Alienation and demoralisation, or continuing labours of love?
Alienation and demoralisation, or continuing labours of love?
This chapter brings together the evidence on the impact of these changes on staff motivation and commitment. The New Public Management has been criticised for assuming that people in general – and public service professionals more specifically – can't be trusted, needing the discipline of targets and close monitoring. This negative approach fails to take account of the actual motivations and values of those involved, it has been argued, motivations and values that may actually be undermined by the imposition of target-type cultures, such as those associated with the New Public Management. The research did indeed identify examples of disaffection and demoralisation among Law Centre staff and volunteers. Some were so alienated that they were actually leaving, feeling that it was becoming impossible to work in ways that were consistent with their professional values any longer. More widely though, there were inspiring examples of continuing commitment amongst staff and volunteers, giving of their time as ‘labours of love’. This was despite the pressures and dilemmas that they were experiencing, dilemmas that would have been less draining for them personally if they had not been investing so much emotional labour in the process.
Keywords: alienation of Law Centre staff, labour of love, emotional labour, professional values
Policy Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
