Bullying targets as social performers in the public administration workplace

This article argues that workers in public administration (PA) who are targets of bullying engage in social performances in an attempt to maintain control over their situation. The article considers the literature on social performances, including Hochschild's concept of emotional labor and its emergence in the PA arena. A case study is then presented that includes a nonfiction narrative describing the bullying of a library worker followed by a constructed (fictional) vignette vivifying the target's experience of being bullied and her possible social performances in response to that. The vignette depicting social performances is then analyzed via various social performance theories: surface and deep acting, emotional self-management, organizational display rules, impression management, and self-monitoring. The article concludes by returning to LaBier's notions of the working wounded and modern madness. Comparing the responses of targets of bullying to the troubled careerists studied by LaBier offers many points of intersection. Most notably, people who are being bullied within the context of the modern PA workplace might appear perfectly normal in their responses to being bullied but may, instead, be exhibiting on-the-job behavior that is quite "sick."