Emotion work
Regular readers might remember a fascinating piece of recent research I featured on the blog which examined what it feels like to share your lived experience as a worker for a criminal justice organisation in England and Scotland. Today, I’m highlighting what I think is a similarly intriguing study by the same three researchers: Kaitlyn Quinn (@KaitlynQuinn90), Philippa Tomczak (@philippatomczak) Gill Buck (@gillybuck), which looks at how voluntary sector workers in the criminal justice sector keep themselves going in the current difficult environment. The paper “How you keep going”: Voluntary sector practitioners’ story-lines as emotion work“, published in the British Journal of Sociology, explores how these workers continued to work for causes that were deeply important to them while reckoning with the reality that the problems they sought to ameliorate were too numerous, too complex, and too systemic — and their work too poorly and inconsistently funded — for their efforts to make the kind of difference that they wished. The intransigent social ills of poverty, crime, homelessness etc. are described throughout the report by the sociological phrase “wicked problems”.
The research, based on focus groups with 32 practitioners, took place during the pandemic, when things were even tougher. The researchers had conversations with participants around three main questions:
- What do you do and why?
- What does it feel like?
- What power do you have?
Supplementary questions included: What do you enjoy about your work? What are its challenges? What matters to those you seek to help? How do you find this out? How are you supported in your work? How could things be different?
Story-lines
The core of the research focuses on the “emotion work” which practitioners rely on to keep going. The researchers found three recurrent story-lines which focused on resignation, strategy and refuge. I look briefly at these three story-lines below.
Resignation
All of the practitioners were faced with the harsh reality that criminalized individuals’ needs
were too expansive and too complex for their efforts to make the kind of difference that they wished. Some practitioners seemingly learned to accept the inevitability of failure and to see anger, frustration, sadness, and despair as an unavoidable, and even necessary, part of this work. These practitioners relied on a story-line of resignation; they accepted that the system could not be changed but this acceptance helped them avoid becoming overcome with frustration, anger, sadness, or despair and still do their job with a degree of commitment.
“I don’t drink alcohol at all because if I did, I would go home and get drunk every night … You come out [of working in the prison] and you just think ‘oh God I need to get drunk’ … it would be so easy after days of what we do to just drown your pain.”
Strategy
Other practitioners spoke about how they kept going amidst the challenging conditions of their work by interpreting their inevitably limited actions as strategically chosen. The researchers found that this story-line was predominantly mobilized by practitioners to manage their feelings of overwhelm at the size and scope of the problems they sought to
ameliorate. Emotion words were rarely used in this story-line. Instead, practitioners appeared to manage their emotions by dividing them off from rationality—at least in the way they talked about the impact of their work. This group of workers often acknowledged that they could not do everything and often concentrated their efforts on creating small, concrete changes for individuals, rather than grappling with wicked problems in their full complexity. Many consciously grappled with doing the best job they could while acknowledging there was so much wrong with the system:
“My peer mentoring was for education, training, and employment, but so what am I supposed to do when she tells me that she’s in a domestic abuse relationship, say ‘sorry that’s not my remit’? You end up sitting in on meetings where people are making judgements about how far you can go to help someone, who you’re allowed to help, and where you can spend your emotional labour coins … That’s really, really hard to deal with.”
Refuge
The third theme focused on the way some practitioners described how they took refuge in their organizations’ values to manage their disappointment, stay positive, and find fulfilment in their work outside of tangible outcomes. The researches found that by focusing on the alignment between their organization’s answer to this question and their own world
views, some practitioners were able to keep going even when their efforts were not rewarded and their aspirations were unlikely to be realized. Organizational values seemed to offer these practitioners a sense of who they were and what they were striving for, mitigating
limited tangible results. None of these story-lines or coping strategies were infallible and most workers were left to struggle with negative feelings about the limited impact of their work:
“It’s like a mission … whether it’s a personal or collective one … and yet we’re having to do so in structures that don’t understand what it’s like and constrain you in ways that make it more emotional. It makes it traumatic really.”
Conclusions
The research team acknowledges that producing change for individuals and societies amidst wicked problems is incredibly difficult work. They argue that while social policy frequently depicts the voluntary sector as capable of supporting individuals struggling at the intersection of social problems and policy failures, it consistently fails to provide the financial backing, infrastructure, and political will to facilitate this work.
They argue that it is important for us to understand what it is like to work in these organizations—both for practitioners and the vulnerable individuals they support.
Thanks to Jen Theodore for kind permission to use the header image in this post which was previously published on Unsplash.
