Technical, Emotional, Professional: Idealism and Commitment in the Peace Corps

• In Event: 495 - Regular Session. Organizations: Actors and Decision-Making

Abstract

How do volunteers reconcile social commitments with bureaucratic realities? Using a social movements frame to make interrelated theoretical and empirical arguments, I analyze how Peace Corps volunteers—who are frequently recruited into the organization using idealistic language—experience the relationship between organizational constraints and social commitment. I demonstrate how organizational processes that neglect the idealistic component of volunteering act negatively on volunteers’ experience of international development, as well as on their political convictions going forward. Lacking structures for dealing with “big” questions about development, service, and international relationships, volunteers experience a decoupling of the program’s goals and what they perceive it to be doing. They resolve this cognitive dissonance either via a) increased conservatism, in which they come to understand the recipients of services as unworthy, or b) in a critique of the organization itself and the practice of development in general, understanding both of them as unworthy. My paper thus develops a clearer theory of the effects of “on-the-ground” workers in ideologically motivated fields that, instead of focusing on the psychological elements of burnout, emphasizes the structural-organizational factors that act on participant ideals.

Author

• Meghan Elizabeth Kallman, Brown University