Global interconnectedness drives the need for richer understanding not only of different nations, but of what is required for international organizations to function well wherever they are sited. Both the home cultures of civil servants and the meta-culture of international public administration are instructive for understanding how “boundary spanning” employees must balance display rules and emotive demands. This chapter touches on several topics, ranging from International Public Administrations (IPAs) and the International Civil Servants (ICSs) they employ, to international policy issues, to ways of thinking about bureaucracy.

IPAs are organizations that implement transnational policies in a range of policy areas, such as peace and security, trade and finance, health and human rights, and poverty and the environment (Busch2014). Eckhardand Ege note that large IPAs tend to be organized hierarchically according to Weberian organizational principles: “with a given mandate, resources, identifiable boundaries, and a set of formal rules and procedures” (2016, 964). Various terms are used to describe the implementation of policies spanning national boundaries and their agencies, including global public policy, global governance, IPAs, and transnational administration (Ege2017). In this chapter, we use “global administration” to refer to the implementation of policies that transcend political borders and “secretariats” to refer to the agencies engaged in implementation.

Stoneand Ladi (2015) identify five types of global administration:

  • Administration of policy by formal international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO);

  • Transnational networks administering policy via informal cooperation between states;

  • Distributed administration “when domestic agencies make decisions on issues of global and transnational concern” (847);

  • Hybrid intergovernmental-private administration such as the cooperation between the International Olympic Committee and the US Anti-Doping Agency; and

  • Administration by private institutions, such as the International Standards Organization (ISO) and FIFA, which are private regulatory bodies.

By any name and in any of its functions, global administration is doing internationally what governments do at home (Finkelstein1995). IPAs employ ICSs and they engage in administrative functions internationally just as domestic governments do at home. ICSs are the administrators who implement policy and manage relationships across countries. While international organizations have been studied extensively, “little systematic research has so far been done on the personnel working in international organizations” (Hensell2016, 1487). This gap in knowledge about global administration has substantially limited comparative research into how these workers experience emotional labor.

This chapter proceeds as follows. In the first section, we discuss policy areas that span political boundaries. In the second section, we discuss the implementation of these policies, specifically those who implement global public policies—ICSsand the IPAs that employ them. Display rules in international organizations are then explored. While they are primarily determined by occupation—for example, a certain set of behaviors is expected from nurses regardless of country—culture also affects display rules (Mastracciand Adams, 2019). What can we say about culture’s impact on an international organization? At minimum, we can say the display rules governing worker behavior vary by culture (Triandis2002), and specifically, the manner in which individuals construe themselves in relation to society varies (Eidand Diener2001). The third section focuses on comparative approaches to how public services are delivered and contrasts classical bureaucracy with market-centered reforms because these approaches differentially affect the emotion work of public servants.

A culture in which the prevailing norms comport with an independent, individual self-construal (individualist cultures) is linked to more effortful and costlier emotional labor compared to a culture in which individual self-construal is interdependent and group oriented (collectivist cultures). Because people who perceive themselves in terms of their communities are accustomed to attuning their outward expressions to coincide with the mood of the group, emotional labor appears to be less laborious to them, compared to those in cultures where people perceive themselves as autonomous, independent individuals. While other dimensions of culture may shape the effects of emotional labor, Hofstede et al.’s (2010) Individualism/Collectivism index has received the most scholarly attention (Taras et al. 2010). In relation to other areas of study, comparative public administration is among the smaller subfields but the reality of an increasingly interconnected public policy landscape has drawn attention to global issues.

The importance of comparative studies cannot be over-emphasized because there is so much yet to be learned about how political dynamics and national culture affect the delivery of public services. How compelling is the collectivism—individualism continuum? What other continua exert forces that affect the public encounter? To these questions, we devote discussion to the influence of neoclassical economic theory, which advocates market-oriented solutions, small government, and service delivery mechanisms that mirror a customer orientation. Popularized in the USA, UK, New Zealand, and South Korea, among others, as New Public Management (NPM), it demands display rules more akin to that which is required in retail sales rather than in the citizen—state encounter that is traditionally the province of government. Interestingly, the paradigm shift toward a market model has varied across countries. These reforms have proven more comprehensive in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK compared to the USA. And different still is the way in which they have manifested in Asian countries (Cheung2012). The topic is germane to the citizen—state encounter and emotional labor because it converts citizens into consumers, modifying the dynamic between state and citizen.

The Interconnectedness of Nations

The international context is an ever-more salient one for public administration, for both its study and its practice. The rise of truly international organizations like the European Union has brought growth in the personnel who run them. This, in turn, brings the need to understand their job demands, activities, and contributions. Whether as the city manager hosting international delegates or as a civil servant of an international secretariat visiting that city manager, no longer can students or practitioners of public administration remain confident their work will not span international borders, either directly in action, or indirectly in effect. But those involved in global governance—which includes secretariats of international governmental organizations, global non-governmental organizations, global think tanks, multinational corporations, and among others—manage international relationships and implement policy without sovereign authority (Finkelstein1995). International secretariats operate with power and resources to fulfill their missions, yet are not located in, or drawing from, the legitimacy of a single sovereign nation. Instead, they draw their legitimacy from member-states.

There are over eight hundred international organizations headquartered in 120 countries around the world (Moloney et al.2018). This organizational form represents a relatively new phenomenon: “Most writings about public administration presuppose the ubiquity of states” (Riggs2006, 924, emphasis supplied). States have recognized boundaries, histories, and people. International organizations borrow the legitimacy and authority to act from their member states, but themselves are not sovereign entities. The evolution from state actors to multistate actors that possess their own policy mandates is a newish development and an interesting example of states forfeiting even a small part of their own authority to another entity.

“Westphalian sovereignty” remains shorthand for describing the fundamental principles of the modern sovereign state, particularly the first principle that states retain exclusive sovereignty over their territory, which is defined by inviolable borders. Limits to the theory of Westphalian sovereignty are readily apparent. Even in the first decades of the twentieth century, states relied on systems of relationships that transcended sovereign frontiers. It was only after World War I, however, that this space was characterized as something separate: “At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference … global powers for the first time defined ‘the international’ as a space distinct from the sum total of member states’ interests” (Eckhardand Ege2016, 960).

Sovereignty proved difficult to maintain in a pure form, as states, and the administrations which ran them, only operated successfully to the extent they managed to not only keep their borders intact, but permeable. Permeability arose in the form of an open-systems approach among countries on the European continent with a more closed approach facing outward. The transformation from Westphalian state to international entity complicates the idea of “the public” because supranational agencies have no citizens of their own: “Globalization has erased the boundary between state and non-state actors in ways that confuse our understanding of what is ‘public’ administration by contrast both with private administration and politics” (Riggs2006, 953). Roles of private, standards-setting international organizations further complicate what is public about administration and policy.

Meaning-Making Jobs

Most public service delivery does not occur during crises like multinational wars or the European refugee crisis of 2015. Even so, public service is inescapably emotion laden and inherently subjective in how it is experienced by the public. How people feel they have been served constitutes as much of the service they receive as their assessment of its quality. Certainly, some public services involve material transactions that can be evaluated objectively as successful or unsuccessful: One either obtains the passport, the building permit, driver’s license, housing assistance benefits—or not. But a defining aspect of the process of obtaining a passport, permit, license, or benefits, involves how one feels about the process. Hochschild (1983) characterizes jobs such as these as meaning-making jobs. In public service delivery, citizens want fairness in terms of uniform standards, they want to be treated with respect, and they want help for those in legitimate need. They also expect high customer service standards to be met, in terms of quality of care, friendliness, and explanations from street-level bureaucrats (Raynerand Lawton2018).

Raynerand Lawton’s analysis of citizen expectations of public service delivery is suffused with subjectivity and emotion. Citizens want a sense of fairness, respectful treatment, friendliness, and a sense of personal service that allows the citizen to feel well informed. None of these are easy to measure and all are subject to the interpretation of the citizen and her or his emotions resulting from an encounter with government. A substantial part of the public servant’s job is to convince the “citizen-cum-consumer” (Lauer2008, 45) that processes are fair, service is of high quality, citizens are well informed and they are treated with respect. The means by which that job is done is emotional labor, which is the effort to suppress inappropriate emotions and/or elicit appropriate emotions within oneself or in another person, where “appropriate” and “inappropriate” are dictated by the demands and expectations of the job.

New research shows that, in addition to demands of the occupation, cultural context also shapes these expectations (Mastracciand Adams, 2019). Occupational “display rules” are the (often unwritten) rules governing a worker’s emotive expressions, or in many cases, suppression, of those responses that are deemed “unprofessional.” For example, emergency responders must tune out the chaos, engage fully with the victim, and attend to the crisis at hand. Similarly, police officers cannot show fear to suspects or boredom to a public that needs their vigilance, else they risk public safety and their own. Social workers cannot cry or show irritation in front of their clients lest they risk being perceived as “too close” to the problem and lacking the professional distance necessary to help the client.

Different jobs and professions use different strategies of emotion management to navigate display rules. Adhering to display rules contributes substantially to the perception of professionalism and good service. This is what Hochschild (1983) emphasizes in her discussion of service-sector jobs as meaning-making jobs. One’s feelings about the interaction is part of service delivery in the private sector, and the same can be said in public service. But the public-sector context is unique in that government is often the provider of last resort, or only resort, during times of crisis, and the meanings made via interactions during emergency situations are inherently different from meanings made through transactions in commercial exchanges (Mastracci et al.2012).

The public sector is a unique context because oftentimes it is government alone that responds in times of crisis and these are fraught with emotion and immediacy. Context shapes the behavior of public servants because it affects display rules, which in turn, affect employee behaviors. John Gaus suggested as much when discussing what he referred to broadly as “the environment” and how it shapes the conduct of public servants:

As Gaus posited, the political environment was a key variable in the determination of bureaucratic conduct … the people, place, physical and social technology, and culture determined the ebb and flow of the functions of government … environments include relationships between administrators and political leaders, negotiations and transactions with other political units, and links with public groups. (Gaus as cited in Otenyoand Lind2006, 2–3)

As the next section demonstrates, and as we argue throughout, the environment for public servants in any country is increasingly a global one. We base this argument, in part, on the case made by comparativist Jamil Jreisat, who observes that the environment of public administration has expanded to include contextual influences that stem from rapid globalization and the progressive universalization of administrative theory and practice (2014, 22).

Local policies attempt to address global issues. For example, cities in the USA adopt sanctuary policies and gun-control policies that contradict national-level policy. Madrid limits driving in parts of the city and at certain times of the day to improve its air quality. Migration policies are not implemented only at the national level: Nearly 100 sanctuary cities exist in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and more than 500 states and cities in the USA have sanctuary city status. These examples demonstrate that urban sanctuary policies and practices challenge the national policies and practices that regulate migration and belonging (Bauder2017, 175). In this way, North American and European cities implement their own migration policies. They both affect, and are affected by, immigration policies of national governments.

Understanding the unique aspects of comparative public administration is important because events that cross political borders and the policies that respond to them, such as refugee crises and climate change, lead to the growing interconnectedness of sovereign nations. Implementation of policies to address regional and global problems involves international governing organizations and the ICSs they employ. Working across national and cultural boundaries demands a different kind of training to serve diverse constituencies and the international organizations that employ public servants from many countries and cultures. We elaborate on some of the reasons why.

Global Public Policy: Issues that Cross Borders

“Kunie! Kenite [sic]!” the coast guard shouts to a confused face … “Kunie! Don’t you speak Arabic? Aren’t you supposed to be Syrian?” he asks in Greek. “Family name!” The coast guard carries on several times in English and receives no answer whatsoever. The officer gets more and more irritated and desperate …. Finally, somebody from the crowd translates the word into Arabic, and then the coast guard gets the answer he was looking for. “Hussain” he types with Latin characters in an Excel spreadsheet. In this tense atmosphere of incessant yelling, the officer requests the rest of the information needed in electronic form … most of the approximately two thousand people that the two shifts of coast guards will deal with today do not have passports and do not speak English. (Rozakou2017, 36–37)

The above exchange took place in late 2015 on the Greek island of Lesvos, the “front line of the refugee crisis” (Papataxiarchis2016, 5). That year, more than half a million refugees arrived on this island of fewer than 100,000 people (Rozakou2017). During the crisis, nearly three in four refugees disembarked at Lesvos (Chatzea et al. 2018). This vignette is shared to convey the frustration encountered in cross-cultural interactions and also the sheer scale of demand for public services in times of crisis. This cross-cultural interaction took place two thousand times each day in a single reception zone in just one of the humanitarian crises facing governments across the world.

In this section, we discuss several areas where policy development, implementation, and evaluation can scarcely be done without regard for other countries: “The pathologies of climate change and environmental pollution, man-made disasters, economic instability, pandemics, international terrorism and organized crime, among others, show little respect for borders” (LeGrand2015, 975). The list of topics covered in this chapter is not exhaustive and need not be to underscore the importance of public problems that transcend borders and the boundary-spanning nature of the policies crafted to address them. The opening vignette illustrates the global nature of migration. Other fundamentally global issues include climate change, poverty, regulatory policy, public health, international trade, and space exploration, all of which obviate a closed-system policy approach.

An “open systems” policy context has prevailed since the fall of mercantilism as a guiding philosophy for economic policy in industrialized nations (O’Leary2014). Policy outputs to address supranational problems demand a different implementation approach: “Consider examples such as terrorism, natural disasters, epidemics, energy, wars, and many other big problems. They all have aspects of networks, collaboration, conflict, implementation, and international leadership. Public administration—the management of public policy—matters” (Kim et al. 2014, 205). Supranational policy problems demand public administrators who are able to span professional, organizational, and national boundaries (Bauer2012; Broomeand Seabrooke2015; Needham et al. 2017).

The European refugee crisis was prompted by, among myriad conflicts, protracted civil wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. “Sea arrivals of refugees and migrants peaked in 2015 when more than a million desperate people crossed the Mediterranean to Europe and almost 5000 died trying to make it … arrivals are back at pre-2014 levels and are dropping towards their long-term historic averages” (UNHCR 2018, para. 6). While the waves of Syrian refugees—the largest group—have dissipated, new crises sustain demand for public services. Of more than 68.5 million refugees in 2017, more than a third fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution. “Leading the displacement during the year was the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war in South Sudan and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees” (Edwards2018, para. 4).

Just as one crisis abates, another erupts somewhere else in the world. International organizations respond and that work demands emotional labor. Rescue workers encounter seriously injured or the dead, witness the impassioned reactions of devastated survivors (distress, grief, and anger), experience disappointment when unsuccessful in saving a life, and expose themselves to potential physical harm. The emotion management required of ICSs—even if they are not among the volunteers greeting refugees at national borders—often leads to psychological distress because the stakes are so high (Mao et al. 2018). New crises force people to flee conflict across the globe, forcing nations to either collaborate on solutions or face the resulting simultaneous hyper-local and supranational effects of ignoring global problems. For example, in 2018, more than 600 migrants—about a quarter of whom were from Sudan—“had been rescued from flimsy smugglers’ boats in the Mediterranean during a series of operations … [and then] were offloaded to the Aquarius to be taken to land” (Winfield and Parra 2018, para. 8). After being denied access to ports in Italy and Malta, the Aquarius was offered port in Spain. The case of the Aquariusrefugee ship brought together civil servants from three countries and many of the refugees sought asylum in yet another country, France (Duncan2018).

Other supranational challenges demanding supranational policy prescriptions include space exploration, climate change, poverty, and public health. The International Space Station (ISS) was an early example of an open-system, cross-border initiative that required policy frameworks that allowed program administrators to operate successfully in an international context. No longer an American pursuit alone, the ISS was successful because advocates from within and outside individual countries’ space agencies were brought together to establish a flagship for human space flight. “Not to be part of this project was to be left behind” (Lambright2014, 29). Administrators from member nations’ space agencies persuaded their own governments to contribute resources to build this flagship space station.

Climate change demands an open-systems approach as well, but in contrast to the multinational efforts to build a space station, climate change thus far has lacked an organizational center or collaborative body to shape and implement policy. Küttingand Cerny (2015, 916) observe: “The lack of representation of a virtual, supra-political ‘actor’—a sort of metagovernance of ‘nature’ or the ‘planet’—is perhaps the biggest challenge.” Treaties using United Nations policy frameworks have attempted to take the place of a supranational actor. For instance, the Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement that extends the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and commits state signers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many signatories—African, Asian, and South American countries—have ratified the Kyoto Protocol but have not established binding target rates of greenhouse gas emissions, and the USA has not ratified this treaty. In another example, even when the parties involved are known, effects of environmental disasters extend beyond these initial parties and continue long after the crisis ended. Deepwater Horizon was an oil-drilling platform operated by British Petroleum that exploded in US waters. The Deepwater Horizon accident spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico for four months in 2010 (Lodge2014). Studies showed the effects of the spill followed sea turtles across the Atlantic. Contamination is traced to dozens of countries years later, as far away as Cape Town, South Africa (Putman et al. 2015).

Poverty eradication, another global challenge, is a goal of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international governing agency. The Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) is part of a set of policies to address public health on a global scale. The FCTC monitors implementation of WHO policy and disseminates information on best practices to countries that have identified tobacco use as an urgent public health problem (Mamudu et al. 2015, 870). Drug trafficking has proven to be a bigger challenge than any single country can address alone. In reaction to individual nations’ failed drug policies, the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP) is a supranational secretariat created in reaction to a failed war on drugs by countries acting largely independently (Alimi2015). None of these secretariats have police powers or the resources to compel countries to comply with their policy recommendations, however.

While space exploration, climate change, poverty, and public health have clear multinational implications, the decisions of individual nations in other policy areas span political borders as well, including trade, industry regulation, and tax policy. Multinational corporations offer services to clients worldwide including management consulting, legal, and accounting (Heidbreder2015, 945). The 2008 financial crisis in the USA quickly spread to other countries because regulations in one country affected the behavior of firms doing business in other countries. Behavior changes that affected those countries’ economies can be characterized this way (Lodge2014, 99):

The collapse of various private financial institutions highlighted how much-celebrated regulatory organizations and instruments had failed to foresee or, at least, mitigate the problems affecting financial institutions in light of over-extension in particular markets … the financial crisis highlighted the inherent interdependency of regulatory activities, with national regulatory decisions in one country having effects on economics elsewhere as internationally operating banks retreated to their national markets in order to comply with strengthened regulatory requirements.

Economic interdependency predates the global recession and economic interdependency remains today in both tax and trade policy. A benefit to being a European Union member nation is that it removes internal borders to facilitate trade and travel. However, sales tax remains a country-by-country issue. This means value added tax (VAT) collection in cross-border trade is an administrative challenge because of the abolition of border controls while leaving VAT administration under national authority (Heidbreder2015). Tax policy constantly changes and as Internet shopping has grown exponentially, so has global interdependency. Multilateral agreements to support the free movement of goods and services include the EU—one of the three largest economies on the globe—and also NAFTA, the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA), the African Continental Free Trade Area, and the WTO. Only a handful of all 195 countries worldwide are not part of a multinational trade compact. This section discussed only a few policy areas that transcend national borders. Who implements these global public policies, and where do they work? Many of these policies are implemented by ICSs working in international secretariats. It is to these organizations and civil servants that we now turn.

Emotional Labor in International Organizations

We now turn toward a discussion of ICSs, for to understand emotional labor in multinational organizations, we must understand the display rules faced by the those who work in them. “With the rise of this new ‘governance architecture’ and its associated bureaucracies, there is a new crop of global public professionals—largely hidden from public view—working to formulate and implement public policy in a trans-national context” (Kim et al. 2014, xiii). One example is the European Commission, which arose post-World War II, and is the civil service of the European Union (EU) (Spence 2012). Staff members come from twenty-eight countries and, as a result of their different national and cultural traditions, they have different educational backgrounds, distinct professional experiences, and diverse administrative styles (Hensell2016). Most of the more than 40,000 EU staff work in Brussels or Luxemburg. Another supranational entity is the United Nations (UN), headquartered in New York City. The scope of international interests addressed by the UN Secretariat is vast and includes peace and security, economic and social development, environment and sustainability, refugee protection, disarmament and non-proliferation, and human rights. The United Nations Secretariat is just one of many IPAs, and the UN and EU are among the largest (Busch2014).

Growing international interconnectedness develops through interpersonal relationships among ICSs working in these multinational organizations. In his analysis of the ISS, Lambright (2014) credits the power of individuals in multinational organizations for sustaining the agenda and keeping the organization on target. In the case of the space station, institutionalization of norms and commitment of founding members ensured the success of the project, even as new staff replaced the founders. While interconnectedness on successful projects such as this foster growth in all member nations, interpersonal relationships can also magnify the effects of failures: “One of the key reasons for the depth of the most recent international financial crisis [was] the phenomenon of ‘revolving doors’ between bankers, economists, and academia” (Seabrooke2014, 337).

Display Rules in International Organizations

International civil servants embody the missions of international organizations and are their face. As such, they are subject to professional and organizational display rules. Display rules are regulations—sometimes explicit, but more often implicit and unwritten—governing a worker’s observed affect, or outward expression (Grandey2003). Different professions use different emotion management strategies to navigate display rules (Carlson et al. 2012; Steinbergand Figart1999). Strategies of emotion management in the service of conforming to professional display rules are emotional labor. Display rules proscribing negative emotive expression (as compared with prescribing positive emotive expression or neutrality) are positively related to burnout in civil servants, specifically law enforcement (Van Gelderen et al. 2011). As members of organizations, there is no reason to expect ICSs to be free from organizational display rules; they are part of organizational culture (Martin1992; McLaren1997).

If display rules are shaped by environment or culture, then what is the culture of an international organization and what might be the nature of its display rules? In David Spence’s (2012) examination of a newly-formed, 5000-employee European External Action Service (EEAS), he describes the need for staffers to “accept the premises of the Euro-diplomatic mindset” (122) and establish “a streamlined corps of diplomats with new horizons, shared methods, and interests all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’” (123). The challenge was to shift EEAS staff perspectives away from the interests of their individual countries to a European point of view: “Constitutional rules and house rules create clear expectations—norms—that are expressly designed to guide Commission officials, whether as political appointees or as permanent career officials” (Hooghe2005, 863). Spence underscores the novelty of the experiment, whose goal is to create a European mind-set that operates at the same level and shoulder-to-shoulder alongside diplomats from different nations.

Loyalty, identification with, and commitment to, a multinational European outlook rather than a nationalist outlook is crucial to cultivate and sustain among EU diplomats. Regularly monitoring for the right frame of mind is necessary because divergences in mind-sets may prove hurtful to the organization (Spence2012). To foster development of such a mind-set, the European Union founding documents (see European Union 2015) mirror the UN Charter (Juncosand Pomorska2013). To achieve no less than “a just and peaceful world” UN civil servants must uphold the principles of “competence, integrity, impartiality, independence and discretion … peace, respect for fundamental rights, economic and social progress, and international cooperation. It is therefore incumbent on ICSs to adhere to the highest standards of conduct; for, ultimately, it is the international civil service that will enable the United Nations system to bring about a just and peaceful world” (International Civil Service Advisory Board 2002, 2). These norms imply clear display rules for ICSs. Ziring, Riggs, and Plano underscore the complex dynamics of organizational culture in international organizations and the importance of these dynamics beyond just shaping display rules (2005, 101):

One obvious challenge is to integrate within a single administrative machine the diverse attitudes, tongues, backgrounds, and abilities of personnel recruited from the four corners of the earth … With no shared global political culture, the secretariat lacks both the guidelines that would make its own choice of actions easier and the legitimacy that would make its functions acceptable to its clientele.

Barnettand Finnemore (1999) complicate the issue of display rules further by underscoring the important role of professions in dictating incumbents’ behavior. Professional training involves norms and display rules and the education one receives to become an attorney, accountant, nurse, and systems analyst—even a public administration generalist—involves its own display rules. These rules risk supplanting the organizational identity of an international organization if, as in the early days of the EU, an organizational identity resists definition. Human resource management practices can play an important role in overcoming this problem by developing an organizational identity. Staff training and organizational team building events reinforce display rules (Spence2012, 133):

If support for policy positions rests upon institutional affiliation or the actors’ mind sets, there is a clear need for posts to go to officials with the ‘right’ mind set. Intense training, accompanied by retreats and other devices, can reverse the signs of regression … The existence of various mind sets is an issue that dare not speak its name, so it is difficult to imagine how the issue can be successfully addressed at the political level. Yet it is the key to sensible human resource management.

Suvarierol (2008) similarly reveals a very strong identification with one’s profession among ICSs in the European Commission, which can hinder the creation and establishment of organizational identity. Suvarierol finds that the diverse cultural backgrounds of officials in IPA may create a barrier to developing an organizational culture. To address this, one scholarly perspective posits that organizational culture and display rules of international organizations are shaped in the image of Weberian bureaucracy.

McLaren argues that bureaucratic operational processes eclipse national influences to create organizational culture. Weberian bureaucracy “has now become a universal, a well-established means for doing the work of an international organization no matter from what country one comes” (1997, 61). Bureaucratic processes are learned in educational institutions: “It scarcely matters that the modern university world is a western-developed set of disciplines … the modern university prepares people to follow a logical, rational approach to operations, whatever the field may be” (McLaren1997, 61). Whether it is Weberian notions of how bureaucracies are how to function, or alternate visions, norms are learned at university, and universities are institutions created to advance sanctioned understandings. For example, OECD uses budget support as a policy tool to mitigate global poverty. Budget support focuses on reforming a country’s managerial and administrative apparatuses rather than focusing on economic development goals (Wolff2015). It is an arbitrary approach but one thought “normal” within OECD.

Weberian principles are also found in the UN Charter, Articles 100 and 101, which defines the occupation of ICS: “The paramount consideration in the employment of the staff and in the determination of the conditions of service shall be the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency,competence, andintegrity” (United Nations1945, Article 101, para. 3, emphasis supplied). Crucially, the constitution of the European Commission also uses this language to shape and define its civil service. Behavior that conveys these standards is endorsed by these display rules, which are rooted in best practices of Weberian bureaucracy. Monitoring for this behavior becomes the business of human resource managers.

Staff Impartiality and Display Rules

Westphalian (sovereign) states give over a portion of their power and legitimacy to international organizations because those organizations position themselves as serving the whole. The power and legitimacy of international organizations derive from the perception that they are impersonal, technocratic, and neutral (Barnettand Finnemore1999). Creating and sustaining the perception that they are in the service of a mission and not exercising power for themselves are essential to their authority. Those who work in these transnational agencies uphold and sustain the perception that their agencies are other-oriented. One means by which ICSs do this is through the separation of their professional and personal selves, as Weber prescribed: “The modern organization of the civil service separates the bureau from the private domicile of the official, and, in general, segregates official activity from the sphere of private life … the more consistently the modern type of business management has been carried through, the more are these separations the case” (Weber1921/1968, 957). Consistent management is delivered without affect, without emotion, according to this oft-cited passage: “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation” (Weber1921/1968, 975). Weber is very clear on these display rules: The bureaucrat is to separate his personal and professional lives and to conduct his professional affairs without observable emotional expression. And Weber clearly intends his advice to dictate individual conduct: “The rule and the rational pursuit of ‘objective’ purposes, as well as devotion to these, would always constitute the norm of conduct” (Weber1921/1968, 979, emphasis supplied). Moreover, expertise is objectively real and separable from the individual: “The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly objective expert” (Weber1921/1968, 975, emphasis original). Weberian bureaucracy is rightly credited with improving administration by emphasizing rule-based, predictable processes and proscribing capricious decision-making and favoritism. Similarly, those who work in international organizations are expected to practice and display impartiality, being loyal to the IO, not to their home-state or the state where their work is located. Impartiality and neutrality require similar emotive displays, and there are pitfalls.

While neutrality is a clear display rule for UN officials, there have been international crises in which neutrality and the desire and need to provide humanitarian assistance come into conflict (Barnettand Finnemore1999, 724–25):

Bosnia is the classic case in point. On the one hand, the ‘all necessary means’ provision of Security Council resolutions gave the UN authority to deliver humanitarian aid and protect civilians in safe havens. On the other hand, the UN abstained from ‘taking sides’ because of the fear that such action would compromise its neutrality and future effectiveness. The result of these conflicts was a string of contradictory policies that failed to provide adequately for the UN’s expanding humanitarian charges.

Moreover, neutral, objective, Weberian bureaucracy may backfire in a culture unlike the Western tradition in which it was founded. As Chapter 12 in this book explains about India, there is a mismatch between its bureaucracy and the needs of the nation. An overview of the mismatch is provided by La Palombara (2006, 201–202):

In a place like India, public administrators steeped in the tradition of the Indian Civil Service may be less useful as developmental entrepreneurs than those who are not so rigidly tied to notions of bureaucratic status, hierarchy, and impartiality. The economic development of a society … requires a breed of bureaucrats different (e.g.: more free-wheeling, less adhering to administrative forms, less attached to the importance of hierarchy and seniority) from the type of man who is useful when the primary concern of the bureaucracy is the maintenance of law and order.

Whatever the bureaucratic model is, whether Weberian or market-based, or some other combination, it drives rules for appropriate workplace behavior. For example, the reification of the market under NPM as a public management strategy aligns display rules in the public sector with those of the private sector in which customer responsiveness is of prime importance. Discussion turns to this because, just as Weberian notions of bureaucracy prevail in some governments, so also does this public management strategy. And, in some countries, the public service context reflects a mix of traditional culture and bureaucratic processes overlaid with (or without) the pursuit of market principles. These are not the only models in the countries surveyed, but they provide an example of the complicated contextual frames that are useful for analyzing the data and interpreting the confluence of forces that public service professionals are called upon to balance.

Comparative Public Administration

Comparative public administration examines how and why governance differs across countries (Fitzpatrick et al. 2011; Van Wartand Cayer1990). Organizational performance research has always followed a comparative logic by borrowing best practices and by identifying lessons learned from other contexts in order to improve performance (Jresiat2005, 2014). However, the best comparative research accepts the fact that best practices from one setting may not work well elsewhere (Fitzpatrick et al. 2011). “Unfortunately,” laments one of the earliest comparativist scholars in public administration, Fred Riggs, “most of the American literature in Political Science and Public Administration is premised on the historical experience of the United States, and the word ‘comparative’ is really used to refer to studies based on experience elsewhere in the world” (2006, 928). Global conflicts have reinforced the consequences of parochialism. As discussed earlier, post-World War I peace negotiations culminated in the delineation of an “international” sphere separate from any individual country, and it was World War II that catalyzed comparative research in public administration: “Comparative public administration emerged out of post-World War II efforts to find better global development strategies. Its early practitioners worked to define the field, develop general theory, set a research agenda, and generalize ‘lessons learned’” (Fitzpatrick et al. 2011, 822).

Early development administration sought to extend the traditional, Weberian bureaucratic model of public administration to other nations (Gulrajaniand Moloney2012). During the immediate postwar period at the dawn of early development administration, Robert Dahl is skeptical of extending Weberian principles to other countries. He says: “There should be no reason for supposing, then, that a principle of public administration has equal validity in every nation-state, or that successful public administration practices in one country will necessarily prove successful in a different social, economic, and political environment” (1947, 8). La Palombara (2006) is similarly skeptical of civil service reforms: “It is far from obvious that the bureaucracies of the new states should uncritically adopt American principles of scientific management. [For example] the introduction of an egalitarian system of recruitment in a highly status-conscious society would serve to reduce the status of public servants” (208). Cultural context implies particularism in public management and public service delivery. Each culture captures particularities in practice and outcomes (Fitzpatrick et al. 2011, 828):

Ignoring cultural norms, values, and traditions leads to misinterpretation of findings. Interventions or administrative innovations may be viewed as ineffective because of the nature of the intervention itself, rather than because of cultural norms that influence the implementation or impact of the innovation.

In the developed world, traditional Weberian bureaucracy gave way to neoclassical economic theory with market-focused NPM reforms as a primary example. Regardless of the paradigm—Weberian bureaucracy or market-focused initiatives—both ignore the affective aspects of public service delivery and the latter reduce the citizen–state encounter to a buyer–seller relationship.

New Public Managementreforms introduced competitive-market dynamics, emphasizing the citizen as customer alongside a customer-service ethos. This may exacerbate emotional labor demands in public services (Thomas2013). By mimicking private sector service delivery, public sector workers experience the emotional labor of “customer service” transactions similar to their counterparts in retail sales. But this emotive burden is compounded by obligations and constraints that accompany the state–citizen relationship. When public service workers are assessed on customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction derives from how a citizen perceives her or his interpersonal interaction with public servants (Gore1993), marketized expectations increase the emotional labor demands upon public servants beyond what has been established already (Guy et al. 2008). Greater emphasis on running government like a business allows us to invoke theories of emotional labor generated from research on retail trade (Johnstonand Sandberg2008). But it is more accurate to move past the private sector and focus solely on the public sector context.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the adoption of market-like principles in public management legitimized the Weberian concentration on efficiency (though defining it quite differently), while simultaneously pushing back on the lack of “customer service” that resulted from the unfeeling-née-neutral nature of public service in the Weberian model. As the lodestar, efficiency allocates according to price, just as in the private market. Because a marketized approach to public management is a reaction against Weberian bureaucracy, it emphasizes outputs instead of process. It is useful to examine the effect that such reforms have on display rules. A customer-service orientation assumes that citizen/customers express their preferences through their choices in the marketplace of services (Grayand Jenkins2006).

Where Weberian bureaucracy attempts to rationalize processes by being neutral and formal regardless of cultural context, marketized reforms reflect local culture. The ultimate assessment of organizational performance is how the citizen/customer feels about the service she or he has received and how that sentiment is expressed in customer satisfaction feedback. The NPMphilosophy, for example, “arose from the conviction that bureaucracy was broken and needed fixing, and that private sector solutions were the key … it promises to provide the ‘Big Answer’ to real and imagined shortcomings in public bureaucracy” (Savioe2006, 593–94). Such reforms dispense with the concept of “The Public Good” by decentralizing government and empowering citizens to articulate their own individual sense of “The Good.” By mimicking private sector allocation mechanisms, it is assumed that public opinion surveys and citizen satisfaction surveys are as accurate as purchasing decisions are in the private sector.

Reforms that favor buyer–seller dynamics reflect and require a commitment to the superiority of the market over government. They also reflect a belief that competition between the public and private sectors makes service delivery more efficient by making the state more responsive to the customer (Vickersand Kouzmin2001). Lynn questions whether this calculation is too simplistic, reiterating the differences between public and private: “Americans view themselves as customers of government rather than as citizens … customers can compel responses to their wishes by insisting on receiving value for what they pay or shopping elsewhere” (Lynn 2006, 575). How feasible is it to shop for public services elsewhere? Where else? The citizen-cum-consumer operating assumption of NPM “raises issues of inequality, oversimplification, and a lack of commitment to the public interest” (Raynerand Lawton2018, 362). Indeed, NPM also assumes a society comprised of people with individualistic self-construal and a public-choice version of The Public Good as the sum of individual choices. In addition, Savoie’s (2006) critique of NPM revisits the important role of feelings to organizational success:

The success of a business executive is much easier to assess than that of a government manager. There is also much less fuss over due process in the private sector than in government, if only because of the difference involved in managing private and public money. It is rarely simple and straightforward in governing where goals are rarely clear … one person’s red tape is another’s dueprocess. (Savoie2006, 597–98, emphasis supplied)

While Weberian bureaucracy prizes neutrality and objectivity as display rules, NPM prizes the importance of being responsive to the citizen/customer’s needs, just as in business transactions. Under this aegis, Weberian processes and routines and codes of conduct are treated like costs and not benefits. Efficiency and responsiveness are valued over accountability and due process (Grayand Jenkins2006). Key features of public management reforms focus on outputs and ends rather than inputs and means. Organizations are reframed as a series of exchange relationships, not interdependencies (Miller et al. 2006). Large organizations are disaggregated into functions. Competition empowers service users to vote with their feet, exercise choice, and discipline service providers through consumer demand. But in most public services, government is the provider of last resort or the only provider.

Reformers adopting a marketized public management perspective refer to their introductory microeconomics textbooks and recall that monopoly providers are inefficient because they tend to supply less than demand and charge higher than equilibrium prices. While textbook explanations apply in the case of a normal good, government traffics in services that, if they could be provided in the private market in sufficient quantities, they already would be. The discipline-of-the-market narrative falls short in the cases of providing regulatory services, humanitarian aid, or refugee legal services.

The logic for treating government as a business involves a false equivalence between the two, asserting that competition fosters efficiency in the private sector, so it will also discipline public-sector service delivery. The consequences of efficiency—the extent to which efficiency compromises equity, for instance—are not considered (Carr1994). One significant consequence is that the emphasis on outputs over processes can produce inequitable outcomes. Another consequence is embedded in the assumption that public opinion polls provide information of similar accuracy as do revenue flows in the private sector. But government provides services where markets have failed, meaning that oftentimes, government is the sole provider or provider of last resort. Moreover, if public goods could be valued just as private-sector goods are—in other words, goods free from the problems of nonrival consumption and nonexclusive consumption—then price rationing would be the appropriate allocation method and the good would be provided by private sellers.

A third consequence relates to the motivations with which public servants choose to work in the public sector. According to his examination of the efficiency movement in schools, Carr (1994) observed that educators were asked to turn away from the principles of their profession to adopt managerialism and efficiency as the paramount objective, yet the motivations and professional display rules of educators are ignored. Public servants working with disadvantaged populations resist market-oriented, narrow, output-focused reforms that erode discretion and autonomy and prioritize the near-term bottom line over longer-term objectives (Miller et al. 2006). Vickersand Kouzmin similarly reveal detrimental impacts of such reforms on the public servants who are asked to carry them out and insist: “There must, in the first instance, be an acknowledgement that actors may be permanently damaged, traumatized, and alienated as a result of their experiences with NPM. Future research should address ‘at risk’ actors in organizations, those who face redundancy through downsizing, and outsourcing, violence, stress, illness, disability, substance abuse or other coercive practices” (2001, 111).

Although falling short of providing public administration’s Big Answer, NPM reforms have improved service delivery in certain venues. For example, prior to NPM reforms, public sector financial management and accounting best practices were fairly rudimentary (Jonesand Kettl2006). Developed countries implemented reforms to greater and lesser degrees, but all somewhat similarly. Developing countries were encouraged to pursue reforms by international actors such as the World Bankand OECD in order to seek greater analytical clarity on how they could enhance their capabilities (Gulrajaniand Moloney2012). The nations experienced NPM reforms differently from countries in the developed world, causing La Palombara (2006) to speculate also about the degree of divergence between countries even as they relied on traditional bureaucratic government. Finally, public management reforms are credited with spurring interest in comparative research because the reform agenda was pursued by so many countries during a relatively distinct period of time. Regardless of the managerial model employed by each nation, comparative public administration fosters greater understanding of the role of emotions in public organizations, whether in the context of marketized public service delivery, traditional bureaucratic processes, or an alternate structure.

Summary and Conclusion

In this chapter, we discussed policy areas as broad ranging as climate change, migration, and Internet commerce, all of which have brought sovereign nations together to consider “the international” as a space that transcends the political boundaries of any single country. Organizations are formed to address global issues—International Public Administrations or secretariats—and people are hired to implement policies—ICSs—to govern across the borders of sovereign nations. Like employees of any organization and members of any profession, ICSs are subject to display rules (Xuand Weller2008). Conforming to organizational and professional display rules demands emotional labor. Working across cultures requires emotional intelligence and “cultural intelligence” (Mollah et al. 2018, 480) as does working in diverse organizations. Ultimately, the capacity to perform emotional labor, which is closely related to emotional intelligence (Guyand Lee2015; Mastracci et al. 2012), is fundamental to quality public service because public servants working in diverse organizations span cultural boundaries with both their relations with co-workers and also with the citizenry of diverse communities. Boundary spanners work in ways that cross organizational boundaries or service sectors. Most often, boundary spanning occurs between organizations, but can also be between different parts of large organizations, like states or local governments (Needham et al. 2017). ICSsworking in IPAs cannot avoid spanning boundaries. The example of sanctuary cities and local-level environmental policies underscores the importance of boundary spanning at subnational levels. Observing display rules and building trust are especially important but much more complex when working across boundaries.

Boundary spanning complicates display rules and boundary spanners need to adapt and modify their presentation to accommodate different constituencies (Needham et al. 2017). We know that the experience of emotions in organizations varies by culture (Gökçen2014; Gunkel et al. 2014; Ratner 2000). And we know that there is great variety among nations within a category, such as among collectivist states or among individualist states. Research that compares nations is required to explore the effects of culture on emotional labor.

Just as boundary spanning is important for international work, political dynamics, and geographic boundaries must be taken into account when comparing nations. This is because different governmental systems vary in the expectations that arise in the public encounter. Public management cultures that rely on traditional bureaucracy with its “neutral” delivery of services exert different emotional labor demands on public servants than cultures that rely on market principles where “the customer is always right.” Another way to think about this is that citizens’ attitudes about their relationship to government, and vice versa, have an effect on how public servants are treated. And how public servants are treated affects how they feel about citizens and about their work.