Volume 3 (2018): Edizione 1 (December 2018)

In traditional administrative models the public servant is emotionally conceptualized in a specific way, namely as a rationally acting and emotionally abstinent person. However, these are also models of observation that are strongly guided on the one hand by normative ideas and on the other by historical master narratives that focus on the development of a specifically occidental rationality. In particular, the emotional turn in historical science inspires us to take a critical view of such assumptions. But other approaches developed in other scientific disciplines also stimulate us to sharpen our historical view of the emotional aspects of bureaucracy: in jurisprudence “Law and Emotions” and in sociology “Sociology of Emotions”. This article presents these scientific approaches and tries to sound out their usefulness for the history of administration. In this way, it also serves as an introduction to this volume of the journal Administory.

The essay is dedicated to the idealized emotionlessness of early modern Spanish office holders. It focuses on the so called corregidores, which represented the king and administered justice in major Spanish cities. Their instructions often idealized the total lack of pasiones or at least their complete invisibility. Such a discarding of all affects echoed the ideals of impartial judges, just kings and uninterested clerics and had specific functions, especially in cities with their high density of mutual observation. To live accordingly, that is, with one’s own emotions permanently held in check, required personal aptitude, appropriate age and a process of education and study which should convert certain habits into a ›second nature‹ and thus distinguish the corregidor significantly from the society over which he was to judge. Constantly checked by society however, this second nature would corrupt, if not protected by a rigid and permanent »vigilance over oneself«.

This contribution investigates the role of emotions for the administration of indigenous people in the Latin American periphery, considered “barbarians” by colonial and republican officials. Drawing on case studies from Northwest Mexico and the Southern Cone, the article examines the Spanish-European self-image as “people of reason” vis-á-vis indigenous “people without reason” or “people of custom”. The concept of trust is employed to explore the boundaries and overlappings between emotion and rationality in interethnic relations during colonial and republican times. Giving examples from archival material such as letters and reports of state agents, this paper concludes that there was no monopoly on rationality, as claimed by the public officials, but always a possibility to establish trusting relationships between indigenous groups and state society.

The points of departure for the contribution are the Catholic Church’s prohibition of consanguineous and affinal marriage and the practice of dispensation with a geographic focus on the Diocese of Brixen, which comprised parts of historical Tyrol and Vorarlberg during the period of study. Granting dispensation was and remained an act of grace, even when government regulations began to interfere in administrative procedures in the late 18th century. The amount of dispensation applications regarding close degrees of consanguinity and affinity significantly increased during this time. Emotions were an integral part of these proceedings. Two central areas of interest are: What were the effects of recording emotions in the dispensation paperwork, and how were the ways that emotions were described in writing expressed in social interactions? The hypothesis of this study is that applicants tried using emotions as instruments for expediting their applications on the one hand, and that lower-level clergy used the practice of recording emotions in order to legitimize supporting dispensation applicants on the other hand.

Research on emotions in the 20th century has shown that in the period after WWI there has been a general tendency to control and suppress the display (if not the experience) of emotions. Based on various sources such as conduct books, autobiographical prose, and disciplinary files this article highlights the role emotions played in civil service in interwar Austria. Emotions could be a disturbance of administrative procedure and everyday office life, but they clearly served to regulate power and gender relations between colleagues, and to define personal boundaries. Specific focus is placed on the interrelation of emotions and political affiliations of government employees, on the particularities of greeting in the office, and on „Beamtengefühl“ – a special feature of this socio-professional group.

The 1850s were witness to several forms of emotion management in the Habsburg monarchy, among them the prohibition of writing to the authorities in a defamatory manner. The so-called law against defamatory speech was one of many initiatives which contributed to the generation, exploitation, control and containment of emotions towards the state. As this law remains in force today, it provides an excellent starting point for an exploration into continuities and changes concerning ›feeling rules‹ for encounters between subjects and the state. My chapter explores these rules through the lens of the administrative court, where acceptable criticism had to be clearly demarcated from defamatory speech acts. Looking at these proceedings, it is evident that emotional work routines are missing in the public service. Therefore, citizens were and still are required to keep their emotions under control and react to provocative acts by public officials in strictly rational terms.

Political discussions and negotiation processes are often used to classify rational or emotional behavior that enhances one’s own and the other’s devaluation. In the paper this is elaborated with a view to the clash of state planning euphoria and civic protest in the wake of the great administrative reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Both supporting the reforms and criticizing them are highly complex emotional processes. But how is this reflected in the arguments and actions of the actors? To answer this question, the contemporary ideas and interpretations of a rational and emotional behavior come into focus. The emotions associated with the debate are analyzed at various levels: as a strategy of citizens’ initiatives, as a media strategy, as a factor of community involvement or the “emotional community” and as an attribution.

Can emotions be observed throughout the years at the regional scale of continents and countries? Does variation in their intensity correlate with historical events and with the evolution of diplomatic and administrative practices? If so, who is the subject of emotion? We seek answers by a remote reading analysis of the reports of Swiss ambassadors in the first half of the 20th century. We examine the conditions under which super-individual subjects of emotion can be aggregated from large textual datasets, and propose a theoretical framework for their interpretation. In specific examples, we show how algorithmic sentiment analysis let us identify the exceptionally expressive language of the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo during World War 2, or the posture of the Swiss administration with regard to the social movements in Scandinavia. Our findings yield both methodological recommendations and theoretical bridges between various disciplines concerned with emotions and their expression in written documents.

The article deals with the narrative of the ‘cold’ or ‘inhumane bureaucracy’. The author argues that one can already observe this narrative during the early bureaucratisation in Germany. He shows that the perception of a ‘cold bureaucracy’ resulted from conflicts about the legitimacy of administrative practices: The new bureaucratic system clashes with the traditional practices exercised by officials, among them certain gift-giving practices. Those actions were based on a concept of honour, they shaped the emotional practices of the officials. The bureaucratic system reduced the spaces for those emotional practices, because it interdicted traditional practices. Officials argued that this interdiction and the bureaucratic instruments of monitoring and controlling was mistrusting and defamatory to them. Public observers condemned the new administrative system to be ‘cold’ and ‘inhumane’. They demanded more spaces for emotional practices by reallowing traditional actions and re-introducing elements of the old administrative system.

I use the personnel files of three consuls in the Austro-Hungarian foreign service to consider the ways Habsburg bureaucracy recorded the emotional lives of civil servants. Consuls were expected to interact with Habsburg subjects and other civilians dispassionately and objectively. But conflicts that occurred in their ‘free time,’ outside the consulates, spilled over into their professional time. The resolution of those conflicts involved their colleagues in the consulates and administrators in Vienna. While showing emotion in interactions inside the consulate was frowned upon, responding to attacks on personal honor with the strongest of emotions was expected of an Austro-Hungarian “gentleman.” Consuls had to abide by both the standards of their profession and the standards for “men of honor” (Ehrenmänner) that had been codified with the officer corps in mind. The recognition that both roles were compatible shows the repackaging of certain kinds of “emotion” as professional requirements, rather than excesses.

In 1910 the Crownland Moravia was confidentially granted a 5 million loan by the Viennese government. Moravia was heavily indebted and spent extensive expenditures for schooling, infrastructure and social welfare. The secret loan to Moravia was just one part of the multi-tiered system of fiscal flows in late Imperial Austria that was subject to emotionally heated debates. Since the budgetary power in the regional, transnational and imperial arenas came with determining the political priorities there, negotiations of the budget mirrored conflicting political camps often divided along national lines. On the imperial level, however, the same politicians forged transnational cooperation and new forms of transnational revenue sharing. Utterances of emotions were made more objective the higher the political level the crownland’s leading officials dealt with. The emotional side of fiscal politics, however, can be seen as a driving force in prioritising certain policy fields.

At the end of the 18th century, reports were made of unusual and curious legal cases in which the plaintiffs were moved by a self-destructive obsession. These excessive desires expressed themselves in the fact that these people were involved in countless lawsuits and vied in vain for their rights in court. These plaintiffs were people who studied the law obsessively, meticulously filed suit after suit, and continuously troubled civil servants with unjustified legal demands. The Prussian bureaucracy gave these plaintiffs a name: ›Querulanten‹ (from Latin: queri, to complain). This paper deals with the history of these troublemakers, and more particularly, with the goal of understanding the source, development, and the continuing existence of querulency as a connection between media, knowledge, and emotions.

This contribution examines the role of trust in disabled veteran welfare in Bohemia during the First World War. It places this concern for disabled veterans’ trust in a wider political context as trust emerged as a specific concern in Cisleithanian political discourses on administrative reform around 1900. In the context of welfare for disabled veterans in Cisleithania, trust gained novel importance. Medical and occupational experts deemed it imperative to gain disabled veterans’ trust to maintain their role as experts and developed specific strategies of emotionally engaging with disabled soldiers to gain their trust. Karl Eger, a military official, emerged as an influential actor in Bohemian welfare for disabled veterans. He propagated a welfare administration based on local welfare boards, which would supposedly possess disabled veterans’ trust. His idea of trust was, however, based on concepts of national communities and he implemented it to re-organize disabled veteran welfare based on nationality.

This article provides a first-hand account of waiting in line to deliver migration documents at an office of the police department known as the Questura in Italy, in 2006. The spectacle of migrants suffering in line day after day, subjected to threats from police and the jostling, complaints and aggression of others in line, provided a stage for the performative realism of the widescale exclusion, criminalization and scapegoating of migrants in Italy at the time. Moreover, migrants’ relations to the state and Italians’ relations to migrants were embodied and felt through the line, marked on bodies and in memories as visceral marginalization.

Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970, in German 1974) deconstructs a stereotype of economic behavior that large parts of social sciences define and analyze as rational and goal-oriented. Hirschman confronts the image of a rational and efficient economy, constantly working towards maximizing output, with the fluctuation and deterioration of its performance. Exit and Voice constitute, according to Hirschman, the fundamental mechanisms available to counteract this tendency for performance decline. He introduces market and non-market forces into his analysis, thereby addressing both economic and political mechanisms, in order to advance the mutual recognition of both disciplines, which Hirschman deems insufficient. At the time of its publication, Hirschman’s study was appreciated for its cross-disciplinary approach. In the eyes of the author however, what grants the book current relevance is its analytical compatibility with devastating present-day problems.

In seiner Schrift Das Dilemma des Verwaltungsmannes von 1965 bringt Fritz Morstein Marx, der Verwaltungswissenschaftler wie Verwaltungspraktiker auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks tätig war, das Problem des Verwaltens folgendermaßen auf den Punkt: Verwalten muss auch immer eine gestalterische Komponente innehaben. Tut es das nicht, kann eine solche Beschränkung auf den bloßen Normvollzug langfristig zu Politikverdrossenheit führen. Jedoch droht der „Verwaltungsmann“ dabei seine Kompetenzen zu überschreiten, weswegen er Nachteile erleiden könnte. Es bieten sich zwei Reaktionen an: Das Verkriechen in ein Mauseloch, wo man in möglichst wenig Kompetenzprobleme gerät - oder aber umgekehrt die Übernahme von Verantwortung, auf die Gefahr hin, negative Konsequenzen zu befürchten. Morstein Marx plädiert für die zweite Lösung, bindet sie aber zugleich in ein Beamtenethos ein.