Reframing Exploitation as Humanitarian? Exploring Workers’ Construction of “the Local” in Jordanian Aid Organizations

• In Event: 2368 - New Forms and Relations of Work

Abstract

Humanitarian aid organizations make distinctions between international and national staff in terms of tasks, salaries, and contract periods. Most national workers describe this two-tiered system based on nationality as problematic (often adding that it is discriminatory and racist). Yet, they simultaneously tend to justify their own work routines as “what it takes to be a humanitarian.” So how do we explain why workers acknowledge their subjectivity, but justify their work patterns in terms of humanitarian norms? Studies of international organizations may highlight workers’ use of humanitarianism as diffusion of globally shared norms in a world society. However, it is not yet clear how workers’ daily practices both within and outside the organization construct the local humanitarian worker through their contributions and contestations of what humanitarianism means. Echoing calls to bring work back into studies of organizations, and drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, this paper explores how workers construct the local worker through their daily routines as “humanitarians.” Based on interviews with over 70 national staff in Jordan, I find that workers strategically connect their routines both in and outside of work to their “humanitarian worker” position: a form of symbolic capital that allows them to negotiate societal assumptions of their economic and social roles. However, workers’ routines inform particular constructions of the “local worker” that exacerbate social hierarchies. Rethinking the ways in which humanitarianism is leveraged among workers can provide a way to intricately account for the processes connected to international organizations’ reproduction of social inequalities.

Author

• Patricia Sarah Ward, Boston University