As the face of government, street-level bureaucrats interact with the citizenry and engage in emotional labor. Here we argue that public servants risk becoming alienated due to the unsupported emotional labor demands of their jobs. Alienated public servants can, in turn, alienate citizens from their government via emotional contagion, and because targets of emotional labor can detect inauthentic surface acting, they will distrust encounters with government as a result. Human resource management practices and organizational structures can mitigate or exacerbate this effect. The problem, though, is that public service is rooted in scientific management, which reifies top-down hierarchy, increasing the likelihood of alienation through its commitment to the bureaucratic form. By extending emotional labor theory to self-estrangement and fellow-beings estrangement, our argument incorporates all four of Marx’s dimensions of alienation, including commodity fetishism, where people are things and feelings qua feelings are part of an overall public service delivery package.
This research finds that public employees like police officers can become emotionally burned out when they’re required to manage their feelings and interactions with the public without adequate organizational support. When officers become alienated from their work, they may unconsciously transmit negative emotions to community members, who can sense when interactions feel fake or forced, leading to greater distrust of police. This matters for policing because it suggests that police departments need better support systems for officers' emotional wellbeing to prevent a cycle where officer burnout damages police-community relationships.
(AI-generated summary, v1, January 2026)
Citations: 12 (as of January 2026)