Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Since 1980, the public sector has been the stage of several transformations guided by New Public Management (NPM). Such transformations include the privatization of the public sector and the outsourcing of its services. Most studies have shown that one of the effects of NPM incorporation is that the work performed by public organizations only counts as long as they fulfill the established accountability indicators, leaving aside the complexity of local processes. This has led to the technification of public sector workers’ labor, who have become operators of functions that, historically, have been oriented to users’ welfare. Despite this, further studies have shown the existence of an affective component that leads workers to resist the NPM accountability instruments, placing the interaction and affective relationship with the users at the center of their labor practices. Although this component is identified as a relevant element in these workers’ everyday work practices, it only emerges as part of the findings of these studies, without considering it as their object of study. This paper puts forth a theoretical-methodological framework that allows us to place the affect as a central component in the analysis of public work organization. Through Affective Theory of Practice and using the method of affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2017), we aim to understand how the affect is central to the organization of public work and its workers’ subjectivity. Regarding the above, the ongoing results of a case study of an NGO that executes child protection policies in Chile is shown.