Bureaucracy and Emotions - Perspectives across Disciplines

When it comes to the question of where emotions are to be located, one can initially focus on individual carriers, whereby one can roughly distinguish between administrators and administrative addressees. However, it is also possible to focus on »emotional communities«,

Barbara H. Rosenwein: »Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions«, in: Passions in Context 1 (2010), online: https://www.passionsincontext.de/uploads/media/01_Rosenwein.pdf (1. 8. 2018).

Finally, the practical forms of bureaucratic and legal procedures with their implications for emotional work (»affective labor«,

Michael Hardt: »Affective Labor«, in: Boundary 26/2 (1999), pp. 89–100.

Emotions can be seen not only as something one has but also as something one does. In this perspective, practical action generates not only emotions but emotions themselves are practices as a way of dealing with the world.

Monique Scheer: »Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion«, in: History and Theory 51 (2012), pp. 193–220.

This is connected with the problem of the construction of emotions, and it concerns the development of a certain vocabulary, which first defines what is to be regarded as emotional at all, and determines which manifestations and effects are associated with which emotions.

Daniela Saxer: »Mit Gefühl handeln. Ansätze der Emotionsgeschichte«, in: Traverse 14 (2007), pp. 15–29, at pp. 16–17.

Finally, from an administrative historical perspective, the question of the regulation of emotions arises. On one hand, a regulatory framework can result from overarching, dominant »emotional regimes« (William Reddy) with a general claim to validity.

See below for more details.

Finally, one can even think of a normative incorporation of emotions into administrative programmes and thus ultimately of their objectification, so that the social welfare of the modern state can to a large extent be regarded as a rationalizing realization of ›compassion‹ – just as the administrative action of totalitarian states against certain groups can be interpreted as an institutionalized form of legitimized ›hate‹.

The regulation of emotions, however, refers not only to external regulation but also to self-regulation. This includes the self-conditioning of public administrators in their efforts to fulfil their tasks and, at the same time, their understanding of status. Implied here is a self-discipline aimed at not allowing inappropriate emotions to flow into the decision-making process as well as a balanced management that allows certain emotions to be taken into account.

Terry A. Maroney: »Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior«, in: California Law Review 99 (2011), pp. 1485–1556.

It can therefore be said that emotions are not only the object of regulation but also have regulatory potential. This draws attention to emotions as a normative resource. This concerns very specific emotions as well as more complex emotional concepts such as honour, trust and loyalty. In addition to law, technical standards, economic guidelines and other normativities, emotions are thus part of a multinormative regulatory basis for administrative action.

With two handbooks published in recent years, the history of emotions seems to have become an established sub-discipline of academic history.

Jan Plamper: Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte, München 2012; Rob Boddice: The History of Emotions, Manchester 2018.

One of the things that drives the work of historians of emotions is the need to articulate the implicit and not always clearly elaborated understanding of emotions in which traditional historiography is often grounded. Many eminent scholars have deployed common-day, mundane understanding of emotional experience and the way people in general act on their emotions, without reflecting on the nature and workings of these feelings. The crucial role empathy played in history, to mention one example, however, is something historians of emotions during the last decades have reflected on more fundamentally. As a result, the historical significance of the fact that people started empathizing with different groups of people is now a crucial aspect to the history of humanitarianism and human rights.

Important advocates of this are found in: Thomas W. Lacquer: »Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative«, in: Lynn Hunt (ed.): The New Cultural History, Berkeley 1989, pp. 176–204; Lynn A. Hunt: Inventing Human Rights. A History, New York 2007; Aleida Assmann / Ines Detmers (eds.): Empathy and Its Limits, Basingstoke 2016.

As a matter of fact, it should not come as a surprise that historians invest their energy in analysing the role emotions played in history. History is, as the German historicist tradition at least asserts, the science of understanding (Verstehen), and the historian analyses the way historical agents make sense of their world bound by their »horizon of expectations«.

Cf. Wolfgang J. Mommsen: »Wandlungen im Bedeutungsgehalt der Kategorie des ›Verstehens‹«, in: Christian Meier / Jörn Rüsen (eds.): Theorie der Geschichte, München 1988, pp. 200–226.

For that matter, an important endeavour for historians of emotions is to highlight the implicit understanding of emotions that are present in classical historical narratives. However, the historian of emotions is often interested in taking this a step further. What they rather pursue is to find the norms and expectations that dictated emotional behaviour itself and to demonstrate that they indeed are also inherently historical. In other words, the aim is to show how these norms and expectations are ingrained in social formations that emerged in history. What prominent historians of emotions have therefore found out is that that various communities have in different ways formulated norms for emotional behaviour, which determined the expectations of members of these communities about what to feel and how to react ›emotionally‹. To see these emotional communities as historical singularities is what the American historian of Medieval Europe Barbara Rosenwein formulated as the most important task of the history of emotions.

Barbara H. Rosenwein: »Worrying about Emotions in History«, in: The American Historical Review 107/3 (2002), pp. 821–845; Barbara H. Rosenwein: Generations of Feeling. A History of Emotions, 600–1700, Cambridge 2015.

The kind of community one can think of varies from case to case. It can be the national community

To mention a few examples: Frank Biess: Republik der Angst. Die andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, Berlin 2018; Thomas Dixon: Weeping Britannia. Portrait of a Nation in Tears, Oxford 2015; Ville Kivimäki / Tuomas Tepora: »War of Hearts. Love and Collective Attachment As Integrating Factors in Finland During World War II«, in: Journal of Social History 43/2 (2009), pp. 285–305; Susan J. Matt: Homesickness. An American history, New York 2011; Stephanie Olsen: Juvenile Nation. Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914, London 2015; Peter N. Stearns: American Cool. Constructing a Twentieth Century Emotional Style, New York 1994.

The thing, however, that has gotten the historical study of emotions particularly on a fast track is the intensive engagement of scholars with the role the body plays in emotional experience and expression. The ways in which emotions are enacted and how these were formed and embodied in the process of history are something traditional historians writing on the topic of emotions were less inclined to include. In modern historical work, however, this has become the kernel of most emotion research. To mention an example, the experience of religious conversion is something bodily enacted, happening in a highly ritualized manner that historical communities have formulated and altered over time, depending on their religious doctrines and ideas about the body. Nonetheless, the way these feelings were embodied can also be the source of deep conflict in certain religious communities when other members of the same faith rather adhere to a restrained and inner experience of religion.

Pascal Eitler / Bettina Hitzer / Monique Scheer: »Feeling and Faith—Religious Emotions in German History«, in: German History 32/3 (2014), pp. 343–352.

Even though histories of emotions seem to cover all spheres of society, there is nonetheless a certain community-bias in the current research. Studies deal with, for instance, the role of emotions in elite circles when they engage in duelling sentiments of solidarity in modern protest movements or the feelings of intimacy that people in oppressed circumstances express; nevertheless, they all start from the assumption that communities are based on emotional ties and thus that emotions are the sine qua non of human communities.

Think of examples such as: Ute Frevert: Men of Honour. A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, Cambridge 1995; Joachim C. Häberlen / Jake P. Smith: »Struggling for Feelings. The Politics of Emotions in the Radical New Left in West Germany, c. 1968–84«, in: Contemporary European History 23/4 (2014), pp. 615–637; Will Jackson: »The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule«, in: Itinerario 42/1 (2018), pp. 1–15.

As a matter of fact, there seems to be a growing interest nowadays in the study of bureaucratic practices from a cultural perspective, which probably started with Michael Lipsky’s seminal work on »Street-level bureaucracy«.

Michael Lipsky: Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, New York 2010.

This challenge to a dominant narrative invites a new way of looking at the role of emotions in forms of bureaucratic government. Rather than thinking of emotional experience and expression as a failure of bureaucratic government – as an error in the system – it invites scholars to look at the way affectionate attachments to this form of government were formed in the process. In other words, such a study aims to give a face to the ›faceless bureaucrat‹. This approach assumes that in the interactions that occur between bureaucrats and clients, there is in fact a constant ongoing negotiation on the permissibility of emotional experience and expression. Many of the studies in this volume show this. Moreover, changes that occur in the moral values that guide bureaucratic practices can also deeply affect the bureaucrats who were formed under the older emotional regime and have to cope with new emotional norms, as their entire emotional economy is ruptured. To give place to these changing norms, it can therefore be fruitful to see the ›rational‹ form of government as more than just a political ideal but also as an emotional style that is both embodied and always inherently contested.

The sociology of emotions covers a broad variety of schools of thought: evolutionary, symbolic interactionist, symbolic interactionist with psychoanalytic elements, interaction ritual, power and status, stratification and exchange. While the topic appears at times in the works of those considered classical sociologists (i.e. Marx’s early concern with alienation and »species being«,

Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. by Martin Mulligan, Moscow 1959.

According to Kathryn J. Lively, »since its inception some four decades ago, the sociology of emotion has been relatively long on theory and short on method, with the majority of scholarship relying on case studies, self-reports, and data gleaned from college students in experimental settings«.

Kathryn J. Lively: »Comment on ›Methodological Innovations From the Sociology of Emotions – Methodological Advances‹«, in: Emotion Review 7/2 (2015), pp. 181f., at p. 181; s. a. Jan E. Stets / Jonathan H. Turner: Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions 2, New York 2014.

Although Hochschild, with her use of survey data

Hochschild: »Emotion Work«, p. 561; idem: The Managed Heart, pp. 12f.

In addition to emotion management, the sociology of emotions holds many promises and opportunities to broaden our understanding of administrative history. A good starting point is the work of Lipsky, who provides an inside view of the common dilemmas faced by street-level bureaucrats, an umbrella term that includes teachers, police, welfare workers and other state agents who deal directly with the public.

Lipsky: Street-Level Bureaucracy.

Another contributor to this emotional »inside« view of how decisions are implemented is provided by Emerson.

Robert M. Emerson: Judging Delinquents. Context and Process in Juvenile Court, Chicago, IL 1969; idem: »Holistic Effects in Social Control Decision-Making«, in: Law and Society Review 17 (1983), pp. 425–455; idem: »Case Processing and Interorganizational Knowledge. Detecting the ›Real Reasons‹ for Referrals«, in: Social Problems 38 (1991), pp. 198–212; idem: »Disputes in Public Bureaucracies«, in: Susan S. Silbey / Austin Sarat (eds.): Studies in Law, Politics and Society 12, Part A, Greenwich, CT, 1992, pp. 3–29.

Emotions are especially prominent when such procedures are breeched. The sociology of troubles focuses on how troubles are »identified, reacted to, and elaborated«. Emerson and Messinger’s piece provides a wholistic view of trouble from the ground up, proposing that the recognition of »deviance« often begins with »a vague sense of ›something wrong‹«

Robert M. Emerson / Sheldon L. Messinger: »The Micro-Politics of Trouble«, in: Social Problems 25/2 (1977), pp. 121–134, at p. 121.

The occasion of ›bad news‹ is also intuitively striking as an opportunity for the expression of emotion. Unlike studies of trouble, which typically concern efforts to manage and remedy the phenomenon, but have difficulty gaining access to the phenomenon itself, studies of bad news have access to the phenomenal present of the emotion-laden moment in which bad news is delivered. McClenahen and Lofland depict deputy U.S. marshals’ tactics of delivering bad news (which must be done several times a day) as involving a »nice guy impersonality«, through which they both »scale down the badness« of their report and »distance« themselves from recipients’ responses. Specifically, they describe a number of »shoring« practices to bolster the recipient after the news is delivered, providing advice about prison such as, »it’s not as bad as you think« or that »it could have been worse«.

Lachlan McClenahen / John Lofland: »Bearing Bad News. Tactics of the Deputy U.S. Marshal«, in: Sociology of Work and Occupations 3/3 (1976), pp. 251–272.

While McClenahen and Lofland ground their analysis in the organizational context of talk, Maynard grounds his studies of physicians’ delivery of diagnostic news (at clinics specializing in developmental disabilities) in the interactional structures of talk and elucidates a number of novel conversational structures en route.

Douglas Maynard: »Bearing Bad News in Clinical Settings«, in: Brenda J. Dervin / Melvin J Voigt (eds.): Progress in Communication Sciences. Norwood, NJ, 1991, pp. 143–172; idem: »The Perspective-Display Series in the Delivery and Receipt of Diagnostic News«, in: Deidre Boden / Don H. Zimmerman (eds.): Talk and Social Structure, Berkeley 1991, pp. 164–194; idem: »On Clinicians Co-implicating Recipients’ Perspective in the Delivery of Diagnostic News«, in: Paul Drew / John Heritage (eds.): Talk at Work, London 1992, pp. 331–358.

In conclusion, while the study of emotions is a new and exciting topic within sociology, it is also an enigmatic and slippery one. There are a number of reasons for such difficulties. First, emotions are quick. Often they come and go without one realizing it, and when one does stop to realize or analyse it, the emotion is gone (one is then doing an analysis). Second, emotions are embodied phenomena. Unlike discursive practices that can be deciphered and analysed in numerous ways, emotions are messy and often difficult to interpret.

David D. Franks: »Notes on the Bodily Aspect of Emotions. A Controversial Issue in Symbolic Interaction«, in: Studies in Symbolic Interaction 8 (1987), pp. 219–233.

One of the more promising scientific approaches for an administrative history focussed on emotions is a research approach that can be summarized under the catchword »law and emotions«. However, it should be mentioned that this is not a coherent theory. Rather, we are dealing with a multitude of approaches that pursue different research directions and are partly based on different theoretical assumptions. In order to clarify this and also to clarify the possible relevance for administrative history, it is important that we first discuss what is to be understood by »law and emotions«.

In the United States, the law and emotions approach is the most influential, carries the most intellectual clout and demonstrates the broadest differentiation. There it has established itself as a self-contained legal sub-discipline. It began when feminists and other representatives of critical legal theory addressed emotions in terms of a challenge to traditional legal doctrine. Prior to this, doctrines were very much focussed on rationality, which meant emotions were only permitted to play a secondary role. The early works on law and emotion mainly aimed at the legitimation of an alternative approach. In the 1990s, the focus shifted from legitimacy to the investigation of emotions and their significance in law itself.

Kathryn Abrams / Hila Keren: »Who’s Afraid of Law and the Emotions«, in: Minnesota Law Review 94 (2009–2010), pp. 1997–2074, at pp. 2003–2011.

Research approaches that have developed in Germany are by no means comparable in terms of scale. To a certain extent, they have their own character, which is clearly connected with their embeddedness within a certain tradition of legal thinking. This is expressed in a particular terminology, for example, »sense of justice« (Rechtsgefühl). »Sense of justice« was already a guiding concept in 19th-century legal literature,

See in particular Gustav Rümelin: »Über das Rechtsgefühl (1871)«, in: Gustav Rümelin: Reden und Aufsätze, Tübingen 1875, pp. 62–87.

However, what could the results of a jurisprudential examination of emotions yield for administrative history? In order to work this out, it is helpful to first discuss three possible objections to the integration of these approaches into an administrative–historical perspective.

The first objection is that the legal debate relates largely

One important exception: Ellerbrock / Kesper-Biermann: »Between Passion and Senses?«; see also the projects of the research area »Law and Emotions« at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, Berlin, online: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions/projects/law-and-emotions(1 8. 2018).

The second objection concerns a fundamental methodological problem. Given that legal discussions always have a normative perspective, the main question comes down to what is right. From a historical perspective, however, the primary question is about what is true.

Hespanha: »Early Modern Law«, pp. 196–203.

Finally, the third objection is subject related: The subject of the legal debate is law, i.e. legal norms, legal procedures and legal discourses. From the perspective of administrative history, however, administrative standards of action, administrative procedures and administrative scientific, especially administrative–historical discourses, play a role. The objection therefore relates to the incongruence of subject areas. This objection is important because it refers to the different normative character of administrative cultures. On the one end of the scale, there is a pronounced legalist administrative culture in which administration is understood merely as the enforcement of law. From a contemporary perspective, i.e. from a more poignant point of view, this is the German administration. At the other end of the scale is an administrative model in which administration is viewed as an instrument for enforcing political decisions. Put simply, the usability of the findings from the debate on »law and emotions«, and also on the »sense of law« depends on the respective legalistic character of the administration: The more legalistic an administration is, the easier it is to transfer knowledge or questions of a jurisprudential treatment of emotions. However, there is another limitation to be taken into account here: The research on »law and emotions« mainly relates to the legal system of the United States, which differs fundamentally from other legal systems, especially the continental European legal systems. In view of these differences, the issue as to which findings or questions are transferable and which are not needs to be clarified. Finally, a third restriction must be pointed out in this context. Much of the work in the context of »law and emotions« focuses on a specific area of law: criminal law. This area of law in particular has a special affinity to emotions.

Ellerbrock / Kesper-Biermann: »Between Passion and Senses?«, p. 5.

After discussing the possibilities and limits of making the legal study of emotions usable, we want to point out certain possible levels of reception. It is less a question of adopting certain results than of focussing on questions that have been developed by law and emotion research.

In general, it should be emphasized that the emotions that play a role in the legal debate are also relevant from an administrative historical perspective. This concerns negatively connotated emotions such as shame, disgust, fear and anger, as well as positively connotated emotions such as loyalty, gratitude, generosity, elevation and awe.

Maroney: »Law and Emotion«, p. 134.

If one now comes to the individual investigation avenues or fields of investigation, one possibility is to divide this according to persons, procedures and organizations.

Similar: Ellerbrock / Kesper-Biermann: »Between Passion and Senses?«, p. 5.

As far as the procedural level is concerned, a distinction must first be made between types of procedures in terms of types of decision-making. Luhmann, in particular, has made the distinction between conditional and final programming prominent.

Niklas Luhmann: Das Recht der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 195–204.

This is related to another factor: Procedures characterized by final programming are often characterized by a complex participant structure, especially when they are planning procedures. Such procedures are characterized not only by the processing of complex information situations and the interrelation of a multitude of divergent calculations of interests but also by the balancing of diverse moods. This is particularly important in the case of administrative procedures involving public participation,

On these procedures from an administrative historical perspective, Pascale Cancik: Verwaltung und Öffentlichkeit in Preußen, Tübingen 2007, pp. 209–374.

Finally, we should draw attention to a constant within the discussion on judicial procedures, which is also of emotional historical relevance. It can be summarized under the heading: »Judging or conciliation« (Richten oder Schlichten).

Brief overview on this debate: Peter Collin: »Judging and Conciliation – Differentiations and Complementarities«, in: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series 4 (2013), online: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2256508 (1. 8. 2018).

Organizational aspects have an important significance in law and emotion research. There, of course, the jury plays an important role as a special organizational variant of judicial decision-making.

An organizational form comparable to that of the jury can hardly be found in administration. However, the research on the jury draws attention to two aspects that are also of importance in the history of administration: 1) How do collectives decide? What emotional dynamics can be observed in processes of collective decision-making? Can the discussion in collectives also reduce negative moods in administrative colleges, as is assumed in jury research?

Bandes / Blumenthal: »Emotion and the Law«, p. 173.

Another aspect highlighted by law and emotion research is the relationship between emotions and institutional structures. This concerns, for example, the question of which incentive systems linked to certain emotional dispositions have been created and implemented in organizations.

Bandes / Blumenthal: »Emotion and the Law«, pp. 173f.