Constructing Supplicants: Normative Control without Value Internalization

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

Organizations traditionally use normative control to align employee "minds and hearts" with organizational goals through the internalization of shared values and identity. Existing research, largely based on corporate settings, assumes these controls target ingroup members with high level of commitment and ultimately integrate them into the organization. However, we know little about how normative control functions as a mechanism of exclusion when applied to outgroup members who are never intended to become part of the formal organization.
This study examines this theoretical gap by analyzing how street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in China’s petitioning system discipline petitioners through normative control. SLBs are documented to shape the subjectivities of their clients to resolve resource-capacity dilemmas. Yet unlike corporate managers who deploy normative control through value internalization, petition SLBs exercise normative controls by constructing an informal dyad and socialize petitioners into internalizing the role of the supplicant. This process relies on two key mechanisms: the moralization of demands and affective capture. First, officials attempt to construct petitioners into supplicants who make morally righteous claims rather than pursuing opportunistic gains. SLBs use the “gift” framing to explain material concessions, the contradiction that they introduced into their own rationale. Petitioners who persist in making claims deemed illegitimate are often shamed as greedy or ignorant. Such practices construct a moral hierarchy and reinforce moral authority. Second, SLBs construct a fictive affective relationship to invoke personal moral obligations of petitioners, trapping them into personalized relationships rather than making legal-rational claims. It further demonstrates that this control is a negotiated moral encounter, where petitioners both internalize and weaponize their "supplicant" status to extract concessions from the state.

Author

• Fengrui Tian, University of Michigan