Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector

Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector Donna Baines a,⁎, Sara Charlesworth b, Ian Cunningham c, Janet Dassinger d a b c d

Labour Studies and Social Work, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4M4 Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia Department of Human Resource Management, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom School of Social Work, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton ON Canada L8S 4M4

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 15 August 2012

s y n o p s i s The findings discussed in this paper are drawn from a larger study of the changing work experience of front-line workers in four comparable, restructured, liberal welfare states, in a subsector of the economy known as the nonprofit social services (NPSS). Older practices, unique to the sector, such as collectivist ethics, relationship building, care and social justice are being colonised and displaced by the new technologies of performativity such as self-monitoring, target setting, outcome measures and technocratic solutions. In addition, changes in labour markets have produced high numbers of unemployed men in some countries, some of whom have moved into jobs in this traditionally female sector, reshaping aspects of the work and its mission-based ethos. This paper suggests a continuum of masculinised and feminised strategies exist in the NPSS. The latter depend on idealised, female self-sacrifice and reinforce social justice ethics while most of the former challenge non-profit ethics and alter work practices to be more consistent with managerialist aims. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Like the private and public sectors, the non-profit social services sector (NPSS) purports to operate on its own unique set of logics, often referred to as the voluntary ethic (Van Til, 2000). Optimally, this ethic is assumed to pervade most practices in the NPSS including: interconnection (relationships); self-sacrifice on behalf of others (altruism); participation (in agency and community decision making); care (physical and emotional) and various versions of social justice (Brainard & Siplon, 2004; Frumkin, 2002). Until the 1980s the voluntary sector in most liberal welfare states extended government provision rather than replacing it. Many fear that due to the growth of outsourcing from the public to the voluntary sector,

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D. Baines), [email protected] (S. Charlesworth), [email protected] (I. Cunningham), [email protected] (J. Dassinger). 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2012.07.002

the NPSS now acts in place of and as an arm of government and is losing its capacity for advocacy, critique and the voluntary ethic (Brainard & Siplon, 2004; Van Til, 2000). In seeking explanations for these changes, attention has focused on wider debates in public service reform outsourcing and its accompanying principles of New Public Management (NPM), where market-oriented, performance management models underlie the restructuring of work organisation and organisational logics. In public education, for example, Ball (2003) argues that NPM reform pivots on three interrelated policy technologies: the market; managerialism; and performativity (p. 371). Though Ball's work addresses educational reform, it is equally applicable to other areas of the larger public sector where restructuring and NPM predominate. Contracting-out and off-loading services from the public to the non- and for-profit sectors are characteristic of these changes, extending the reach and impact of performativity through contract requirements and accreditation standards, self-monitoring, target setting, outcome measures and technocratic solutions that potentially colonise and displace older

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

technologies and practices unique to the sector such as collectivist ethics, relationship building, care and social justice. In all three of the countries studied, shifts in labour market policies have resulted in the decline of working class male employment in manufacturing and industry as production has moved offshore to lower wage, lower protection environments (Harvey, 2005). Governments have been reluctant to protect or replace these jobs through direct intervention, job creation or incentives to employers. This has created a pool of men who may have once had access to male, “breadwinning”, working class jobs but now find themselves seeking alternate employment, often in non-traditional, lower wage areas typically filled by women (Lupton, 2000; Simpson, 2004), including care work in the NPSS. Drawing from a qualitative four country study of the NPSS (Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Scotland/UK) our findings suggest that voluntary and social justice ethics may be under serious threat by marketisation, managerialism, and performativity (Ball, 2003; Clarke, 2004). 1 Interestingly, our data shows that the voluntary ethos seemed to be least evident in areas with higher male unemployment, and the consequent influx of significant numbers of male employees to NPSS workplaces. For example, in our study site that had a more typical, predominantly female workforce (in Australia), the social justice/voluntary ethic was strongly evident. However, the same altruistic ethic was much less evident in the two agencies studied with 50% male samples (New Zealand and Scotland). Earlier case studies in Canada, Scotland and Australia (Baines, 2010) also confirmed an explicit commitment to social justice among the overwhelmingly female staff, leading us to question whether certain gendered relationships to social justice/voluntary ethic are emerging in the NPSS with the entry of higher numbers of men employed in the sector. This article will argue that the NPSS is a highly gendered sector as are the non-profit organisations themselves and the identities and practices of the workers within these agencies. Differing from Ball's (2003) gender neutral analysis of performativity, we argue that performativity is a highly gendered process, building on and reflecting gendered expectations of ones self and others. In this article, we suggest a spectrum or continuum of masculinised and feminised care strategies and activities that men and women undertake in order to do their work in the context of managerialism and performativity. The article will focus in particular on performativity's transfer of aspects of monitoring, documenting and blaming from management to the worker, in effect constructing the self-monitored, self-documented, self-blamed worker in a context where selfsacrifice is the widely accepted gendered norm. The balance of this article will address the following questions: 1) are male and female workers clustered on a gendered care continuum in the NPSS, and if so, where; 2) are self-monitoring, self-blame and self-sacrifice part of the work experience of NPSS workers and if so are there gendered patterns; and 3) is performativity and/or the social justice/voluntary ethos gendered in the increasingly managerialised NPSS, and if so how? This article begins with a brief summary of the four country study from which the findings are drawn. It continues with a short review of relevant literature before moving on to the main section of the article in which findings are reported. The article concludes with discussion and reflections.

363

The study The larger four country, comparative study, of which the data discussed in this article are a part, investigates changing work relations in the non-profit sector. Exploring the experience of front-line workers, our larger study undertakes comparative, international intensive case studies of non-profit social service agencies in each of the highly restructured welfare states involved in the study (with twelve case studies in total; nine completed to date — three in each of Canada and Australia, two in Scotland, one in New Zealand). In order to access the richest possible data, the agencies studied have been selected on the basis of similarity and difference (Patton, 2002). All agencies studied to date have been fairly typical, large-sized, multi-service, multi-site agency, providing a range of NPSS including: housing; addictions services; food; budgeting and income support; child and family services; elder supports; policy analysis; and referrals. All agencies received the majority of their funding through government contracts but were also involved in fundraising. Case studies involved interviews, participant observations and document reviews. Interviews and observation sites were selected through both criterion sampling (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and snowball sampling (Glesne, 2005) in which sites and research participants were: 1) selected by the researchers based on their potential contribution to the data keeping in mind our goal of richest possible data and widest possible viewpoints; and 2) suggested to us by those we interviewed and observed. In the latter case, suggestions were triangulated for their potential contribution to data collection, seeking similarity and difference or what Patton (2002) calls “predictable contrasts”. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants were asked to comment on changes they had experienced in the last few years, reasons for working and staying in the non-profit sector, changes they would like to see, advice they would give to others and their experience of working in this environment. Participant observations were naturalistic and involved a mixture of interaction and informal discussions with agency workers, service users and others present at the project (DeWalt, 2007). Data analysis took place through a constant comparison method until themes were identified and patterns discerned (Kirby, Greaves, & Reid, 2005). The bulk of the discussion in this article will focus on data collected during the three case studies that took place in 2010 in each of Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. The case study in Scotland involved 23 interviews (12 men and 11 women), 5 participant observations respectively and a number of programme tours. New Zealand was the second case study with17 interviews (8 men and 10 women), 4 participant observations, various programme tours and a document review, and Australia was the third with 17 interviews (6 men and 10 women), 4 observations, programme tours and a review of documents. As mentioned earlier, the sample in Australia was more typical of the sector at 73% female while the samples in New Zealand and Scotland were roughly 50% male. As this was a qualitative study seeking the greatest depth and richness of data, saturation was the goal of data collection and sample size rather than representativeness (Bowen, 2008; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Saturation was achieved with the numbers reported above.

364

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

Contexts and literature The nonprofit social services sector and performativity Though not explicitly part of the private market, through their managerial models and approaches to social problems, non-profit agencies are increasingly promarket — legitimising and extending the influence of the for-profit sector (Baines, 2010). Mirroring a global turn to private markets as the solution for social and individual problems (Clarke, 2004; Ferguson, 2007), performance management has been a key plank in restructuring public and private delivery of services (Baines, 2010; Cunningham, 2008; McDonald, 2006). As noted earlier, NPM and managerialism, forms of work standardisation and cost control, has become the hegemonic model of social service delivery in the four countries involved in our larger study. Based in performance management, or a series of regulations, measures and documentation processes that reward, control and sanction those working under this system, performativity attempts the “translation of complex social processes and events into simple figures or categories of judgement” (Ball, 2003: 217). Promoted as part of neoliberal agenda of deregulation (Curristine, Lonti, & Joumard, 2007), performance management is actually a process of re‐regulating workers by transferring much of the monitoring, evaluation, and blame to the “self” or the individual worker. Performativity does more than alter the mode of regulation in a workplace, as Rose (1990) notes, it changes our relationship and experience of the self as a worker (and who one feels they can and should be) as well as our relationships with and to others. Research in the social services sector indicates that NPM has standardised work practices and removed or reduced opportunities for social justice and community empowerment (Baines, 2010; Ross, 2011; Smith, 2011). Ball (2003) claims further that in workplaces where performativity operates, employees often monitor their own performance in relation to the performance metrics, rather than in relation to their professional training and professional, personal or social ethics, even when they are aware that conflicts exist between the two. As will be explored later in this study, some workers resist performance management by trying to use outcome targets in more social justice-directed ways while others find ways to work around metrics and struggle to preserve the voluntary ethos. Highly gendered sector Work in the non-profit social services work often draws on the larger term of care work which can be defined as a series of embodied tasks (counselling, referrals, bathing, cooking, and cleaning) and emotional states (relationships, support, and nurturing) provided to an individual or group of individuals in a paid or unpaid capacity, aimed at enhancing functionality and day-to-day living. Populations in receipt of care include: children and people who are elderly, ill, disabled and/or disadvantaged, but can also include family members (Baines, Evans, & Neysmith, 1998). In the countries involved in this study, care work is performed mainly by women in paid and unpaid capacities in the home, private, public and non-profit sectors. Not surprisingly, women make up the majority of staff, clients and volunteers in this sector, though men continue to

make up the majority of upper management and executivelevel employees (Themundo, 2009). The selfless altruism assumed of staff in the NPSS overlaps with and reinforces the selfless and endless sacrifice assumed from mothers and other female caregivers (Baines, 2004; Baines et al., 1998; Charlesworth, 2010). Indeed, it is often difficult to differentiate between the “ideal” NPSS employee and the assumed and “naturalised” female focus on relationship, care of others and boundless capacity to put the needs of others ahead of one's own (Cunningham, 2008; Themundo, 2009). Though not yet reflected in national statistics, our early findings show that a further aspect of welfare state and economic restructuring seems to be that men are moving into paid care work, displacing women and bringing new dimensions to this work. The literature on masculinities is extensive and growing. Though noting that masculinities are relational, that is, socially constructed in relation to other identities, structures and practices (Acker, 2006; Connell, 2005, Martin & Collinson, 2002), most studies of masculinity focus primarily or largely on comparing men to men (Cheng, 1996; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Kerfoot & Knights, 2006). Filling a gap in the literature, this article compares the experience, performance and strategies of men to men as well as to women working in the non-profit sector. The strategies and performances of women will likewise be compared to other women. The section of the masculinities literature we are particularly interested in focuses on the ways men draw on various masculine storylines and behaviours within non-traditional work (Cross & Bagilhole, 2002; Lupton, 2000; Simpson, 2004). Cross and Bagilhole (2002) identify three identities men adopt in “women's jobs”: traditional; traditional and reconstructed; and reconstructed masculinities. They, like other authors, note that while work in non-traditional fields may provide opportunities for alternative, reconstructed masculinities, it is more likely that men will colonise women's work, modernising patriarchy rather than reducing or eradicating it (Cross & Bagilhole, 2002: 221). Lupton (2000) similarly notes that while women are typically disadvantaged in male-dominated jobs, men often quickly rise to administration and management positions in female-majority jobs, benefitting from assumed technical and leadership capacities. Lupton (2000) also notes that to cope with employment in female-majority workplaces, men may play up their masculinity; play down masculinity; incorporate aspects of feminised behaviour and/or note that they, as individuals, are just well suited to the work, while other men are not (Lupton, 2000: 44). Similarly, Simpson's (2004) typology includes: seekers (men who seek out non-traditional work); finders (men who fall into non-traditional jobs without knowing much about them); and settlers (men who remain in a non-traditional job after working in male dominated jobs) (p. 349). Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) question trait theories and typologies noting that identities are fluid and men are likely to employ a number of strategies simultaneously rather than stick neatly to one or the other category. Rather than a typology, our earlier analysis led to the development of a continuum or spectrum of masculinities present within the restructured NPSS (Baines & Cunningham, 2011). We emphasise that masculinities in traditionally female workplaces operate relationally up and down a masculinist

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

care spectrum or continuum in which men simultaneously mobilise multiple strategies and activities in order to maintain their position relative to women and other men within femalemajority job categories, and that these strategies connect with and reproduce larger social relations of gendered dominance and subordination. We have identified three larger points on the masculinist care continuum: “more masculinist men” — male employees drawing on managerialism to emphasise the technical aspects of their work, rather than relationship-building or social justice aspects of their work; “middling, managerialised men” — mid-ranked supervisors who maintain a surface commitment to the voluntary ethic and social justice while drawing on the privilege accorded them because of their formal education and credentials, and uncritically making use of outcome measures and other aspects of managerialism; and “minimally masculinist men” who mobilise a masculinity that is most compatible with the voluntary ethic and its expectations of care and relationship. In short, jobs that involve less care work and can be recast as having a component of toughness, professionalism and/or technical aspects to them (such as addictions) are at one end of the masculinist care continuum while jobs involving more hands-on care of people and their bodies (such as eldercare or disability support worker) are at the other end. Typologies of femininity within traditionally female work are not easy to locate in the literature. A search for the purposes of this article located few and none pertained to work or workplaces, an obvious site of gender. A broader search on “hegemonic” or “emphasised” femininity (a term Connell and Messerschmidt (2005: 848), among others, argue more accurately reflects the asymmetry of femininities within a patriarchal society, see also Connell, 2005), produced nine articles, none of which discussed work or workplaces. Drawing on our findings, this article will suggest a continuum of female identities and feminised performances of self and outcomes exist in the NPSS. We suggest that within the NPSS, femininities largely cluster around a mid-point of idealised, self-sacrificing womanhood and further that the ways this sense of self plays out in the NPSS makes it easier for employers to exploit the labour and resources of female workers and extends the capacity of overstretched and under-funded agencies to provide care and services. Findings Our findings point to a cluster of female care strategies and activities we term “feminine self-sacrifice” on behalf of clients, communities and larger themes of social justice. In contrast, male research participants clustered around three points described earlier, namely: more masculinist; middling, managerial and minimally masculinist. Earlier work by the authors (Baines & Cunningham, 2011) elaborates the male care continuum and we draw on it here, adding new insights and comparisons to the female strategies. Also, drawing on Ball (2003), we analyse the ways that feminine and masculine strategies are mobilised around the following aspects of performance management: self-monitoring; self-evaluation (particularly in terms of documentation, outcome targets and self-care), and self-blame. Performativity will be analysed as activities and actions undertaken by staff in the performance of their jobs, and the mindsets or feelings that they often describe in conjunction with this performativity.

365

Findings are reported ethnographically (Geertz, 1975), interspersing quotes from the data with literature and analysis. The three setting discussed in this article are quite different though they all serve similar populations with similar services in their specific countries. The Australian study site was the most managerialised and had the strongest social justice ethos throughout the agency as well as they highest portion of women in our sample (73%). The New Zealand and Scottish sites were less managerialised, had little social justice content beyond their mission statements. Men formed half the sample in each of Scotland and New Zealand. National statistical data (see Fig. 1) shows a pattern of high male unemployment in Scotland (9.6% for men; 6.8% for women — Scottish Council for Voluntary Organizations, 2005), fairly equal rates for males and females in New Zealand (6.2% and 6.9% — Statistics New Zealand, 2005) and a lower rate of male unemployment in Australia (5.1% for men; 5.4% for women — Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009). Our data confirm that many of the men in our sample moved into care work jobs after losing or trying out more typical male employment including: factory worker; police officer; taxi driver; truck driver; chef; and custodian. Clusters on the female care continuum: self-monitoring, selfsacrificing and self-blaming The female care continuum contained only two clusters. One is, for all intents, the same as the middling, managerialised men. It includes the female senior managers in our sample who were largely indistinguishable from their male counterparts — working long hours and simultaneously praising and exploiting the goodwill and voluntary ethic of their staff. The second cluster is the largest cluster. We have termed this cluster feminised, self-sacrifice as it reflects and reproduces notions of endless female sacrifice for the good of the clients and agency. Female workers tend to expect this of themselves and each other, and managers depend on them to extend the services of cash-strapped agencies (Baines, 2010). Most of the examples in this section are drawn from our Australian data where the staff was predominantly female. Data drawn from New Zealand and Scotland are identified as such. Self-monitoring through outcome measures Female front-line workers told us that they were deeply concerned about the large amount of time spent documenting outcomes, a time consuming aspect of the performance management model. Most believed that they should be focusing their energies on providing support to and face-to-face interactions with service users. As one youth worker deplore, “You become a processor …processing young people rather than engaging with them.” There were a variety of responses to the pressures from performativity across the case studies. In our earlier study sites, where social justice ethics were strong, workers have been highly critical of the standardising impact of performance measures, particularly the way that standardisation removed opened-ended and difficult-to-quantify social justice practices such as relationship building, community mobilisation and social activism (Baines, 2010; Baines & Cunningham, 2011). Similarly, more recent data from highly managerialised programme areas in the New Zealand agency confirms the

366

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

Unemployment Rates by Sex 2010, Percent Men

Women

Total

Australia

5.1

5.4

5.2

New Zealand

6.2

6.9

6.5

Scotland

9.6

6.8

8.3

Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Labor Force, Australia;” Statistics N.Z., “Household Labor Force Survey;” Office for National Statistics, U.K., “Labour Market Statistics: Scotland.” Fig. 1. Unemployment rates by sex.

same finding. Some of the female workers interviewed felt that outcome measures largely removed their capacity to undertake social justice work. For example, one senior housing worker argued that her employers forbade her to undertake policy critique or community activism, emphasising, instead, the need to complete documentation on time and record statistics properly. As she put it, her employers were “incredibly fanatical about the (government funding) contract…it's pushed down your throat continually and they won't rock the boat.” She was particularly concerned about the cessation of advocacy and policy work, “I feel totally gagged and totally suffocated.” There were also workload issues associated with meeting the documentation and target measures required by government contracts. Regarding the “endless paperwork” required, a child and family worker lamented, “once I start falling behind, it just falls apart, really. That is a nightmare, that. But it's all gotta be there. They (management) love all their stats and their bits of paper.” Referring to similar workload issues another worker noted, “whatever I do, I'm not gonna make the grade so I am just coping with that.” Emphasising her alienation from the increasingly standardised work, the same worker asserted that “at best I was just a piece of machinery in a factory. Just churn out the work.” Though initially drawn to the New Zealand agency because of its strong social justice mission, some workers quickly felt disillusioned by their limited scope to do much more than meet narrow targets and complete documentation requirements. In part this was attributed to the hierarchical structure of the agency and the way that “not much filters down to the ordinary worker” including the agency's well-worded social justice mission. Unlike the agency in Australia, supervision was seen to be infrequent and inadequate, when not outright abusive. Referring to her supervisor, one female worker told us “she treated me like a dog” and was apparently far more interested in the worker's statistic-keeping than her care of and for clients. Management were very aware of the stressful impact statistics keeping and other forms of performance-monitoring data recording had on their employees, particularly given the multiple funding contracts typical of government contractingout where funding is project-based and time limited, requiring constant reapplication and reporting. As one team leader put it, We have lots of little pockets of funding; so through the year I probably have to provide now, I reckon close to twelve different reports and we have multiple, multiple databases.

My staff are so data fatigued – database fatigued – it's just incredible. Consistent with the link between work content and the self as a caring individual, reporting requirements were linked in participants' stories to a loss of focus on serving the community and a changed professional identity. Self-sacrificing Reflecting a common expectation of self-sacrifice in the voluntary sector, many of our female participants reported undertaking unpaid overtime in order to complete documentation and still try to maintain a caring relationship with clients. Undocumented and unpaid overtime is endemic to the NPSS (Baines, 2010; Cunningham, 2008) and something that the management at the study sites acknowledged and depended on to stretch scare resources. A very senior manager noted, “our staff work well beyond their targets.” Another manager spoke of “preying on workers' commitment” to service users and the agency, while a senior manager cautioned that services that dependent on unpaid overtime have difficulty calculating the real cost of the programme, “We've got incredibly loyal and dedicated staff, and sometimes I think … we over-use that dedication.” In addition to regular unpaid overtime, the predominantly female staff was reluctant to take time off for illness as this further stretched scarce resources and put added burdens on fellow staff members. As confirmed by a section manager supervising a large staff, “even when they are sick … I have to force people to go home … there is too much responsibility sometimes from people, you know to their peers and colleagues.” Unpaid overtime and working sick represent forms of intensification of workload, though one that management seems unwilling to do more than superficially acknowledge and exploit. This construction of femininity as self-sacrificing, but also self-monitoring and self-blaming works in the employers' favour, extending insufficient resources and keeping cash strapped services afloat. Though self-blame/monitoring is rarely an aspect of the naturalised notion of femininity, this construction of femininity is otherwise very similar to the idealised mother and caregiver who never stop giving in any circumstance. The fact that it also dovetails and undergirds social justice/voluntary ethics holds clear advantages for this underfunded sector that prides itself on its altruism and service to others.

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

Self-monitoring and self-blame A final aspect of performativity is the transfer of monitoring and blame from management to staff (Ball, 2003). In the case of the agencies studied, the work content undertaken by most staff was closely monitored by managers through the outcome measures documentation discussed above. In a number of cases, staff was reprimanded by supervisors when their documentation was not up-to-date, indicating that though staff is meant to be self-monitoring through statistics keeping, much of the discipline to selfmonitor still comes from management. A second aspect to self-monitoring is a process known as self-care which is meant to improve staff performance, prevent burn-out and stress and enhance the quality of work life. Under a system of self-care, staff are supposed to monitor their own wellbeing and take individual corrective measures including time off, supervisory sessions or other forms of support when they note that their performance and or quality of work life is falling. In Scotland and New Zealand, workers did not participate in self-care in any organised way though some were aware of various “wellness” discourses at the agency and a few staff had participated in the very occasional stress-reduction workshop. In Australia most of the staff involved in our project had heard of the self-care concept and a few were aware that it included a selfassessment to be completed every fortnight, which some thought it might be helpful. However, most echoed the sentiments of a senior caseworker who observed, “I actually haven't used it for a long time… I'm a bit cynical, I have to say.” A senior mental health worker in Australia expressed guilt when we asked her if she participated in self-care, noting that she rarely had the time. Later in the interview she admitted, with significant discomfort, that she undertook a great deal of unpaid overtime because time was not sufficient in her paid hours to complete her tasks and that the model of the job (service-user run) was not amenable to strict observation of paid hours. Criticising herself for her “shortcomings” in both areas she ruminated, You know, a lot of people can be self-critical and say if only I was a little bit more organised, if only I was a bit more disciplined or if only I locked the door and not let (clients) in this morning (before opening hours), if only you know…. We probed for clarification and she continued to blame herself exclusively for working too many hours and caring too much about the service users. In this case, the employer received extra hours of unpaid work from a dedicated, senior front-line worker who had internalised the notion that she was responsible for her own exploitation and the only one to blame for her lack of self-care. Our data show that self-blame for overwork was widespread among the female front-line staff the predominantly female Australian study site. Using out-comes as resistance In all the study sites, upper management took on the role of policy change, political mobilisation and lobbying, practices that had originally been the purview of front-line staff. Some female staff involved in our study reported that they wished they could undertake social justice and policy initiatives themselves rather than having it undertaken largely by senior staff and resented

367

the way that outcome measures facilitated the removal of advocacy and activism from front-line work. This suggests that in most situations, the social justice ethic was difficult to keep alive. However, the Australian site consciously used aspects of performance management to challenge the tendency to use managerialism as a way to cut costs, reduce staff and eliminate resources and practices aimed at social justice. The Australian agency maintained a strong NPSS/social justice ethic not only because of the selfless “selves” that the largely female workforce brought to the agency. A social justice/NPSS ethic was also present within managers' own value set and consciously nurtured through a number of agency policies. According to management data, the emphasis on building supervisory capacity has had a positive effect as staff turnover had fallen slightly below sector norms. In addition, our data shows that many of the predominantly female staff were overqualified, over credentialed and had been offered employment by other agencies but remained in their current jobs because of their strong affiliation for their supervisor, their team and the work. Policies that helped to culture and maintain these values included: training and further education opportunities; benefits including family–work balance; cooperation with unions on social justice initiatives; participation in policy change efforts at the state and national level in conjunction with other agencies and organisations; and a deliberate emphasis on building strong supervisors to provide supports, improve performance and quality of work life and build strong teams. Most of the staff we interviewed were aware of some or all of these initiatives and expressed strong support. For example, in the Australian study site, front-line female research participants (as opposed to the female managers) spoke of ways that outcome measures finally confirmed the standards their agency had been achieving or exceeding for years. They also felt there were ways they could use outcome measures to generate ever higher standards for client care. In addition, when workers expressed concern about government imposed targets, the agency developed a second set of measures in consultation with the staff. In essence, the agency mediate government demands and found ways to make workers feel that even outcome measures could promote social justice, if used consciously and critically. Commenting on the dual system of measures, a disability support worker noted, that across the sector, I think being accountable is excellent and proving outcomes is excellent…the way they (the government funders) want people to be accountable, is not dissimilar to what we've already done but it's going to make it easier because we know exactly what they're wanting and now we know how to work with it and around it. Another senior worker agreed that though outcome measures often just confirm that which workers have long been doing, they can also validate their everyday work and when used carefully they can also document the extra efforts workers undertake for and with clients. If used in these ways, the worker argued that meeting and exceeding outcome measures can be a way of “making everyday more worthwhile because you're not just getting lost in, ‘Oh God, I've got to fill out this 24-page

368

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

document.’ You can actually see what the end result could be.” She continued, “it's been a good reminder for people. Apparently people have been quite excited about it in the fact that they (the government funders) have actually realised what they (the social justice-oriented workers) are trying to do.” Similarly, though most of the female-majority workforce in the NZ case study chafed at the volume of statistics keeping, documentation and paperwork required from them to sustain a system of outcome measures and targets, a minority felt that outcome measures were a helpful way to provide a storyline, serving as a reminder to staff regarding why they were undertaking stressful, boring and repetitive work and how their little pieces fed into a bigger picture of social justice and care. This is an interesting way to ascribe meaning to the increased workload, alienation and standardising processes associated with performance management (Baines, 2010; Carey, 2008; Dominelli, 2004). In contrast to both Australia and New Zealand, the data from the Scottish case study does not suggest that management consciously or unconsciously used performance measures and documentation requirements to remove social justice practices from the workplace (though arguably, unlike the Australian case study, management did not show any particular leadership in this area). Instead, the higher numbers of male workers seems to achieve a similar “outcome” by downplaying care aspects of their jobs and emphasising technical and quantifiable aspects such as statistics-keeping and target measures. Unlike the New Zealand case, very few of the workers we interviewed, male or female, expressed any concern about whether social justice/NPSS ethics were part of their work or even part of the larger ethos of the workplace. The men on or near the “mildly masculinist” section of the continuum were interested in jobs that had aspects of altruism or social care to them, but there was little or no awareness of the larger ethic of participation, fairness and social justice upon which the sector is thought to be based.

Clusters from the data on men: more, middling and minimally masculinities The literature and our findings indicate that masculinities in traditionally female arenas operate as a spectrum or continuum in which men simultaneously mobilise multiple strategies and activities to maintain their position relative to women and other men within female-majority job categories, and that these strategies connect with and reproduce larger social relations of gendered dominance and subordination (Lupton, 2006; Simpson, 2004). Jobs that involved little or no hands-on care work and could be recast as having components of toughness, professionalism and/or technical aspects to them can be found at one end of our masculinist care continuum (more masculinist) while jobs involving more hands-on care of people, their bodies and emotions are at the other end (minimally masculinist). The more technical, hands-off, non-emotional interpretations of care work dovetail with standardisation and performativity, embracing easily measurable outcomes and recasting care work as a series of small, regularised, thin interventions, rather than the thicker, more complex, open-ended, relationship- and emotion-based interventions characteristic of pre-managerial models (Carniol, 2010; McDonald, 2006).

More masculinist men Our data suggests that the more masculinist men actively reshaped care work, emphasising its technical, non-emotive, hands-off aspects and maintaining tight boundaries regarding hours of work and other forms of self-sacrifice for the job. Most of these men lost their employment in various ways (that is, they did not leave their jobs voluntarily) and were in Simpson's (2004) terminology, finders, that is they fell into the work when other options were not available, rather than deliberately seeking out values-based employment. The overwhelming majority of these men found employment in the field of addictions, a subsection of the agencies and the NPSS that avoids contact with people's bodies and adopts a notion of professional distance and “tough love” rather than care. Addictions workers tend to work alone, counselling individuals and groups. Even with group work, generally only one counsellor is present at a time. In Cross and Bagilhole's (2002) schema these men draw on largely traditional notions of masculinity including individualism, toughness, solitariness and self-reliance. They often emphasised to us how difficult their clients were and the way they “handled” them on their own, with little or no supervision or support. The “more masculinist men” did not reflect the elasticity expected from workers in the NPSS where the predominantly female workforce tends to undertake unpaid overtime and other forms of subsidising the workplace such as skipping lunches and breaks, taking work home, taking clients home, bringing goods from home and purchasing supplies when they run out (Baines, 2010). Instead, most of the “more masculinist men” left work at the prescribed time or earlier and never took work or clients home with them. Others spent a large portion of the day on “community visits”, which seemed to be code for leaving work early. Relative to other staff in the NPSS, most of those working in addictions had significantly lighter caseloads (though a small minority had heavier). The closest the men in our sample got to self-care was for a couple of them to tell us that they were “successfully avoiding burn-out” by leaving work at or before the end of the working day and “leaving the job at the door”, in other words, not worrying about the work once they leave for the day. Self-blame was not part of their descriptions of their work experiences. The major appeal of the job tended to be described in terms of addictions being an “interesting issue” or “important social problem” rather than an emotional connection with clients and their struggles and/or with a sense of social justice or mission. This technical rather than relationship-based approach to NPSS work also extended to the extensive paperwork required to document outcome measures. Rather than deploring the loss of relationship-building and open-ended support often heard in the NPSS (Baines, 2010; Charlesworth, 2010) the “more masculinist men” liked the routinisation and sense of “scientific management” associated with standardised assessment and intake forms, took pride in keeping their paperwork “up to date” and kept close track of phone calls, meetings outside the agency and visits to the court house to recruit new clients. Middling, managerialised masculinist men The men in our study who mobilised strategies approaching the mid-point of the masculinist care continuum tended to be front-line managers or higher. Most used one of two routes to

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

employment in the NPSS: 1) direct route through higher education in an appropriate field; or 2) change precipitated by a personal crisis, often followed by pursuing higher education in a care-related field. These men fit Simpson's (2004) notion of seekers as their career choices are deliberate. Some were purists (Brown & Heseth, 2004), feeling a strong vocation for the work while a number of others billed themselves as “change managers”, moving from programme to programme and across different agencies, helping to “modernise” and managerialise agencies. All these men had a sense of career path and felt they would remain at the managerial level in the future or perhaps move higher up the ladder. Though most were critical of the low level of government funding for the sector, even with follow-up and probing questions, none had any critique of the increasing standardisation of work in the sector, or the use of outcome measures and performance management models — all key aspects of managerialism. Like the private sector, they favoured tighter controls and increased efficiency. These men were prepared to put in long hours as managers, particularly the self-defined “change managers”, and most felt the workload was heavy but manageable, though one noted with some humour that he had been “burnt out for the last fifteen years.” This comment was the closest any of them got to discussing self-care as they were more interested in speaking about how they managed their workloads or the stress of their employees and moved quickly away from questions about their own stress or need for support. The managers felt they had quite a bit of autonomy though in reality they spent a great deal of their time completing paperwork and documenting outcome measures. This sacrifice of time is an expected aspect of management in the NPSS where workloads have expanded significantly to cover the added demands of performance management and funding contract compliance. Not withstanding the aforementioned jest about burn-out, self-care was not part of the discourse of these men who presented themselves as highly committed, productive and effective individuals who were not adversely impacted by heavy workloads and stressful situations. Minimally masculinist men At the other end of the care continuum, the largest group of men involved in the case studies discussed in this paper, worked in areas such as services for homeless people with psychiatric problems, people with intellectual disabilities and impaired functioning, and excluded children. With the exception of the former, these services involved contact with people's bodies in the form of physical supports and restraints, and sometimes assistance with dressing, washing, toileting, cleaning and the like. Though the work is sometimes dirty and often difficult, requiring physical and psychological resiliency, particularly in contrast to addictions work which is seen as requiring a stern hand and strong will, this type of work is generally viewed as repetitious, feminine, unglamorous, care work. The “minimally masculinist men” did not describe or present themselves as tough. They were more likely to emphasise their empathy for others, tolerance of difference, affection and respect for clients and affinity for client-centred care. Enacting a less intense form of self-sacrifice on behalf of the agency, these men took on unpaid overtime irregularly

369

when clients were in need of extra, rather than standard, care. Possibly a milder form of self-blame, these research participants described second-guessing themselves and ruminating about whether they had “done the right thing” in difficult interchanges with clients. Overall, these men reported feeling supported by their supervisors (usually women) and denied the need for self-care beyond time with family, friends and in sporting activities. In Simpson's (2004) terminology, these men were settlers as most had moved to this type of work after working for years in male job categories. All of the men in our study who fit this cluster intended to remain within care work as they found it more rewarding and consistent with their values and life goals than the private-sector male jobs in which they had previously found employment. Though the work was highly regulated (risk assessments, clients' rights codes, health and safety protocols, and accreditation standards), the level at which these men were employed meant that they undertook very little in the way of documentation which was instead undertaken by low-level front-line managers. These men reported that documentation requirements and outcome measures did not intrude on their relationship-based work with clients, for which they were grateful. Conclusion The data seems to suggest gendered practices of resistance to and use of performativity in the NPSS. For example, with the exception of women at upper levels of the agency, many female staff seem to resist performativity through self-sacrifice of personal time and resources, and in one case had some success using outcome measures in more reflective and liberatory ways. On the other hand, many men in the NPSS seem to bring practices with them from the private sector and male employment, emphasising technical and managerial issues over social justice-directed practices and relationships with clients and communities. The data also shows that in some areas of NPSS work, such as addictions, the influx of significant numbers of male employees in our New Zealand and Scottish study sites has worked in tandem with public sector reform, emphasising the technical details and standardisation characteristic of performance management while simultaneously displacing and downplaying the relationship-based, participatory practices that have formed the bedrock of volunteerism back to the 1830s (Tocqueville, 1956). In contrast, our data from the Australian agency that continued to have a female majority workforce (and a lower overall male unemployment rate nationally), suggests that two main factors contributed to the retention of social justice/voluntary ethics in the workplace. The first was the social construction of naturalised, otherdirected, caring femininity and the ways this dovetails with the high expectations/needs of employers for unpaid work and sacrifice in the context of insufficient funding. Though men in this workplace also sought out work that paralleled their values, they tended to work at the management and upper levels of the agency, providing little in the way of hands-on care or close inter-personal relationships with clients and communities and their unpaid overtime was characteristic of a widely expected and masculinised aspect of management

370

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371

work in the private and public sectors, rather than the feminised self-sacrifice and other-directedness expected of female, frontline staff. The second main factor contributing to the maintenance of a social justice ethic in the Australian agency lay in the leadership displayed by the largely male upper management who simultaneously depended on the unpaid sacrifices of their predominantly female staff and consciously supported and promoted policies a) to improve work life within the confines of underfunding and managerialism (developing supervisory capacities; providing training and education opportunities; improving workplace benefits) and b) to expand their employees' understanding and practice of social justice. Similar leadership was not observed at either of the other agencies discussed in this article and the social justice talk and practice in these two agencies was in limited supply and tenuously sustained by individual social justice-oriented workers. Ironically, the most managerialised agency (Australia), that is, the agency with the deepest integration of performance management practices and outcome measures, also had the strongest social justice content and ethos throughout the predominantly female staffed agency. The very different ways the three agencies reflected or failed to reflect the voluntary ethic, suggests that though most of the men in our study used managerialism to reshape traditionally female care work in ways that feel more comfortable and less feminine to them, this use of managerialism may be opportunist rather than something inherent in managerialism. In other words, maleness can work in tandem with NPM to crowd out practices of caring and social justice, as seen in the New Zealand and Scottish examples, or as seen in the Australian example, aspects of managerialism (such as the dual sets of outcome measures) can be strategically used to keep social justice ideals alive and financially struggling agencies solvent. A strong male presence in the workforce, particularly in areas where aspects of the work that can be reshaped as more technical and less self-sacrificing, put social justice more under threat than in agencies where feminine strategies were strong. This suggests that more dominant forms of masculinity erode social justice more significantly than managerialism or perhaps managerialism can be colonised and used in ways that resist the erosion of the older NPSS/naturalised female practices of altruism and putting the needs of others ahead of one's own. This appears to be an unstable and unsustainable equilibrium as it is dependent on keeping self-sacrificing women in NPSS jobs and keeping masculinist strategies out. Given the larger instability of the world economy, male unemployment is likely to follow the rising levels in Scotland and New Zealand, compelling men to seek jobs in non-traditional spheres and displacing female employment. The male and female care continuums in our study did not seem to overlap except at the level of senior managers, suggesting that management is a highly gendered terrain (Kerfoot & Knights, 2006). Instead, for the most part, in the agencies where the more masculinist strategies were more present, they seemed to disrupt and displace feminine strategies, making the whole workplace or programme area less consistent with the social justice/voluntary ethic. More research is required to explore this dynamic and its impact on different groups of male and female employees as experiences are likely to vary on the basis of a number of factors including:

race, age, position within the agency and the outside world. Further research is also required to assess changing gender patterns across other kinds of welfare states and the implications for social care and social justice/voluntary ethics. End Note 1 In Canada, the NPSS work force is 85% female; 75% in Australia and Scotland (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009; Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, 2005) and a similar proportion in New Zealand (Statistics New Zealand, 2005). The same statistics were not available in New Zealand though Statistics New Zealand (2005) reports that in 2001 women were more than five times as likely as men to work in health and community services or roughly 84% of the workforce.In a recent study of non-profit social service agencies in Scotland and New Zealand, we noticed a higher proportion of men present at the agencies we studied and involved as research participants (around 50% of our sample). Subsequent questions to management confirmed higher numbers of men applying for jobs in the sector and moving in to employment.

References Acker, Joan (2006). Gender and organisations. In Janet Saltzman Chafetz (Ed.), Handbook of the sociology of gender (pp. 177–194). New York: Plenum Press. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2009). Australian social trends. Retrieved from. http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/mf/4102.0?opendocumment? um_id=LN Baines, D. (2004). Caring for nothing: Work organization and unwaged labour in social services. Work, Employment and Society, 18(2), 267–295. Baines, Donna (2010). Neoliberal restructuring/activism and social unionism in the nonprofit social services. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 39(1), 10–28. Baines, Donna, & Cunningham, Ian (2011). White knuckle care work: Working on the edge with the most excluded work. Work, Employment and Society, 25(4), 760–776. Baines, Carol, Evans, Patricia, & Neysmith, Sheila (1998). Women's caring: Feminist perspectives on social welfare. Toronto: Oxford Press. Ball, Stephan J. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(22), 215–228. Bowen, Glenn A. (2008). Naturalistic inquiry and the saturation concept: A research note. Qualitative Research, 8(1), 137–152. Brainard, Lori A., & Siplon, Patricia D. (2004). Toward non-profit organisation reform in the voluntary spirit: Lessons from the internet. Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 33(3), 435–457. Brown, Phil, & Heseth, Anthony (2004). The mismanagement of talent: Employability and jobs in the knowledge economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carey, Malcolm (2008). Everything must go? The privatization of state social work. British Journal of Social Work, 38(5), 918–935. Carniol, Ben (2010). Case critical: The dilemma of social work in Canada (6th ed.). Toronto: Between the Lines. Charlesworth, Sara (2010). The regulation of paid workers wages and conditions in the non-profit sector: A Toronto case study. Industrielles-Industrial Relations, 65(3), 380–399. Cheng, Cliff (1996). Masculinities in organisations. London: Sage. Clarke, John (2004). Dissolving the public realm? The logics and limits of neo-liberalism. Journal of Social Policy, 33(1), 27–48. Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender and Society, 19(6), 829–841. Cross, Simon, & Bagilhole, Barbara (2002). Girls' jobs for the boys? Men, masculinity and non-traditional occupations. Gender, Work and Organization, 9(2), 204–226. Cunningham, Ian (2008). Employment relations in the voluntary sector. London: Routledge. Curristine, Teresa, Lonti, Zsuzsanna, & Joumard, Isabelle (2007). Improving public sector efficiency: Challenges and opportunities. OECD Journal on Budgeting, 1(7), 1–41 Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/ 41/20/43412680.pdf. DeWalt, Kathleen Musante (2007). Participant observation: A guide for fieldworkers. California: Walnut Creek. Dominelli, Lena (2004). Social work: Theory and practice for a changing profession. Cambridge: Polity Press.

D. Baines et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 362–371 Ferguson, Ian (2007). Reclaiming social work: Challenging neo-liberalism and promoting social justice. London: Sage. Frumkin, Peter (2002). On being non-profit: A conceptual and policy primer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1975). Interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Glesne, Corrine (2005). Becoming qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). White Plains, NY: Longman. Harvey, David (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. London: Oxford. Kerfoot, Deborah, & Knights, David (2006). The hidden agenda: Masculinity in management and organisation. Berkeley: Sage. Kirby, Susan, Greaves, Lorraine, & Reid, Colleen (2005). Experience research social change: Methods beyond the mainstream. Toronto: Garamond Press. Lupton, Ben (2000). Maintaining masculinity: Men who do women's work. British Journal of Management, 11, 33–48 [Special Edition]. Lupton, Ben (2006). Explaining men's entry into female-concentrated occupations: Issues of masculinity and social class. Gender, Work and Organisation, 13(2), 103–128 [March]. Martin, Patricia Yancey, & Collinson, David (2002). Over the pond and across the water: Developing the field of gendered organisations. Gender, Work and Organisation, 9(3), 244–265. McDonald, Catherine (2006). Challenging social work: The context of practice. New York: Palgrave. New Zealand. Statistics New Zealand (2005). Focusing on women. http:// www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/women/ focusing-on-women.aspx

371

Patton, Michael Quinn (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Rose, Nikolas (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. New York: Routledge. Ross, Meaghan (2011). Social work activism amidst neoliberalism: A big, broad tent of activism. In Donna Baines (Ed.), Doing anti-oppressive practice: Social justice social work (pp. 251–264). Halifax/Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (2005). Voluntary sector workforce. Retrieved from. http://www.scvo.org.uk/information/about-thesector/voluntary-sector-workforce-statistics-2005/ Simpson, Ruth (2004). Masculinity at work: The experience of men in female dominated occupations. Work, Employment and Society, 18(2), 349–368. Smith, Kirsten (2011). Occupied spaces: Unmapping standardized assessments in health and social service organizations. In Donna Baines (Ed.), Doing anti-oppressive practice: Social justice social work (pp. 251–264). Halifax/Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Strauss, Anselm L., & Corbin, Juliet M. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks (California): Sage Publications. Themundo, Nuno (2009). Gender and the non-profit sector. Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 38(4), 663–683. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1956). Democracy in America. New York: New American Library. Van Til, Jon (2000). Growing civil society: From non-profit sector to third space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.