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Habitus and the practice of public service

Peggy McDonough Work Employment Society 2006 20: 629 DOI: 10.1177/0950017006069805 The online version of this article can be found at: http://wes.sagepub.com/content/20/4/629

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Work, employment and society

Copyright 2006 BSA Publications Ltd Volume 20(4): 629647 [DOI: 10.1177/0950017006069805] SAGE Publications London,Thousand Oaks, New Delhi

The Public Services

Habitus and the practice of public service

s

Peggy McDonough
University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT

This article presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the public service ethos under municipal government restructuring. Using Bourdieus theory of practice, it suggests, rst, that public service makes public servants through socialization in the public service habitus.This gives practice a prereective, embodied and immediate character. Second, it links the public service habitus to eld struggles over the definition of the public good. Front-line workers tacit recognition of a traditional vision of the universal good means that they will defend it in the face of threats by those attempting to impose alternative visions of the state as an extension of the market. Finally, the article offers an empirically grounded understanding of public servants making public service.Through their daily practices, including the practical practice of public service, embodied public service and defence of public service, workers reproduce, usually unconsciously, this traditional vision of the public good.
KEY WORDS

Bourdieu / habitus / logic of practice / public service / restructuring

Introduction

mong its 1995 post-election announcements, the Conservative Government of Ontario signalled its intention to undertake a series of municipal government amalgamations, beginning with the greater Toronto area. On 1 January 1998, the new City of Toronto was created by combining the regional government of Metropolitan Toronto with six neighbouring municipalities serving 2.4 million people. The Ontario government also made deep cuts to provincial transfer payments to the City, changed the property tax

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system and downloaded responsibility for a variety of social services. In response, the nascent municipality introduced private sector management techniques to reduce costs and increase efciency. Departments were reorganized and employees were made redundant, relocated or reassigned. Moreover, at the time of this study, alternative service delivery, including the contracting out of some services, was on the Citys agenda (Garrett, 2001). This article is based on an exploratory study of work and well-being among City of Toronto front-line staff. Although the new City was approaching its third anniversary at the time of the study, signicant change related to the amalgamation process was on going. Workers talked about job intensication, deteriorating relationships with management, job insecurity and poor morale, problems well documented in related research on public sector restructuring (Bach, 2000; Doogan, 1997; Lloyd and Seifert, 1995; McIntosh and Broderick, 1996; Sinclair et al., 1996). Less expected was their erce loyalty to public service. Indeed, their appeals are contrary to dominant anti-statist cultural discourses (Aldridge, 1998) of the superiority of market solutions to service delivery, and go beyond a defensive self-interest. Their commitment to public service is also at odds with the prevailing view that the marketization of the state brings with it employees disengagement or alienation from clients (Frederickson, 1997; Gawthorp, 1998; Peters and Pierre, 2000). A key problem with much of the work on the fate of the public service ethos, however, is its deterministic portrayal of new public management (NPM) in which individuals react passively to the market-oriented discourses imposed upon them. Current debates about subjectivity and organizational change paint a more nuanced picture in which new managerialist discourses are appropriated, contested and transformed as individuals come to know and challenge the ways in which their identities are redened (Thomas and Davies, 2002). While this approach offers a welcome alternative, its emphasis on identity construction as a conscious process of critical reection limits its contribution to a generative theory of human action. Pierre Bourdieus theory of practice offers the possibility of overcoming these problems through its insistence on the inseparability of structure and subjectivity and the pre-reective, embodied character of practice. Using Bourdieus work to understand front-line workers professed commitment to public service, this article makes three contributions to existing theory and research on restructuring and the public service ethos. First, I argue that front-line workers narratives reect a public service habitus, a socially constituted set of dispositions representing the internalization of a dominant vision of the universal that privileges the public good over private (selsh) interests. Through daily work practices, public servants embody and reproduce, usually subconsciously, this notion of the public good, one that seems natural to them because it agrees with the objective structures of the state (and public service). Second, I argue that competing discourses of the public good represent the symbolic struggle between groups to impose their vision of public service on the minds of public servants. While the neoliberal view of a commodied public good, in which

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services are privately produced and sold, challenges a more traditional, altruistic notion of public service, the tacit recognition of the traditional vision by front-line municipal workers means they will defend it in the face of threats through practices countering encroaching market rationalities. Finally, while the rst two contributions speak to how public service makes public servants, the third addresses how public servants make public service. Using interview data, I illustrate how the symbolic force of the public good is embodied in, and reproduced by, public servants in their daily practices of public service. The article begins with a brief review of the literature on restructuring and the public service ethos. Following this is a discussion of the elements of Bourdieus theory of practice that I use to interpret the interview material, namely, his concepts of habitus, eld and symbolic capital, and his discussion of the state and neoliberalism. A nal section sketches local municipal restructuring initiatives and illustrates how Bourdieus work can help us understand municipal employee narratives.

Restructuring and the public service ethos

Research on the public service ethos in the context of restructuring reects competing denitions of the public good. In the traditional approach, the public good is about maintaining and implementing the democratic principles that protect the interests of every citizen (OToole, 2000). Charged with realizing this ideal through the state that is entrusted with it, public servants are expected to be accountable, demonstrate bureaucratic behaviour (honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity), believe in the public interest, be motivated by the intrinsic rewards of their work rather than by prot, and be loyal to their departments, professions and communities (Pratchett and Wingeld, 1996). A second approach ties the public good to the receipt of quality services provided with maximum efciency. Contemporary managerialism (Du Gay, 2000) argues that quality can only be achieved by bringing in the private sector. For example, Brereton and Temple propose a new public service ethos synthesizing public notions of honesty, impartiality and community service and private notions of competition and consumer choice. Fundamental to this is the redenition of the public from client/supplicant to consumer/purchaser (1999: 466). These two approaches illustrate the symbolic struggle that is taking place in on-going efforts to restructure the state through NPM initiatives. Needless to say, it has implications for the ethos of public service. Critics of public sector reform argue that NPM practices have seriously eroded traditional sources of employee motivation and morale: workers are becoming more instrumental and calculating toward the public (see Morgan et al., 2000). In her work on the public service class in Britain, Webb (1999) contends that restructuring has commodied public service work, leading to a defensive and instrumental selfmonitoring among workers that makes them less responsive to service users.

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Webb suggests that in the race to the bottom, performance trumps public service as discourses of welfare and values of care/caring in public service work become subordinated to the language of markets and the values of efciency and entrepreneurialism in assessing workers performance. The result is a commodied workforce whose members retreat into defensive and instrumental reexivity because they are bound to fail in a system where rationalized work, with its criteria of productivity, achievement and growth, is highly valued. Others worry that the introduction of pecuniary interests threatens the traditional public service ethos (Richards and Smith, 2000). Du Gay (2000) argues that bureaucratic culture is based on a strict separation of private and public spheres. The discourse of enterprise requires that the public sector bureaucrat assume the role of a businessperson who is judged according to the ethos of the entrepreneur. This conation of the public and private realms, Du Gay warns, leaves the door open to corruption: the contemporary subjectication of the workplace places considerable responsibility on the shoulder of individuals themselves for their own advancement (1994: 671). The often heated debate about the fate of the traditional public service ethos under NPM underscores the links between organizational context and workers beliefs and practices. However, a problem with much of this work is that it posits the existence of a set of rules that are mapped onto workers practices. As such, researchers evaluate the state of the public service ethos as an ideal type by asking individuals directly if they adhere to its principles (Pratchett and Wingeld, 1996), or by looking for the expression of these principles in practice (Hebson et al., 2003). Either way, this approach reects the reication of the public service ethos as a normative institution that is unproblematically translated onto and, thus, can be read off, the minds and behaviours of public servants (Du Gay, 1996). A more complex understanding locates restructuring at the heart of interactional dynamics or the culture of organizations. This approach, which relies heavily on Foucaults notion of government, argues that restructuring involves changing not only the structures and organization of the workplace, but also work-based identities by creating new ways for people to be at work (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Townley, 1994). In other words, there is a close correspondence between NPM discourses and employee subjectivity. Du Gay suggests that new wave management discourses of excellence produce agents who come to identify themselves and conceive of their interests in terms of these new words and images and formulate their objectives in relation to them (1996: 53). The production of an enterprise culture valorizes enterprising qualities, such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, boldness and risk-taking, that make up workers as they come to understand and act upon themselves. However, individuals do not uncritically accept the new organizational discourses (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Fleming and Sewell, 2002; Knights and McCabe, 2000). Indeed, as Thomas and Davies (2002) demonstrate in their examination of NPM in the UK civil service, agents struggle to create, appropriate and transform NPM discourses when they do not accord with their own interests.

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Inasmuch as the production of social meaning is an essential component of all social practice, a key problem with cultural approaches to identity is that it may be less susceptible to reexive intervention than these accounts suggest (Sweetman, 2003). Bourdieus theory of practice tells us that action is more than actors having conceptions of, and thinking meaningfully about, the social world (Du Gay, 1996: 40). According to Bourdieu, action also involves adaptation to the constraints of social arrangements and material conditions. Moreover, his concept of habitus stresses the prereective dimension of action intentionality without intention and knowledge without cognitive intent (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 19) that enables actors to construct the world as it appears to them. This understanding is dispositional, embodied and practical; importantly, it obscures the arbitrary character of the social world, and leads actors to take for granted the denition of rewards and the ways of obtaining them (Swartz, 1997: 126).

The logic of practice

Bourdieus theory of practice posits that social order is (re)produced through relations of domination because agents acquire ways of comprehending the world by incorporating, as mental and corporeal (embodied) dispositions or inclinations, the patterns, purposes and principles of structured social contexts (Crossley, 2001). Lest this seem overly deterministic, Bourdieu portrays agents as players in a game who take advantage of its possibilities to pursue their own ends (Bourdieu, 1997). To see how this operates, it is necessary to outline several of his key concepts, including habitus, eld and capital.1 Habitus captures the dialectic between structure and agency central to Bourdieus approach. It is the means through which agents perceive and appreciate and, thus, act in the social world. As an active residue of an agents past that functions in the present, habitus consists of a strategic system of dispositions, schemas, forms of know-how and competence (Crossley, 2001: 83) that function largely outside of consciousness. Although this system can be readily brought to the level of awareness, it is the prelogical or preective dimension of action that endows agents with an immediate competence for making sense of the world. If habitus is the cultural unconscious that shapes action (Widick, 2003), the concepts of eld and capital delineate the structural context of action. Society is differentiated into interlocking elds, some corresponding to institutions, such as the family or the state, others assuming sub-institutional or transinstitutional forms, such as the public service. A patterned system of objective forces, a eld is a relational conguration endowed with a specic gravity (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 17) in the form of implicit rules and regularities that dene its functioning. Again, Bourdieu uses the analogy of a game to clarify his notion of eld. As in a game, stakes emerge from competitive struggles over the various resources that players (agents) deem worthy of struggling

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for. The immediate and tacit recognition of the value of the stakes of a game, which Bourdieu (1990) refers to as doxa or doxic submission, is a fundamental dimension of action. An important distinction between a game and a eld, however, is that agents do not apprehend the constitutive role of their beliefs and actions for a eld and, hence, misrecognize it as an external, naturally given reality. Action is also shaped by the resources or capital available to an agent in a given eld of play. As something that is afforded exchange value in a eld, capital serves as a resource for action, one that is sought after. Thus, it is both a weapon and a stake in the game. For Bourdieu (1986), the main forms of capital are economic, cultural (knowledge, cultural goods, education), social (connections) and symbolic (the power of legitimation or recognized value). The total amount and type of capital that agents mobilize reect their social position in a given eld. To return to the game analogy, players can play to increase or preserve their capital according to the games tacit rules, but they can also attempt to transform these rules. For example, players may adopt strategies that discredit the form of capital upon which their opponents force rests, valorizing instead their own preferential form (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 99). Field and capital, therefore, interweave with habitus. Through the exigencies and logic of the game as it unfolds, involvement in a field shapes the habitus that, in turn, shapes actions that reproduce the field. Capital largely defines ones position in a field, and this position structures possibilities for action and, thus, habitus (Crossley, 2001). Applying this logic of practice to front-line municipal workers, we can say that the public service habitus is both a structure that is constituted by the social context within which it exists (the field of the state/public service) and a structuring structure (Bourdieu, 1990) that shapes practice bearing on the nature of public service. In the following sections, we look at these structures and their subjective representations, beginning with Bourdieus work on the state,2 the social context of the public service habitus.

Bourdieus theory of the state

The dialectic between structures and their subjective dimensions is evident in Bourdieus theory of the state. He argues that the state is both an entity in the form of specic organizational structures and mechanisms (the judiciary, policymaking bodies, administrative bodies, etc.) and an idea in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought (Bourdieu, 1998a: 40). The organizational or objective structures of the state are the product of a historical struggle to concentrate key forms of capital, including physical force (e.g., army and police), economic capital, cultural or informational capital and symbolic capital. Differing from accounts that privilege military force, Bourdieu argues that symbolic capital is a key stake in the struggle to define state power because it legitimates all other types of capital by officially

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recognizing the oppositions inscribed in their distribution (strong/weak, rich/poor, cultured/uncultured, etc.). Ofcial recognition occurs in a variety of ways: classication systems represented in law, bureaucratic procedures, educational structures, social rituals and so forth. These guarantees of authority predispose agents to recognize state structures as legitimate, thereby naturalizing relations of domination. The tacit recognition of state power is secured partly by the principle of the universal or the sacricing of selsh interests, especially economic ones, for the good of the group. Bourdieu (1998a) reminds us that, although it may seem to go without saying, the universal is a dominant vision imposed by agents in historical struggles against agents with competing visions. Further, the values of neutrality and disinterested loyalty to the public good
impose themselves with increasing force upon the functionaries of the state as the history of the long work of symbolic construction unfolds whereby the ofcial representation of the state as the site of universality and of service to the general interest is invented and imposed. (Bourdieu, 1997: 59)

Finally, the ofcial recognition of the public good means that it can always be used as a weapon in struggles of interest. Indeed, Bourdieu argues that the traditional principle of the public good is under attack in state restructuring initiatives. He sees an enormous economic and social transformation (Bourdieu, 1998b: 101) resulting from the increasing penetration of economic market logic into all elds, and the corresponding symbolic legitimation that inculcates, in the minds of agents, the neoliberal view that the public good is better served through market mechanisms. If the traditional notion of public service still enjoys any currency, it is attributable to the hysteresis of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990: 59), the time lag between changing material circumstances and their impact on systems of classication, and judgement contained in each agents habitus (Lane, 2000: 149). Will the traditional public sector ethos eventually be transformed into a more market-mediated formulation? Bourdieu is reluctant to concede this, even though his view of habitus/action tends to emphasize its adaptive nature (Swartz, 1997). For him, resisting the modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalists (Bourdieu, 1998b: 34) is achievable because
in state institutions and also in the dispositions of agents, there still exist forces which, under the appearance of simply defending a vanishing order and the corresponding privileges will have to work to invent and construct a social order which is not governed solely by the pursuit of selsh interest and individual prot. (Bourdieu, 1998b: 104)

That is possible because even though the state is a conduit of economic and political power with little interest in the universal, it preserves the traces of previous struggles within its very structure. Bourdieus theory of practice has been charged with being overly deterministic and emphasizing social reproduction at the expense of social change

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(Brubaker, 1993; Free, 1996).3 While the resolution of these criticisms and Bourdieus response to them (e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) is beyond the scope of this article, his theory of practice can, nevertheless, be used to understand municipal workers appeals to public service as expressions of the public service habitus. Of particular relevance to struggles in this eld are those of a symbolic nature that portray the bureaucracy as a universal group endowed with the intuition of, and a will to, a universal interest presented as legitimate and disinterested (Bourdieu, 1998b: 38). This vision is now under threat by one linking the public good with protecting the sovereign consumer. As we shall see, these competing discourses have implications for the daily practical and symbolic work of public servants.

Restructuring public service in Toronto

In his analysis of municipal state restructuring in Ontario, Kipfer (2000) argues that restructuring is part of an ongoing process of capitalist urbanization that takes different forms in specic historical and geographical contexts. It has several dimensions, only one of which is directly relevant here: the entrepreneurial or competitive city. Proponents of the entrepreneurial city practice proactive economic development and urban planning strategies with the goal of maximizing competitive advantage over other cities in attracting private investment. Through its amalgamation legislation, the provincial government wished to increase the global competitiveness of Toronto, eliminate duplication, promote urban development and reduce the costs of service provision. Notably, the Strategic Plan outlining the Citys vision of governance reected corporate principles and private sector approaches to public service provision (Kipfer, 2000; Kipfer and Keil, 2002). Its Corporate Management Framework mandated departments to orient their activities toward efcient delivery of services to clients, scal responsibility in budgeting practices and increased exibility in service provision. Of particular note, the Framework emphasized the use of performance measurements to assess the costs of service delivery and the efciency of individual employees work practices. At the time of amalgamation in 1998, the City had a workforce of approximately 46,000 full-time equivalents (FTEs) (City of Toronto, 1999). Of these, 22,000 worked in programmes that were amalgamated. A threeyear staff reduction target of 10 percent in programmes with property tax rate impacts was established (1960 FTEs). In addition to staff cuts, redefining service delivery processes entailed creating a new organizational structure and reorganizing office space. Fifty-two departments were pared down to six, 206 divisions to 37, and 33 service boards to 14 (City of Toronto, 1999). The consolidation of office space and the relocation of staff resulted in a reduction of office space by 8 percent and 6000 staff moves within the first year of amalgamation.

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The research material drawn on here is from the initial stage of a project examining front-line employees experiences of municipal government restructuring in relation to working conditions, health and workhome spillover.4 Although not intended to be a denitive statement on the habitus of the municipal public servant at a particular historical juncture, the following discussion highlights the ways in which Bourdieus concepts of habitus, eld and symbolic power can be used to understand the dynamics of the contemporary struggle to dene the public good and, ultimately, the nature of the state itself. Of particular interest is that respondents were never asked about their views on public service. These views emerged spontaneously in the course of the interviews, usually in response to questions about what they liked best about their jobs or the impact of restructuring on their work lives.

Sample
Recruitment began in the spring of 2000 with personal contacts of the research team and proceeded with snowball sampling. While senior management refused to endorse the study, three unions representing over 90 percent of the workforce supported it. One year later, we had interviewed 23 women and 22 men, all front-line, unionized workers. Participants were mainly middle-aged with periods of service ranging from nine to 30 years. Their occupational positions varied considerably, from those requiring professional training (e.g., nurses, librarians and social workers) or technical training (e.g., millwrights), to those requiring no formal training at all (e.g., clerks and maintenance workers).

Data collection
Data were collected by means of in-depth, unstructured interviews that lasted from 20 minutes to three hours, averaging just over one hour. Permission to tape the interview was granted in all but one case. Questions focused on the nature of individuals jobs (duties, responsibilities, most/least liked elements), relationships with co-workers and management, health status and workfamily spillover. Change in these areas since amalgamation was an important interview segment.

The practice of public service

In Bourdieus logic of practice, the struggle in the eld of the state is over the representation (naming) of the public good. Importantly, the performative effect of naming public service as an obligation to the public good is complemented by constant work on the maintenance of a public service ethos. The practice of public service took three main forms: practical practice, embodied practice and defence of public service. The practical practice of public service refers to the activities undertaken by municipal workers that enhanced the lives of individual constituents, either

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directly, or indirectly through their contributions to the broader communities in which they worked. Some expressions of practical practice were general, while others focused more specically on actual activities undertaken. For example, a maintenance crew leader at a suburban recreation centre made this general statement when asked what he liked best about his job: Im a recreation lifer and I guess the satisfaction comes from knowing that your facility is here, and youre providing a service for people. A public health nurse with 15 years at the City described the job satisfaction she experienced from public service in slightly more dramatic terms:
I cant imagine working in a bank. Id wanna shoot myself. I really would. I mean, I dont know how you could get any job satisfaction. Because even on the shittiest days, I can say: Yes, I have improved public health, you know, so that feels good to me.

Others, such as the 52-year-old public health nurse, gave more specic examples of the ways in which they helped individual constituents.
Like tonight, Im gonna nish at 10:30 and then I have a client who doesnt have bus tokens to go for treatment, so Im gonna drop them off at 11:00. I dont have to, but I can do it It makes me feel like Im accomplishing something for that person. Thats how I get satisfaction on my job.

A recreation coordinators commitment to his broader community is similarly striking. He described his working conditions as extremely high-paced, with no time for breaks and frequent overtime, but his engagement with the community he served is evident.
Its not within the kind of job description that we have, but its something that you take on if you are at all committed to the work and to the community that you work in You have to get involved, be concerned about forms of violence that impact on the community, and I think that recreation does have a role to play in a sense of the alternatives that it represents to youth and to families.

Specic acts of public service oriented to the broader community were also phrased as interventions or advocacy, usually in relation to the municipal bureaucracy. For example, a recreation coordinator with a strong commitment to community development and social issues outside work talked about the fallout at her community centre when the City harmonized user fees for programmes across its newly amalgamated districts.
They increased the price, which had a devastating effect on our community because the community just didnt register for the program. So a program that had been running for 10 years, is in danger I mean, people are registering for it, but not from the community.

Faced with an inaccessible and controlling new management not interested in community building, she was considering leaving her job with the City at the time of the interview.

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Public service as advocacy was expressed by a community worker with Housing whose mental and physical health had deteriorated considerably through the restructuring process. Forced to re-apply for a job she held for over a decade when her department was consolidated, her rst attempt was unsuccessful. Although a second interview process reinstated her, the effects of the initial failure lingered. Nevertheless, she retained a commitment to her constituents:
We want to give the tenants a sense of: this is home; this is where they live. Although they may not be owners, this is what they call home. And they need to feel some sense of ability to say what goes on in their home. And so thats what were trying to develop and were talking about community.

These accounts, which entail doing for individual constituents and communities, represent ways in which public employees construct, through their practices, the habitus of the public servant. But the public service habitus is also an embodied practice that becomes most evident in respondents reports of what they were unable to do for their constituents, despite considerable effort (stress). The account of a tenant services worker who was highly committed to service is typical. She spoke at some length about sharing an ethnic background with her tenants. This connection had its rewards: I like the fact that I am here, and people can talk to me. I think Im doing absolutely fantastic in relating to my own people. However, faced with dwindling resources, her struggles to do her best took a toll on her health, including headaches, insomnia and generalized anxiety. A ve-month stress leave did little to change her work situation. After recounting a series of incidents in the housing complex that involved police intervention and no small input from her, she said:
Its got to make you sick. Its got to make you angry. Its got to make you turn around and say You know what? I cant And theres nobody to help. I get really upset at times. But, the bottom line is, I still do like my job.

A librarians experience of the contradictions between wanting to serve the public and inadequate resources is also telling of public service as embodied practice. A punishing work deadline precipitated panic attacks for which she sought medical care. Although the attacks were rare, and prescribed medication helped, she was forced to cancel a program one day:
That day I was just, I actually phoned work and I started to cry because I had a class coming in. It was cancelled and that upset me. Cause I liked it, cause I really care about what I do and it was very upsetting to have to cancel.

The embodiment of public service emerged in a directly material way as well, exemplied by a re ghters description of the gap between safe stafng for re trucks and actual stafng levels. The trucks rarely responded to calls with the recommended number of personnel, and he worried about the risk of injury. Managements response was to tell re ghters to do nothing until backup assistance arrived. He commented:

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In our job its just a ridiculous, ridiculous scenario. I mean, how you can tell people when you pull up at a scene and something traumatic is happening, people are not going to accept it that you are going to stand there and wait until this next crew comes in. And plus, I mean, I dont think the re ghters themselves can accept that.

A third theme evident in employees accounts of public service, the defence of public service, directly relates to the contemporary struggle within the state to dene the public good. As noted earlier, this involves a challenge to the collectivist notion of the universal by discourses privileging individual freedom and an unrestrained market. As restraint was imposed on spending and private sector accounting methods adopted in the City of Torontos restructuring attempts, front-line staff were clearly involved in a symbolic struggle to impose their vision of public service and discredit their neoliberal opponents. Their defence of public service, seen in the above examples of advocacy work, is also evident in their concerns about the decline of the quality of service in the wake of economic cutbacks and staff shortages. A refrigeration engineer with 20 years of service in Parks and Recreation predicted that deterioration in the City parks would turn signicant acreage into untended landscapes with natural vegetation, rather than trimmed lawns (his prediction proved correct):
Our people are so frustrated because they are so used to being able to provide a certain level of service. And now that theyre so spread, theyre saying You know, Im not happy with the job Im doing because its nothing like it was before. And Im not even getting to complete what I did before. So eventually, you know well get more naturalized areas. We dont have any choice. We dont have the manpower to keep up. And theyre not hiring more people.

In another instance, a tenant services coordinator talked about the impact of a critical shortage of social housing. With thousands on a waiting list, deteriorating housing stock and no new constructions planned, the minimum wait for placement was ve to 10 years:
Yeah, its gonna get a lot worse, so thats sort of the stress. Its just been constant change over the last 5 years, and nobodys serving the clients anymore. We used to do a real good job and I dont feel we do anymore.

After a stress leave precipitated by a burgeoning workload, her return to work was marked by a voluntary demotion and accompanying pay cut. The aching joints, shortness of breath, sleep problems and chest and stomach pain she experienced were too high a price to pay. A librarian approaching retirement talked about her frustration with the new top-down style of management that imposed policies and programs and staff cuts without consulting employees. She believed that community needs were not being met:
So they severely downsized the technical services department [cataloguing service]. Now, they have such a backlog of books that some of the ways of operating for us on the front line are dictated by the fact that they cant get these things processed

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the sort of thing I see happening more and more, is that the decisions that are made, which impact on public service, are done to serve the infrastructure of the library. Now, what seems to be driving this library is the bottom line.

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Defence of the principle of public service was seen in respondents references to the privatization of service provision. The key concern was that the private sector would deliver a poorer quality of service to the public. As widely reported in studies of municipal sector restructuring (for a review, see Bach, 2000), the City of Toronto was exploring ways to contract out the delivery of key services, including garbage pick-up and water treatment. In response, Solid Waste workers, through their union, drew up a proposal that would offer competitive disposal rates. At the time of the study, City ofcials had not yet responded formally to the unions plan. A steward from the union representing workers from the Division of Solid Waste suggested:
We say we give a better service. Might not be the same prices, but its a better service to the City of Toronto. If a front line employee makes a mess, the bag breaks or whatever, he goes back, shovel and broom, shovels it all up. Thats one of the services we have. We interact with the public.

Similar concerns were voiced about the possibility of contracting out the management of public housing to the private sector. A tenant services coordinator with 23 years of service had this to say when asked about her forecast for the public housing company:
I just think that Housing is going to be contracted out to private property management rms. Social housing in Toronto, the funding isnt there anymore And I really think that without the provincial funding its gonna go private. And the private industry can do it much cheaper than we can, cause theres no union. But the level of service that these tenants are used to will not be there.

The defence of public service may be emerging from a destabilized habitus or hysteresis, a term Bourdieu (2000) uses to refer to a crisis where habitus falls out of alignment with the eld in which it operates. As Crossley (2003: 44) suggests, in such instances, belief in the game, or illusio, is temporarily suspended, and taken-for-granted assumptions are raised to the level of discourse. For the municipal workers at the City of Toronto, it could be said that their deeply held beliefs in the value of public service were raised to the level of consciousness and defended in the context of changing eld conditions. At the same time, it is clear that some public servants were only too well aware of the dilemma of defending public service under these conditions. As a recreation coordinator having difculty nancing his programmes put it:
Remember I had said earlier where people care about their clients and their community and all that? And they take a lot of this stuff personally. But basically we have said that You know what? Were not gonna do it anymore. Right? well just tell the public that this is, this is the new age policy and weve got to follow it. We dont have the authority to over ride it. And we have said that we want a phone

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number that we can give the public to make the calls. So they [management] need to hear it for themselves, because theyre not listening to us.

Others gave up trying to sustain the level of service they were accustomed to providing and retreated to take care of themselves, reducing work effort or making plans to retire. Nevertheless, despite of the disengagement of some, the practices of municipal workers show the ways in which the public service habitus constructs social reality at the same time as it is dened by that reality. As such, practical practice, embodied practice and the defence of the public service are examples of a tacit or prereective recognition of a traditional public service ethos that front-line workers reproduce in their daily work.

Conclusion
Using Bourdieus theory of practice, this article makes three contributions to the ongoing debate about the future of the public service ethos under restructuring. First, drawing on an understanding of habitus, it suggests a way to theorize the public service ethos. The habitus describes a process whereby a dominant vision of public service becomes internalized as a structure of dispositions and expectations, thereby giving practice an infraconscious, embodied and immediate character. Habitus allows us to understand how public service turns from a nominal fiction into a real group (public servants) whose members are united by a commitment to the public good through the practical and symbolic work that transforms the obligation to public service into a public service disposition, and endows each member of the public service with a commitment to the public good that generates devotion, generosity and solidarity (Bourdieu, 1998b: 68); nothing seems more natural to the public servant than public service. Of course, it could be argued that these municipal workers were appealing to traditional discourses of the public good to disguise self-interest. After all, restructuring initiatives, such as downsizing and contracting out, threatened their working conditions and their jobs. But as Bourdieus theory of practice tells us, this is only part of the story: frontline workers believed in what they were doing and were defending their convictions (Bourdieu, 1998a: 33). Second, the article theorizes the changing nature of the public service ethos by linking the public service habitus to eld struggles over the denition of the public good. Workers took up a traditional view of public service because it had represented the dominant vision. Now challenging this account is the neoliberal alternative that the public good is best served by giving the market free reign. However, we need to be wary about making predictive pronouncements about the fate of the public service ethos. It is not a reied concept, but one that changes in the light of ongoing struggles. Indeed, whether our data are indicative of a lag in the uptake of marketized discourses of the public good or represent more long-term resistance can only be determined by empirical

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research on a case-by-case basis (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). At the very least, the existence of such a struggle indicates that new discourses are not unproblematically mapped on to the minds of docile workers. Finally, the article offers an empirically-grounded understanding of public servants making public service. For the employees we interviewed, this meant work practices that responded to the actual and anticipated needs of their constituents. It meant an engagement with their communities that rendered the communities ever-present in work narratives. Their commitment was expressed in their practice of public service, from providing specific resources to individuals and groups, to advocacy and community development. The embodied nature of their public service habitus was evident in the disquietude, even anguish, they felt over being unable to provide the level or quality of service that they wished. In some instances, the personal toll was considerable. Nonetheless, in the face of field dynamics that threatened to destabilize their habitus, front-line workers struggled to defend their vision of the public good. Of course, public servants are not a homogeneous group. In fact, Bourdieu stresses that habitus sets the structural limits for action through the unconscious calculation of what is possible (or not) for agents in specic locations in a stratied social order (Swartz, 1997). This suggests that the practice of public service may be linked to position in the organizational structure. Although empirical support for this remains scant, Hebson and colleagues (2003) found that front-line workers in health and local authorities in Britain that were recongured as privatepublic partnerships, continued to be motivated by a commitment to working in the public interest. In contrast, managers had greater difculty adhering to the elements of the public sector ethos that more directly concerned them accountability and bureaucratic behaviour. Professional socialization (Abbot, 1988) may also result in a vision of the public good that differs from that of non-professionals, although professionals involved in management may come to embrace enterprise culture (Hanlon, 1998). Although the nature of our sample (exploratory and of an occupationally diverse group of unionized, front-line employees) did not permit us to explore this dimension of workforce segmentation, it remains an essential task for future research.5 In summary, Bourdieus theory of practice tells us that the front-line municipal workers appeals to public service come from the public service habitus. Moreover, having internalized and naturalized an imposed vision of public service, public servants responded to threats to this vision by defending the view that the public good is best served by a state that valorizes public, rather than private, service delivery. Understanding the nature of their commitment reminds us that current transformations of the bureaucracy to create a leaner state challenge a hitherto widely shared denition of the public good shaped through previous struggles. Ultimately, the denition of the public good and, indeed, of the state itself is at stake in the contemporary struggle involving public sector restructuring.

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Acknowledgements
I thank David Coburn, Joan Eakin, three anonymous reviewers and Helen Rainbird for their helpful comments. This research was partly funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Initiatives in the New Economy grant number 50120020106.

Notes
1 2 Rather than offering yet another paraphrasing of these concepts, the discussion relies on Crossleys (2001) excellent rendering of them. Bourdieu writes about the historical emergence of the French state, but the values of neutrality and disinterested loyalty to the public good are evident in legitimating discourses of the Canadian state. For example, Jenkins (1992) argues that Bourdieu portrays practice as selffullling prophecy: structures produce the habitus, which generates practices that, in turn, reproduce social structure. In Jenkins view, this type of practice amounts to mindless (literally) conformity. He suggests, further, that Bourdieu underestimates the role of rationality in practice; although behaviour is allowed to have its causes (lodged in the structuring structures of the habitus), actors are not permitted to have reasons for it. Nor, Evens (1999) contends, are they allowed to have much agency in a habitus that presents embodiment as constraint. The interviews formed the basis of a survey of workers (N = 1010), a small sample of whom were contacted for in-depth interviews following the survey. The results of these additional study phases are not reported here. We are currently examining gender and the public service habitus (Worts et al., 2005). Unlike Pratchett and Wingeld (1996) who found that men expressed greater allegiance to the public service ethos than women, we nd that both referenced discourses of public service as they confronted workplace change. However, their engagement with this ideal, reected in their practices, appears to be gendered.

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Peggy McDonough
Peggy McDonough is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her research addresses social inequalities in health. Currently, she is focusing on the implications of municipal sector restructuring for the working conditions and well-being of front-line workers. Address: Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto, 12 Queens Park Crescent West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada. E-mail: peggy.mcdonough@utoronto.ca

Date submitted January 2005 Date accepted March 2006

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