Role Redefinition and Resistance Strategies: a Heuristic Approach to Executive Aggrandizement under the Trump Administration

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 18: Theoretical Sociology

Abstract

Our paper will compare the reactions of federal workers across agencies to Trump administration executive orders, drawing from decision theory approaches to federal worker responses to the first Trump administration (Kucinskas 2023) and organizational decline (Hirschman 1970) as well as social network approaches to role-claiming (Leifer 1988) to understand how reactions to executive transgressions redefine the executive role and shape future strategies for executive aggrandizement. Building on existing models of employee resistance, we plan to develop an interactive and iterative theory of executive aggrandizement. Kucinskas’s study of the first Trump administration outlined varied strategies in between full loyalty and direct exit available to federal workers seeking to resist changing norms in the civil service. We hypothesize that the space within agencies for such a wide spectrum of resistance is being tightened, in response to civil service reactions to Trump’s first administration, to increasingly limit individual options to complete acquiescence or exit, leading to a comparatively large amount of exit being observed. Additionally, we want to identify which agencies are most vulnerable to this massive restriction of federal worker strategic options, due to particular organizational cultures or the structural power of certain sets of federal workers. We plan to build on Kucinskas’s qualitative sampled interviews of federal workers complying, resisting and quitting throughout the first Trump administration, and expand the research by collecting ongoing accounts of internal resistance and tracking the evolution of executive orders as they respond to different forms of resistance.

Authors

• Wanru Ni, Cornell University

• Simon Steve Pierre Chanezon, Cornell University