertainty (Eby et al. 2000). Positive emotions are conducive to change because they induce compliance (Huy 2002; Ronningstad 2018); negative emotions can engender resistance and suboptimal effects (Bartunek 1984). Reactions to managers’ messaging about change is not merely cognitive (i.e., how well change is explained and justified) but emotional (i.e., how it resonates with recipients). Discouraging negative emotional reactions is necessary for effective change (Maitlis and Christianson 2014).
Mid- to low-level managers are both change recipients in relation to changes promulgated by senior management and change agents through their role in making workers abide by new organizational practices (Gunnarsdottir 2016). As change recipients, managers must quell their own negative emotions (e.g., distress at firing workers, anxiety from fears of job loss) in order meet professional feeling rules of neutral affect and avoid sanctions (Bryant and Cox 2015; Clarke et al. 2007; Gunnarsdottir 2016). As change agents, managers may ease implementation through emotional labor meant to calm worker anxiety and spur enthusiasm. Managers may model positive reactions to change (Maitlis and Sonenshein 2010), provide social support (Eby et al. 2000), and generally help employees cope with anxiety and stress (Bryant and Cox 2015; Gunnarsdottir 2016; Huy 1999, 2002). Frontline workers are rarely conceptualized as change agents, characterized instead as the objects upon which change is enacted. However, studies of customer socialization suggest that frontline workers may play a role in communicating organizational expectations for new practices (Kelley et al. 1992) and providing reassurance for those encountering unfamiliar technology (Cassidy et al. 2015).
While not grounded in II, research on street-level bureaucrats contributes to investigations of coupling configurations by showing how public service workers “make policy” when they use individual discretion to distribute benefits and sanctions to members of the public (Lipsky 2010, 13). Street-level bureaucrats operate at the intersection of abstract policy and individuals’ complicated lives and must contend with the demands of competing stakeholders (e.g., professional communities, state legislators), limited resources, heavy workloads, and conflicted personal ideals as they decide how to actualize policy dictates (Gormley 1998; Henderson 2013; May and Wood 2003; Taylor 2014). Scholars aver that street-level bureaucrats cope in three major ways with conflicts between policy and the practical: moving away from clients (i.e., rationing effort and engaging with clients in standardized, rule-bound ways), against clients (i.e., rigid rule following to discipline clients and reduce workloads), and toward clients (i.e., bending or breaking rules) (Tummers et al. 2015). Though public service workers have a reputation for moving against clients, research shows that this is not the most common approach. For example, Tummers and Rocco (2015) describe how government health insurance caseworkers engaged in uncompensated overtime to learn how to use the online portals with which clients were having difficulties.
Interaction with clients is an integral part of service delivery, making street-level bureaucrats interactive service workers (Leidner 1993). Studies of welfare caseworkers regularly describe them as suppressing their own emotional reactions to distraught clients, engaging in tough love, and adopting motivational approaches to counseling (Garot 2004; Taylor 2014; Watkins-Hayes 2009). Research on regulatory enforcement styles, or “the character of the day-to-day interactions of inspectors when dealing with regulated entities” (May and Winter 2000, 145) show they differ among inspectors and may impact the behaviors of those being regulated (Gormley 1998; May and Wood 2003). Emotions are alluded to in remarks contrasting some inspectors’ friendliness and supportiveness with those who are picky or overbearing (May and Winter 2000). Though agencies’ organizational-level practices are more determinate of compliance than inspectors’ styles, coercive styles can decrease compliance, suggesting that the emotional tenor of street-level bureaucrats’ relationships with clients may have concrete effects (May and Wood 2003).
Emotional Labor and IT
Emotional labor as originally formulated by Hochschild (1983, 7) refers to work that requires workers “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” and is done in the service of organizational profit-seeking. One may do emotional labor on both the self and others, as managing one’s own emotions is often necessary to induce emotions in others, whether positive or negative. As manufacturing has declined and service work come to dominate the American labor market, research on emotional labor has exploded. Scholars have emphasized emotional labor as a way that gender and racial inequalities are (re)produced (Evans and Moore 2015; Harlow 2003; Simpson 2009). Hochschild’s original concern for the alienating aspects of emotional labor has been complemented by attention to workers who find emotional labor pleasurable and/or choose particular jobs precisely because of the required emotional labor (Wharton 1996). An early focus on low-status service workers has been supplemented by studies of the feeling rules of professional workplaces (Kramer and Hess 2002; Wingfield 2010). Workers are known to do emotional labor not only on customers and superiors but also their peers (Lively 2000; Pierce 1999). Emotion work and emotional labor are pervasive in interactive service work, from low-status nursing home assistants (Lopez 2006) to high-status physicians (Larson and Yao 2005).
A small literature shows how emotional labor can be an integral part of computing occupations (Seeley 2019; Rutner et al. 2011). For example, IT consulting requires substantial social competence and some emotional labor when dealing with customers (Kelan 2008). Specific to ITS, scholars have shown that workers do emotional labor on themselves when they abide by organizational feeling rules that limit expressing negative emotions toward users (Rutner et al. 2011). The deep acting of being nice to frustrating users can cause burnout (Huarng 1998). ITS workers also do emotional labor on users. A study of a New Zealand nonprofit’s introduction of a web-based case management system documents the “emotional labor of change agents” as part of IT implementation (Zorn 2002, 169). Because new technology may be frustrating and/or threatening, IT trainers must appear calm and positive, even if frustrated themselves. In turn, they must assuage users’ frustration by turning training into a positive experience, not allowing one users’ frustration to become emotional contagion, reframing problems as expected and resolvable, and engaging in comic relief to alleviate tension. Ultimately, successful IT implementation requires change agents to help users “develop the emotion-laden beliefs that the system is a good thing that users can and want to make it succeed” (Zorn 2002, 169), which involves emotional labor on both themselves and their users. Orr’s (1996) Talking about Machines implies similar expectations for emotional labor when he discusses how Xerox technicians sought to make their clients happy, not just fix their machines.
Methods and Setting
This article is based on ethnographic observation from Winter to Summer 2014 at The Help Desk, the computing support services department of a medical school at an elite public university. Interested in the interactional processes of support work, ethnographic observation was the most fitting method to capture mundane events, like the verbiage used when making a request, that often go unnoticed by participants and discussed only in generalities in interviews. For 200 hours, I shadowed ITS workers as they kept 800 users and 1,500 computers running, including changing passwords, replacing failing hard drives, trouble-shooting classroom technology, and installing new computers and programs. I was present for 53 days spread across 5 months, each week averaging three visits of four hours apiece. Early in my field work I was often present either during opening at 8am or closing at 5pm, but eventually concentrated on observing between 9.30
Data from The Help Desk is complemented by 45 hours of observation at a professional school on the same campus and unstructured interviews with 30 ITS workers from observed and nonobserved ITS units across the university. In total, 17 were women; 13 were men. In total, 7 were managers; 23 were Desktop Support Specialists, with ranks ranging from associate to senior. Interested in people’s own understandings of their experiences and their interactional meaning making processes, qualitative interviews were necessary. Interviews focused on the subjective experience of working in ITS, gender, emotional labor, and relationships with colleagues and users.
Unexpectedly, IT services for the university as a whole underwent a reorganization during my research. Described as centralization and rationalization, units were combined, staff moved to different departments, and new service request systems introduced. These organizational changes became an important backdrop against which my research and analysis were conducted. When I began my interviews in Fall 2013, rationalization had just begun with the switch from Microsoft to Google email and the first consolidations of departmental ITS units. Interviewees were eager to talk about the changes and what they meant or might mean. My interviewing continued until Summer 2014, when most of the changes had been completed, allowing me to capture ITS workers’ experiences at all stages of the process. My observation began about half way through the change process, meaning that the most significant changes like department consolidation had occurred but ITS were still in the process of acclimating users to new protocols. While these changes provided a new substantive focus, they had minimal impact on my methods.
The Help Desk was staffed by a total of six individuals during my observation, with two people leaving and one person being hired while I was present. ITS workers are interactive service workers (Leidner 1993), because interaction between users and ITS workers is necessary to identify and fix problems. Overseen by Alice, who had more than three decades of experience in IT, the department was heterogeneous, comprised on individuals from a range of sexualities, ages, races, genders, and immigration statuses (see Table 1). All held the position of Desktop Support Specialist Intermediate. Only two of the workers had spent their entire careers in IT; the remainder entered after leaving nontechnical professions. Interviewees have been given pseudonyms and identifying information has been masked as necessary to protect subject confidentiality. When employees of The Help Desk are discussed, they are identified only by name. ITS workers from other units are identified by their department.
The Help Desk IT Support Workers.
Given my lack of skill with ITS, I engaged in shadowing, or nonparticipant observation in which I watched but did not participate in the technical labor of service interactions (Orr 1996; Quinlan 2008). My time was spent in two ways: First, I accompanied ITS workers on service calls throughout the school. I tagged along as they traveled to different departments and then remained as unobtrusive an observer as possible during service calls that lasted between just a few minutes and more than an hour. I watched as the ITS interacted with the users and worked on their technology. I occasionally interacted with the users and others in the vicinity if they were curious about my presence, explaining the project as requested. These conversation (and their palpable absence when I was ignored by faculty who became quite gregarious when they learned I was a PhD student and not ITS) provided further insights into user-ITS interaction, especially regarding status. I carried a small notebook to take notes, capturing the duration of the service call, the observed interactions, the setting, and other events that happened along the way. These notes were transformed into typed field notes at night. Second, I spent significant time sitting at The Help Desk’s front desk as workers fielded service requests via phone calls and walk-ins. Sitting far enough away from the ITS worker that users did not think I was ITS myself but close enough to hear most phone conversations, I watched as ITS workers resolved walk-in requests, answered phones, and completed requests remotely. I used a small netbook to take notes, carefully recording all user interactions as close to verbatim as possible (e.g., was hello said or not) along with times of arrival and departure, relevant information about the user (e.g., faculty or staff), nonverbal behavior, and the ITS workers’ commentary on the interaction. These notes were fleshed out either during lulls between walk-ins or at night. When necessary, I asked for clarification about procedures or user identities (Emerson et al. 1995).
All interview and observation subjects signed consent forms. IRB set no expectation of consenting all users, though all were given pseudonyms. During my observation, users’ knowledge of my role generally depended on whether or not the worker I was shadowing disclosed my identity. This was common practice when we spent substantial time on a service call that involved interaction with a user, though not during brief and superficial exchanges, like quick password resets for walk-ins. I informed users myself when they directed service requests to me or engaged me in conversation, never pretending to be ITS. Users were almost always positive about my presence, as staff often provided their own observations and faculty either ignored me or asked about my research. Only once did a user seem uncomfortable with my presence, so I departed and recorded only the fact of their discomfort in my notes. I participated more fully in the social life of the department, attending meetings and engaging in informal socializing in the offices.
I focused on interactions between ITS workers and users. Minimal attention was given to the technical details of their work except where necessary to provide context. Though technology changes rapidly, how ITS and users interact remains consistent, shaped not by the technologies themselves but the larger interaction order (Goffman 1967). Regardless of the technology (e.g., dot matrix printer vs. smartphone), ITS workers are interactive service workers who must create positive affect in users if a service call is to be successful. The consistency of interaction rituals irrespective of technology is supported by the similarity of observed and retrospectively reported interactions across the university and over time despite the variety of technologies being used.
The originating focus of this project was the salience of gender for ITS workers, but my experience in the unique field of a university redirected my attention to the organizational hierarchy that gave faculty greater status and esteem than staff. During my time at The Help Desk, I engaged in member checks by frequently discussing what I had observed and my nascent theorizations with the ITS workers. Jim catalyzed turning my attention to organizational status after a discussion about gender and technology in which he was adamant about the irrelevance of gender. Though I never came to see gender as irrelevant, a review of my field notes up to that point gave some credence to his observation and pushed me toward more systematic concern for organizational status. While waiting for walk-ins and wandering the halls, I would informally ask for their thoughts on my evolving analysis. More formally, I would share my observations during department meetings at the behest of manager Alice, and the staff would provide feedback that informed my later data gathering and analysis.
Analysis thus proceeded largely in an inductive manner influenced by grounded theory (Charmaz 2006) so as to maintain a symbolic interactionist focus on ITS workers’ understandings of their experiences rather than an imposition of my own concerns. I wrote memos teasing out themes I noticed while in the field, cementing my additional focus to organizational status. Once data collection was complete in Fall 2014, I used HyperRESEARCH qualitative coding software to code and analyze the data with an eye toward the relative influence of gender and organizational status interactions between users and ITS workers, particularly for emotional labor, displays of deference, and a willingness to comply with new protocols. Because rationalization had been an important concern for my subjects, I was very attentive to its presence in my field notes and transcripts, creating codes for the practical aspects of rationalization, like request systems and explanation of new protocol. After coding all passages involving rationalization, the intertwined processes of instrumental and emotional labor of organizational change that had only been a hunch came into relief given the frequent overlap of codes for practical aspects of rationalization and emotional labor. When the aims of the emotional labor were scrutinized, the distinction between proactive and reactive emotional labor came forward, resulting in the concepts of ITS as shock troops and shock absorbers. The examples provided are representative and best illustrative of the interactions and accounts coded as both rationalization processes and emotional labor.
Results
Shock Troops: Communicating and Enforcing Policies
Like street-level bureaucrats, ITS workers were change agents responsible for translating rationalization policies into practice by getting users to understand and abide by new rules, whether voluntarily or not (Watkins-Hayes 2009). While implementation is straightforward for cases that resemble the normative case on which a policy is premised (Henderson 2013), both client resistance and nonnormative cases requiring worker discretion necessitate deviation from stated policy (May and Winter 1999; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). These deviations highlight the inescapable slippages in policy’s realization, or the inevitability of less than perfect couplings of policy and practice (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020). Examining ITS workers demonstrates how interactive service workers may influence the coupling of institutions, organizations, and interactions when they explain and enforce new protocols that accord with the organization’s efforts of tight coupling to institutional myths. As I show, ITS workers were shock troops for rationalization that introduced users to new policies and secured their compliance, employing emotional labor to naturalize and defuse resistance to unpopular changes. This occurred in three primary ways: preparing users for the changes to come, convincing users that centralization’s depersonalized triage for assigning ITS workers would not degrade service, and socializing users to decreased entitlement.
IT rationalization at the university was a catchall term for a variety of new policies and practices meant to increase efficiency and decrease duplicate effort (Howcraft and Richardson 2012). Fundamentally, though, rationalization involved decreased entitlement and increased constraint in users’ access to ITS services. This manifested in several ways: Restrictions were placed on what vendors could be used, diminishing choice in favor of cost savings. Nonuniversity computers were no longer eligible for servicing, saving labor costs but externalizing to users the burden of repairs. ITS workers were transferred from individual departments to centralized units, severing the strong ties that developed between ITS workers and the users they served and establishing impersonal triage. Automated electronic systems for requesting ITS were introduced, curtailing the practice of making requests directly to an ITS worker and increasing the amount of waiting required.
This sea change in policy was laid bare in an interview with Wallace, a retiree who had been the first ITS worker at the medical school. Asked to define good customer service, he contrasted ITS practices before and after rationalization:
I hardly ever would say no to someone, I’d just do it. I guess I bent the rules a little bit. Well, [a professor] called me after I retired <chuckles> and said, I want to do this! I told her to go talk to Sabrina, the CIO, and do this and do that. And they wouldn’t let her on. You know, what she should have told them was that the department paid for some of the machine and then it would have been fine. But she didn’t, she told them it was her machine and that was the end of it. So, there’s little stuff that I used to do that they don’t do anymore, which is fine. You have to have rules. But at the same time, I always thought it was lazy of people. They make hard and fast rules so they don’t have to do it anymore. . . . but some people could really use the help, you know. So I hardly ever told anyone no. If it was outrageous or bad computing practice, then I’d say no. But in a lot of cases, no didn’t exist for me. I think that’s why people liked me.
Wallace represented the prerationalization era where bending rules, like ignoring policy that only university-purchased computers could receive ITS services, was unlikely to receive oversight or censure. This contrasted starkly with the postrationalization era, which is best symbolized by The Help Desk’s Sue’s offhand remark that “Sometimes ‘yes’ is not the best answer.” For Sue, constrained by bureaucratic record-keeping that made dissemblance about the origins of a computer impossible, saying no was necessary and routine. Like ITS across the university, her job was not just to fix computers, but also the interactive labor of socializing users to accept decreased entitlement in a period of cost-cutting.
This function was highlighted when Help Desk workers had to explain to users that things Wallace had done as little as a year ago were no longer possible. The experience of an Emeritus faculty is instructive. Jim had accepted Dr Kwan’s laptop and his request for an operating system (OS) upgrade with minimal commentary. Upon inspection, though, Jim and Harry discovered that the machine had a dual-boot system in which both Mac and Windows OS were available to the user upon start up, something Wallace had done three years prior. Sue quashed any upgrade that maintained the dual OS, saying it made for an unstable machine, and told Harry he would have to break the news to Dr Kwan. Saying no to a user was always tense because one never knew how the user would react. When the Emeritus did return, he was displeased and asked Harry why they refused to do something that they had done previously, mentioning Wallace by name. Harry replied, “Sorry, that’s what Sue says,” indicating that he had little discretion in the matter. I braced for an argument, anticipating that Dr Kwan was going to balk, but he just thought for a second and said, “Then I choose Windows. I’ll be back Monday. Thank you.” Harry was relieved that the interaction did not become contentious and repeats “Thank you” to Dr Kwan. Most ITS workers told similar stories of socializing users to new limits on services, like restricting vendor choice and refusing to work on personal computers, as tight coupling required ITS workers to abandon an ethos of always saying yes and incorporate no into their vocabularies.
Centralization was the centerpiece of IT rationalization at the university. Previously, ITS workers had been individually assigned to and located in particular departments and schools. Small departments with limited computing needs, like History, had a single ITS worker assigned, while larger departments with sizable labs, such as Engineering, had multiple ITS workers and a corps of student workers. After rationalization, IT service was divided into local (within the same or adjacent buildings), neighborhood (within the same college but dispersed buildings), and central (for the university as a whole). ITS workers previously located in particular departments, like chemistry, moved conceptually and physically into a central pool responsible to all individuals within a given college or school. Some functions, such as purchasing and upkeep of public-use computers and printers, moved to stand-alone units. This loss of department IT was a form of depersonalization. Rather than develop a sustained relationship with a single ITS worker who has a deep understanding of the needs and idiosyncrasies of a given department, users were assigned ITS workers based on triage practices established by Central IT that emphasized eliminating duplicate effort.
Of course, ensuring compliance with centralization required more than just introducing no into ITS workers’ vocabularies. Instead, it required the interactive labor of convincing users that they would not experience a degradation of service. Many adopted the new procedures without question, but others required persuading. Communicating imminent changes in ways that allayed these fears required considerable emotional labor. IT manager Peter (sciences), talked at length about preparing users for the changes they were about to experience:
[My strategy for easing change is] mainly going to staff meetings, faculty meetings, talking about th[e change] and then just let them know that this is why we’re changing. . . . and letting them know it’s not going to be perfect day one. Anyone that’s going to come in and say, “Hey we’re making this change. It’s not going to be hard . . . and there’s going to be no problems.” That would be overselling it on top of it too being unrealistic.
For several months, Peter’s schedule was dominated by presentations to staff and one-on-ones with faculty meant to explain just what would change and reassure them that his unit would be there to shepherd them through the process. ITS managers in other units described similar efforts. Nathalie (psychology) put this more colorfully: “Tell them what they can expect because if they expect you to make the world bright and shiny and glowing and filled with rum punch and when they don’t get it, they’re going to be mad.” Successfully introducing policy changes required proactive efforts by ITS to shape users’ definitions of and expectations for good service. Keeping users from being “mad” required more than making them happy. It required cultivating and naturalizing new expectations for ITS services whereby the impersonal triage of rationalization was accepted as routine, not just a degraded version of the personalized relationships they had supplanted.
Centralization was accompanied by the introduction of electronic service request systems called ticket queues, which required users to complete an online form detailing their request, and displaced less formal means, like emailing known ITS workers directly (Seeley 2019). Ticket queues were designed for more efficient prioritization of requests and allocation of personnel, but not speaking to an actual person induced anxiety about being left unhelped, which manifested in phone calls to ITS workers moments after the request was submitted to ensure it had been received. Enforcing uptake of the ticket queue was an important part of implementing rationalization and sometimes quite difficult. Hugh (administration) had tried to implement a ticket queue of his own design prior to rationalization but had the users in his small administrative department “revolt” and simply refuse to use it. ITS workers from across the university discussed users who tried to bypass the systems, like Nathalie’s (psychology) exasperated complaint about a user who tried to justify not learning how to use the system because she needed it so infrequently.
At The Help Desk, a user survey revealed concerns about the impersonal character of the new service request system. Multiple users remarked that they did not entirely trust the system and sought work arounds, like contacting ITS workers directly. While Alice directed her team to continue enforcing use of the ticket queue, they also initiated changes to the online request system that included an automated email indicating the request been received and when to expect a response. More than just a receipt, the replies were a form of automated emotional labor meant to defuse nervousness about being ignored and increase compliance. ITS workers in other departments discussed similar practices, suggesting that timely and responsive communication about when users could expect assistance went a long way. Tightening the coupling between organizational policy and user practice thus required emotional labor by ITS workers who fostered acceptance of new ticket queues by replacing anxiety with confidence in their effective operation.
Another part of rationalization was stringently enforcing rules about what computers could receive ITS help. In an effort to limit workloads and forestall liability, ITS workers could not service personal computers. ITS workers had to not only communicate these rules but avoid appearing uncaring when they refused to help someone. During a series of new graduate student orientations, I watched as The Help Desk’s Harry and Isaac attempted to balance between protocol and users’ feelings. Ostensibly about setting up students’ laptops and phones on the medical school’s network, the ITS workers framed their presentation as an explanation of what could and could not be requested from The Help Desk. Most interesting was the shift of tone in their caveats about what The Help Desk would not do over the course of three sessions. When Harry ran the first session, he played up what the Help Desk could do for the students, trying to create a welcoming atmosphere. Isaac politely interrupted him and talked a little about what they were not able to do for them. Harry reinforced Isaac’s comments by saying that services like repairing personal computers were not even provided to the Dean. Isaac led the next session and, despite his cheery tone and convivial approach, he made clear the limits of The Help Desk’s services. Harry nodded silently in agreement. As the session progressed, though, Isaac softened his approach, saying “You can always come to our office any time. Someone is always at the desk.” When Harry led the third group, he shifted his language again to balance between setting limits and positioning ITS as welcoming. He tried to make clear that ITS were not supposed to even “touch” students’ personal machines and such crises must be taken elsewhere, but stressed that The Help Desk would always be happy to help where they can and provide referrals when they cannot. The students said little, seemingly accepting the limits placed on ITS services. The example of Harry and Isaac demonstrates an important balancing act required of ITS workers implementing rationalization: creating a positive experience for those seeking help but enforcing clear limits what help could be provided.
Ultimately, rationalization demanded that users accept new limits to ITS services and depersonalized relationships with ITS workers, which required ITS workers to engage in emotional labor to naturalize and legitimate decreased entitlement. ITS workers who could not do the requisite emotional labor sometimes left for positions that did not require customer service. Nathalie (psychology) talked about her husband leaving ITS to become a systems administrator because he found himself becoming enraged at being asked the same question (e.g., “So we really have to switch to Gmail? Really?”) hundreds of times. For those who remained, ITS workers’ function as shock troops tightening the coupling between institutions, organizations, and interactions was facilitated by the emotional labor they voluntarily performed.
Shock Absorbers: Encouraging Uptake and Insulating Administrators
As shock absorbers, ITS workers performed emotional labor on themselves and others that insulated administrators from discontent with rationalization. Like some macrolevel analysts, administrators imagined rationalization was complete once new technology went live. For ITS workers, having new systems up and running was only the beginning of a second phase of ensuring user adjustment and compliance. These conflicting perspectives were neatly summed up by IT Manager Anita (professional school): “[Central IT] thinks [the switch to Google] is a success, but it’s not successful until the customer is 100% happy. So I don’t think [Central IT] sees the whole picture. I don’t think they see what happened to us in those six months afterwards, where we had to do training and suffer with the user because it was so difficult for them to do things. . . . they claimed victory a bit too soon.” As I show, ITS workers functioned as shock absorbers in two ways: First, the emotional labor done by ITS workers on users during this second phase, particularly sympathizing while reinforcing protocol, defused frustration with new practices and policies, ensured their successful uptake, and kept administrators ignorant of users’ unhappiness. Second, ITS workers engaged in reciprocal emotional labor to mitigate the negative effects of user unhappiness on their own well-being. Though entwined with and often indistinguishable in form from their activities as shock troops, their emotional labor as shock absorbers was reactive rather than proactive. The success of rationalization and thus the tightened coupling of organizational practices and institutional myths depended as much on ITS workers’ ability to absorb user irritation and defuse peer frustration as it did on getting technology to function correctly.
While IT and computing are associated with rationality and disassociated from emotions and relationality, ITS is an interactive service work position that requires significant emotional labor. Frustration is defined as the mismatch between expectations and reality and often experienced by users (Corn 2011). While computer programmers try to solve this by making better interfaces, that’s never enough (Besserie et al. 2004). ITS thus fill in the gap between the technology and users’ understanding of it. Patience with users experiencing frustration was a key skill for ITS workers. For example, I observed 20 individuals contact The Help Desk in the span of two hours because a major update to Java had been released. Each time Harry kindly explained what was happening and guided the user through a simple fix, never even complaining to me about these repetitive calls.
This approach was shared among the ITS workers I encountered. When I asked about the most important skills required for being good at ITS, I was surprised that technical skills were almost never mentioned. Instead, soft skills were described as key. Isaac’s answer was typical: “Not take it personally. When I first started, I used to take it more personally, but now it’s less. . . . because now I can go to somebody who is frustrated and doesn’t understand technology and explain that it doesn’t always work.” Similarly, Antonio (engineering) said the following:
A user may get frustrated because something is not working the way it’s supposed to. Say an update [to a program] happened, and it was working fine [before, but now it’s not], so they may get frustrated at that and that’s something that’s understandable. I don’t take it personally when they get upset because I know they’re not upset with me. I know they’re upset with the technology not working the way it’s supposed to, so they’re maybe verbalizing their own upset. So I say, “No worries, I’m here taking care of it to make it right.”
Not everyone has the ability to remain unflappable after spending five minutes traveling to an unspecified service call only to find that a Full Professor who thought they needed help on how to change the background image of their desktop on a new install of Windows realized while we were en route that the process was the same for all versions of the OS. ITS workers constantly reminded themselves that their users were not IT professionals and that it would be counterproductive to resent users’ lack of technical skills. Instead, they engaged in extensive emotional labor to ease users’ frustrations, as the first step in most repairs is calming the user enough that they are able to explain their problem and be receptive to a solution.
ITS workers did intensive reactive emotional labor on their users as they encouraged users to abide by new protocols once implemented. Users were known to lash out ITS workers, engaging in incivility when frustrated by new technologies and ways of interacting with ITS workers. Joan (library) described difficulties experienced by her staff: “They’re getting the people that are just screaming about, ‘Where’s my print job, where’s this, where’s that, why is not working this way and it’s always worked this way!’” At The Help Desk, Dr Otto, an Emeritus faculty who had been at the medical school for more than 30 years, was known for being particularly difficult when ITS workers hewed to policies that forbade them from working on users’ personal machines. While ITS workers occasionally broke the rules by servicing his computers, instances in which they refused could bring forth vitriolic reactions. On one occasion, Isaac’s inability to fix a faltering hard drive on a computer he wasn’t supposed to be servicing anyways brought forth complaints about deteriorating service from The Help Desk over the last 30 years and threats to email the CIO directly. A different service call during which Jim refused to break protocol by servicing the same personally owned machine ended with Dr Otto questioning the professionalism of the ITS staff and spitting out “What’s the point of you then?” Because ITS workers’ ideals of professionalism meant they could not respond in kind, they engaged in extensive emotional labor to calm unhappy users.
When experiencing recalcitrant or belligerent users like these, ITS workers employed similar strategies of emotional labor: remain calm, express sympathy for their troubles, and hope that politely explaining protocol will defuse the situation and lead to acceptance and uptake of new procedures. This strategy was deployed to assuage user discontent with most of the changes wrought by rationalization. Though not always effective, sympathizing while reinforcing protocol dampened negativity and encouraged compliance as users’ frustrations were lessened and limits on entitlement were redefined as nonthreatening.
Sympathizing with users about the problems arising from centralization while firmly reinforcing new policies was very common. By redistributing responsibility for some tasks from local ITS to Central IT, like resetting passwords and maintaining public computer labs, practices that were logical from an administrative standpoint could feel Kafkaesque to users in the midst of an emergency, as they couldn’t understand why the ITS worker standing in front of them couldn’t service a computer lab two doors down. Though most users took The Help Desk’s instructions to contact Central IT in stride, others required emotional labor to convince them they weren’t being callous in refusing the task and referring them elsewhere. This was necessary to forestall backlash from users who did not understand why the ITS worker immediately available refused to work on their problem. My field notes captured a phone call in which Harry demonstrated a common mix of firmness and sympathy in his referral to another unit. Asked for help with a password reset, Harry directed them to Central IT. When the user protested, Harry says sincerely, “I would love to [help] if I could, but I don’t have access to that system.” My field notes are littered with similar instances in which ITS workers couched referrals to others in expressions of a desire to help, sympathy for having to contact another unit, and assurances that they would be helped.
Users’ dislike of preferred vendor agreements often required substantial emotional labor, because they diminished entitlement by limiting choice. Preferred vendors, companies with whom the university has contracts for discounted rates, limited what and from whom computers could be purchased. When this conflicted with users’ preferences, discord could arise. On one occasion Harry attempted, albeit not successfully, to calm a faculty member upset about being unable to order an IBM-brand computer. Harry tried to allay the users’ concern by explaining that the brands of computers available from the other vendors were little different from and just as good as the costlier IBM the faculty member wanted. This failed, however, ending with the user leaving in a huff. At the professional school I observed, a switch in brands of photocopiers caused significant discontent. Because copiers are fundamentally complex, networked computers, ITS workers are usually involved in their installation and maintenance. This required working with the administrative assistants responsible for the machines. The ITS workers there split their time between solving technical problems and calming down admins beleaguered by faculty and administrators unhappy with lost documents. This in turn meant suppressing their own irritation at the administrators who made purchasing decisions without consulting the ITS workers who would be responsible for its upkeep. Through extensive technical labor as well as emotional labor on distraught admins, they ensured that the photocopiers functioned correctly and that the admins’ distress did not find its way back to the administrators. Vendor agreements thus appeared from the top to be successful, though administrators were oblivious to the emotional labor such cost-saving required.
The ticket queue for requesting ITS services was the source of much frustration and anxiety despite ITS workers’ proactive efforts to convince users that they would be better serviced by the online system. Some users were afraid that requests made through the online ticket queue had not been received and had a habit of calling their local ITS shortly after inputting their request to check that it was received. Though ITS workers expressed irritation at this practice, they maintained a calm demeanor with users and politely reassured them that their request had been received and would be handled. I never heard an ITS worker admonish a user for a practice that amongst themselves they interpreted as disrespectful because it implied that users did not trust them to manage their workload effectively (see Seeley 2019 for an extensive discussion of electronic ticket queues). Zoe (Central IT) talked about being extremely frustrated with a graduate student user who continued to contact her directly even after she moved to Central IT. On one occasion, rather than putting a ticket in with his school’s ITS, he emailed her. On vacation, she didn’t receive the email until a week after it was sent. Though she fumed to me about his failure to heed her emails about no longer being his ITS contact, she politely wrote him a sympathetic email that emphasized how she didn’t want him to be put in the situation of being unhelped again and that his school’s ITS was ready and willing to support him. By focusing on his fears of not being helped rather than his failure to follow protocol, her emotional labor finally convinced him to use the new ticket queue. As these varied examples show, ITS workers’ emotional labor subtly naturalized and reinforced rationalization by rendering it unthreatening and redefining old practices as problematic, thus encouraging the acceptance and uptake of unpopular policies.
The emotional labor done by ITS workers more resembles emotional labor resulting from professional socialization than that conditioned by management (Lively 2000). While ITS managers tried to hire for soft skills and encouraged “good service,” they did not dictate when and how that labor was done. Indeed, ITS workers often saw their efforts as filling in a hole created by administrators’ inattention to the practicalities of change. Maggie (sciences) talked about ITS workers efforts to mitigate the negative effects of centralization on faculty. When centralization began, ITS workers took the initiative to prevent the implementation of programs that “nobody uses and it’s a big waste of time and money.” She described an IT manager going around to the different departments in the College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences to hear faculty’s concerns. When their major complaint was that they didn’t feel like their unique needs were being recognized, they created an “advocacy” group that could liaise between the college’s IT unit and Central IT to prevent blanket policies that didn’t distinguish between Economics’ practice of running computer simulations 24/7 for weeks on end that couldn’t simply be stopped for updates from Psychology and History where outages could be scheduled without coordination with the departments. Not only did they do emotional labor to ensure that users’ unhappiness didn’t derail the overall process of rationalization, but that emotional labor sensitized them to the untenableness of some protocols. This spurred the development of new policies that when adopted less reluctantly by users contributed to tighter coupling among institutional myth, organizational protocol, and the practices of constituent members.
ITS workers also served as shock absorbers when frustration and anger were transferred from the user to the ITS worker and then released through commiseration and/or backstage humor. Whether arising from user frustration about rationalization or other sources, The Help Desk employees performed much emotional labor for each other, sympathizing about problematic users, rationalizing their behavior, and advising each other on how to “not take it personally.” Research following from Goffman’s (1959) theory of the presentation of the self-documents how geographic and metaphorical backstages provide sites where workers can defuse irritation at problematic customers, cope with the travails of service work (Erickson 2009; Tracy and Tracy 1998), and teach each other techniques for dealing with problem customers and the proper display rules of their occupation (Scott and Myers 2005). Damon (housing) described how the backstage functioned as a site for defusing irritation to make positive interactions with users possible. As a manager, he instructed workers before a shift to “take ten minutes to get everything off your chest and relax a little bit, because in ten minutes, all hell is about to break loose.” Though ITS workers talked about not taking things personally, the emotional labor required was a collective effort that neutralized users’ negative affect by redefining their incivility as the sympathetic by-product of a lack of technical skill rather than deliberate enmity.
At the professional school, ITS workers had to contend with faculty users who treated computer acquisitions as a means for status display and thus had to be persuaded to not interpret as a status affront the “basic” computer package dictated by rationalization. This engendered a great deal of resentment from the ITS workers, which was defused in part through a running joke about a “punishment laptop.” On my fifth day, Burton gave me a tour of the supply closets. He dropped into my arms the largest and heaviest laptop I have still ever seen. More than 18 by 12 inches, the front was emblazoned with the logo for Alienware, a large white alien head with glowing neon green eyes. The inside was similarly decorated, causing me to laugh, which only intensified after he showed me a charger weighing more than 20 pounds and a backpack meant to ease lugging around almost fifty pounds of computer. He explained its origins: Once a professor needed a laptop and in a particularly glaring example of status seeking ordered the most expensive laptop in the catalog he was given. Upon arrival, that he had not carefully examined the specs before ordering became apparent by how taken aback he was by the laptop’s decoration. As Burton told it, the professor took one look, said “I can’t use that,” and demanded a new laptop. The Alienware laptop was downgraded to being a loaner. Since no one wanted to use it, it eventually became the “punishment laptop” given to users considered particularly troublesome. Although I never saw anyone assigned the laptop during my time there and no one could remember it being loaned to anyone, its storied existence was a release valve for discontent with overly demanding faculty. By dissipating the frustration engendered by problematic users through backstage humor, the ITS workers could maintain the positive affect toward users necessary to complete their jobs and implement rationalization effectively.
Though the value of venting was recognized, ITS workers also policed each other to ensure that humor meant to dispel irritation did not become vitriolic snark that fed negative affect and anger toward the user. Charlie (sciences) remarked that negative attitudes can become infectious: “It’s going to spread and people are going to start developing bad attitudes because you have this dark cloud in the corner just constantly complaining.” I myself was the object of such emotional labor on multiple occasions given my sarcastic sense of humor. One time Lola and I went upstairs to the Info Desk. When Isaac took the call, he asked the receptionist to restart her computer. The woman tried to follow Isaac’s instruction but said she wasn’t getting a response from the machine. Lola looked it over and then firmly held down the power button until we heard it power off. After a few seconds, Lola restarted it and it returned to normal functioning. 1 The receptionist was apologetic and thanked Lola profusely. Lola brushed off the compliments, saying she was just happy the machine wasn’t broken. We left the Info Desk and as the elevator door closed, I made a snarky joke about the receptionist not having the upper body strength to push the power button hard enough to shut down the machine. Lola laughed for a second but then segued into defending the user, remarking that users were sometimes afraid to push buttons with much force, not realizing computers’ sturdiness. This behavior was engaged in by all the ITS workers across the university. As long as the user had been civil, they were likely to be forgiven for whatever ignorance or foible had necessitated the service call. My experiences are suggestive of how ITS workers are socialized to their function as emotional as well as technical laborers through implicit lessons that one should be understanding of users’ lack of technical savvy and that it was counterproductive to respond to users’ negative affect with anything other than sympathetic understanding and educational efforts about the value of abiding by protocol.
Ultimately, ITS workers acted as shock absorbers for the problems of rationalization when they offered sympathy and understanding as users complained about changing technology and protocols. ITS workers often let users vent, listening sympathetically to their disappointment but rarely communicating them upward to the administrators responsible. Training sessions meant to acclimate users to new technologies involved extensive emotional labor, both calming frustrated users and magnanimously receiving a lot of “advice” from faculty users about how the transition should have progressed. ITS workers had to tread carefully, making users feel validated in their opinions but being clear that there was no chance of retreat from the changes. Demonstrating infinite patience and sympathy could be wearing, but reciprocal emotional labor further ensured that user discontent was absorbed by frontline ITS workers and that high-level administrators were left with the impression that rationalization had been an unmitigated success. Without ITS workers’ reactive emotional labor as shock absorbers, which served to naturalize and legitimate reduced entitlement to ITS services, user compliance would only be partial and coupling among institutional myth, organizational policy, and employee practice far looser.
Conclusion and Discussion
Examining the experiences of university ITS workers during a period of rationalization provides valuable contributions to several literatures dealing with emotional labor and/or organizational change: ITS as site of emotional labor, street-level bureaucrats’ implementation of new policy, management scholars’ conceptualization of change agents, and inhabited institutional theories of the interactive labor required for coupling of institutional myths, organizational policy, and worker practice.
Although ITS workers do not often come to mind when thinking about emotional laborers, examination shows them to be as engaged in emotional labor as any other service worker. For users who are not IT professionals with a deep understanding of technology, interactions with ITS workers who can act as interlocuters between laymen’s understandings and technology’s logics is imperative (Zorn 2002). Defusing a user’s unhappiness is often the first step of any service call, as users must be calm to effectively describe their problem and be receptive to a solution. Preventing frustration, defined as the negative emotions that arises from a mismatch between expectations and reality, is particularly important for the introduction of technological change (Besserie et al. 2004; Corn 2011). As the example of ITS workers shows, alleviating frustration is not merely cognitive, but an affective process of creating positive emotions that permit the user to be amenable to new practices. Emotional labor is thus indispensable to ITS, because technology is fruitless if it disrupts users’ ability to do their jobs.
As street-level bureaucrats, ITS workers’ role in ensuring the uptake of new bureaucratic policies to often recalcitrant users highlights the similarities between their work and welfare case workers implementing new rules (Taylor 2014; Watkins-Hayes 2009) and inspectors enforcing regulation (Gormley 1998; May and Wood 2003). Expanding the definition of clients to include internal as well as external constituents gives a fuller picture of the work frontline employees do to implement rationalized policies. ITS workers’ example underscores the importance of emotional labor to change processes. Whether street-level bureaucrats issue threats and enact tough love (Garot 2004; Taylor 2014) or attempt to cajole clients into voluntary compliance (Gormley 1998; May and Winter 2000), emotional appeals are as necessary as clear explanations of new rules. Even when baseline compliance is unavoidable, how street-level bureaucrats communicate the benefits and consequences of rationalized policy shapes their uptake. When appropriate emotional appeals are lacking, resistance decreases the ease of implementation and engenders frustration for both workers and clients. The redefinition of ITS workers as street-level bureaucrats also adds to evidence that the use of discretion can be positively rather than negatively oriented toward clients (Tummers and Rocco 2015). By locally revising policy established by administrators to be responsive to user needs, they ensure positive experiences that make the overall goal of rationalization successful. This provides a new example of “moving toward” clients when policy and practice conflict that goes beyond breaking or bending rules (Tummers et al. 2015) to proactively establishing new practices that limit the negative effects of policy.
For management scholars, recognizing ITS workers’ emotional labor during rationalization can help organizational scholars move beyond a limited focus on nonmanagerial workers as change recipients (Eby et al. 2000; Gunnarsdottir 2016) to see their function as change agents. ITS workers’ roles as shock troops and shock absorbers highlights the indispensability of front-facing employees for successfully deploying new organizational practices, corroborating limited research on customer socialization (Cassidy et al. 2015; Kelley et al. 1992). Simply stating and publicizing new policies is insufficient; uptake requires frontline workers’ effective interactions with customers explaining, modeling, and reinforcing novel ways of functioning in organizational environments. Emotional labor is an integral part of this customer socialization, assuaging customer confusion and frustration with unfamiliar processes and limiting resistance that can undermine policies developed by management. No change program can be successful if clients’ negative emotional reactions prompt exit rather than compliance.
Finally, attention to service workers as change agents strengthens II’s understanding of the interactive processes through which coupling among institutional myth, organizational policy, and constituent interactions occurs (Hallett and Hawbaker 2020). Similar to dynamics seen in other II studies (Binder 2007; Hallett 2010; Haedicke 2012), the university’s rationalization project was derived from institutional myths about accountability and efficiency, whereby generic prescriptions to act more like businesses are manifested in specific policy and protocol through the decisions of administrators. Binder (2007), Kameo (2015), and Sauder and Espeland (2009) all allude to workers tasked with getting professional employees and clients to abide by new policies, but the example of ITS workers as shock troops and shock absorbers brings this into relief. Service workers and other support workers can be major players in local struggles over meaning. They shape how other workers understand what policy changes mean for their work and themselves, making them indispensable for converting new protocols into accepted practice. Where these projects fail or service workers are unwilling to engaging in meaning-making projects conducive to the realization of organizational policy, loose coupling and decoupling may be more likely, though more research is required.
ITS workers’ also highlight the importance of emotional labor for these meaning-making projects and policy implementation. Though ITS workers could not prevent new modes of interaction or the threat to status that decreased entitlement caused, their emotional labor could make them more palatable, naturalizing new protocols, decreasing resistance, and encouraging voluntary compliance. Despite their contribution to the coupling of organizational practice and institutional myth, though, ITS workers’ emotional labor is anything but a straightforward coupling of worker interaction and organizational policy. Not dictated by management, it is as a space of agency and creativity that gently tightens the coupling between workers’ microlevel actions and mesolevel policy by intervening in meaning-making processes and occasionally policy itself in ways not expected by management. ITS workers’ example provides a new layer to Hallett’s (2010) observations that organizational change is an emotional process and that the uptake of new practices depends on more than workers’ cognitive understanding. Emotional labor by interactive service workers can be a tool for tightening the coupling of institutional myth and organizational policy if its contribution to local meaning-making projects encourages acceptance and enactment of organizational protocols, not just ceremonial compliance.
Further research by inhabited institution scholars should be done on service workers and other front-facing employees to deepen our understanding of how policy promulgated at the organizational level is and isn’t realized on the ground and what that means for an organization’s specific coupling configuration. While the role of professionals in enacting new policy or not has begun to be documented, the role of service workers as mediators between policy and the employees who are expected to change their practices deserves more attention.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Mark S. Mizruchi, Pamela J. Smock, Lilia Cortina, the Economic Sociology Workshop at the University of Michigan, Denise Bailey, Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Laura Backstrom, and Philip Lewin for their feedback and encouragement.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
