the
DEATH IDEALISM of
Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps
M EG HAN ELIZABETH KALLMAN
INTRODUCTION
[The Peace Corps] gave rise to my last burst of true idealism. Returned Peace Corps volunteer, 1960s, Turkey
E
sther offered the remark above over the phone, nearly fifty years after she had completed her Peace Corps service in Turkey.1 She spoke of enthusiasm for public service during the Kennedy years, of becoming an internationalist through her experience abroad, and of the dismay she felt upon returning home to the upheaval of the 1960s. After a long career in nonprofit work and international development, she retired. “I now live outside Washington,” she told me. “I’m—in a modest way—politically active, and I understand that many government policies affect me.” Her experience mirrors the political and professional trajectories of many thousands of others who served in the Peace Corps. Esther is one of nearly 250,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers, or RPCVs. She is one of over 140 people with whom I spoke to help me make sense of my questions about when, why, and how idealism is lost. Why do so many citizens in Western society find themselves, early in the twenty-first century, starved
2
Introduction
for a sense of meaning and purpose? How does this happen, even (or especially) in the context of doing socially engaged work? Idealism— envisioning things in an ideal form and living under the influence of that potential—is usually understood as an individual phenomenon: people are idealistic. And people who are idealistic usually say that it is an important part of their identities; they use idealism to justify, explain, and make sense of themselves in relation to others, to their work, and to the world.2 Idealism can be manifested in people’s career choices or in their civic participation; thus explanations of why people do prosocial work often focus on internal, individual factors, such as altruistic motivations and personal values. But a more sociological perspective argues that these “internal” factors are always affected by external forces, including organizations, institutions, media, religions, schools, and the like.3 If an idealistic commitment to one’s work is based on “feelings of competence and selfdetermination,” then those feelings can be increased, decreased, or otherwise shaped by outside pressures.4 In other words, I will argue here that idealism is a social phenomenon. The questions of how people experience idealism, why it dies, and why that matters are the central puzzle of this book. I answer them by looking at one of the most clear-cut cases of organized idealism in U.S. history: the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is a fascinating irony. Ostensibly established to capitalize on idealism, the organization has, in practice, ended up discouraging it. This is a result of rationalized society forcing maladaptation in an organization through routinized professional practices: a combination of social forces and organizational pressures depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers and reshapes their idealism. And these changes are broadly consequential: volunteers’ political and social attitudes diffuse widely through international development organizations and the U.S. social sector via their lives and
Introduction
3
careers. This analysis allows me to speak to another question circulating in two decades worth of social scientific debate: What is responsible for the persistent failure of development organizations?5 This book explores both the sources of the death of idealism and the consequences for people and their careers, their organizations, and the efforts to advance justice and development more broadly. While few social scientists have studied idealism, a great many have looked at cynicism, which is also known within sociology, management, and social psychology as burnout or disengagement, and there are many theories about its origins.6 The first explanation is a theory of materialism, and the basic argument goes like this: as people age, they acquire possessions (money, real estate, etc.), and in the process of caring more about their material wealth, they start making decisions motivated by wealth rather than by values. To manage the discomfort they feel as this happens, they dismiss values as naiveté. Thus idealism dies. Others note that aging brings different responsibilities and talk about political and philosophical changes (and the death of idealism) as being part of a change in one’s social roles and a product of tension between outer values (idealism) and inner ones (e.g., family-orientation).7 Still more research focuses on burnout, wherein the emotional stressors of a job become unmanageable, resulting in disengagement and cynicism.8 In this explanation, the death of idealism is attributable to persistent and ongoing emotional exhaustion related to one’s work. A fourth line of thought points to a perceived dichotomy between idealism and realism, suggesting that once naïve workers, activists, or volunteers come to understand the complexities of the social world, they will default to “realism,” a term marshaled to capture the range of ways in which people’s expectations are altered. (Peter Senge’s quip that if you “scratch the surface of
4
Introduction
most cynics, you find a frustrated idealist: someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations” neatly captures this perspective.) And so idealism dies. All these accounts, while illustrative, miss two critical pieces of the puzzle. First, cynicism and burnout are the “output” emotions, or the results of a social process. I analyze idealism—the “input” emotion. Taking idealism rather than cynicism as a focus suggests that we must look at the structures and experiences that affect people’s ideas and values. We need to look not simply at the output but at how exactly the input gets transformed. More important, these perspectives usually pay only limited attention to organizational context—to the kinds of (physical, social) collective spaces in which such transformations occur, and how they may affect people’s experiences. Organizations are the “the preeminent institutional form in modern society,” and professions are one of “the primary modern shapers of institutional forms.”9 To this we should add that they are the context in which most professional and even volunteer work takes place; organizations and occupations interact in a nexus that affects almost every domain of modern life. They are often much more powerful than individuals; more cohesive and deliberate than gender groups or socioeconomic classes; and nimbler and more active than governments. They are not passive or neutral; organizations have their own values and cultures, are responsive to their environments, and socialize their participants in particular ways. In other words, and because we live in a “society of organizations,” answers to sociological questions increasingly require an understanding of organizational behavior to be thorough.10 Sociology, however, has only occasionally explored the effect of organizational structures and practices on
Introduction
5
individual motivation11— although management literature has flirted with the topic—and even less frequently examined the effect of organizational structure on values.12 I ground my analysis in a body of literature that has hinted at the ways in which organizations can powerfully restructure social convictions.13 The death of idealism, I will argue, is caused by a combination of rationalistic societal values and organizational pressures that together shape the experience of the idealistic Peace Corps volunteer. In a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Teresa Heinz Kerry proclaimed: “To me, one of the best faces America has ever projected is the face of a Peace Corps volunteer. That face symbolizes this country: young, curious, brimming with idealism and hope—and a real, honest compassion.”14 Her account fits nicely with what most people would summon to mind when asked to picture a Peace Corps volunteer. We imagine them as deeply idealistic, wanting to make the world a better place, and believing they are capable of doing so. Furthermore, and according to existing research, we would probably expect them to feel fulfilled by their work abroad.15 There is a substantial body of somewhat older organizational literature suggesting that volunteers feel more powerful and well located in their worlds, as well as in their democracies, as a result of volunteer experiences; organizational sociology might well theorize that volunteers would remain sustained by intrinsic motivation and their formative experience throughout their careers.16 In these pages I describe a different outcome. By the time they emerge from the Peace Corps, volunteers have been politically and emotionally reshaped in unexpected ways. They almost universally value their service for exposing them to new parts of the world, new people, new adventures, and new skills. They
6
Introduction
usually develop deep friendships during their service— friendships that endure for decades in many cases. However, and though many do seek out work in public service and nonprofits, they also exhibit surprising shifts in their political and professional consciousness. Throughout their service they do not develop a critique of large-scale social dynamics (such as development, trade policy, or poverty) and instead focus on individual or organizational behavior. They become more politically liberal in some areas but not in others; they experience burnout; they are consummate organizationalists, both blaming organizations when things go wrong and seeing power as almost entirely situated within the professional organizational context; and they often view international development as problematic, if not downright wrong. They have lost their idealism, replacing it not with a critical or structural analysis but rather with a kind of cynicism and emotional disengagement that is unique and consequential in the way that it alters their politics. Therefore my first task in this book is to analyze the organizational structures of the Peace Corps that are reshaping idealism. I will argue that these structures are historical: they were born of a particular moment in U.S. history and a specific set of international relationships. Over time the Peace Corps has attempted to enhance its legitimacy in American and international politics, as well as in the emergent field of international development, by trying to professionalize its young, intrinsically motivated volunteers. What “professionalization” means, and how all the various aspects of it manifest, is a large part of my analysis. I show how professionalization within the Peace Corps is a product of a complicated legacy of weak central government in the United States—how professionalization was a performative process that helped the organization survive and produced a host of unanticipated consequences.17
Introduction
7
Despite playing on idealism in recruitment, the Peace Corps does little to sustain that idealism or address the existential challenges that volunteers experience during their service—challenges that are exacerbated by the many pressures within development itself. Ultimately, by failing to equip volunteers to effectively engage with the complexities of development, the Peace Corps decreases the resonance and the plausibility of the whole idea of professionalism (not to mention of development).18 It strips its volunteers of their perhaps innocent but nonetheless authentic political convictions and idealism, producing semidisengaged workers who seek out professional jobs within the social sector for most of their careers. Many remain dissatisfied with what they do, despite the fact that they are ostensibly living their values through service-oriented work. Using social movements and civil society literature, I develop a theory of the relationship between idealism and formal organizational bureaucracy. This analysis of professionalization permits me to undertake a second task in this book: I tackle changes in development using literature on professions, bringing sociological perspective to the question of what is responsible for the persistent failure of development organizations.19 Development workers’ motivations and their relationship to development failure have received very little attention in either development studies or sociology; while I certainly do not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of what is “wrong” with development, I add perspective by looking at the effect of professionalization on workers. In an era in which the default and presumed means of influencing worker actions is through largely pay-based incentives or threat of termination, what room is there for recovering the more profoundly sociological underpinnings of motivation that originate not in individual self-interest but rather in ideas and values?
8
Introduction
WHAT IS PROFESSIONALIZATION? My argument will turn on the idea of “professionalization,” and so an introduction to this concept is in order. Around the world, people seek out jobs that enable them to do work that they care about. They become nurses, public servants, teachers, and development workers. Within many of these jobs (social service jobs in particular), the idea of professionalization is taken for granted—it is typically seen as a way to do well while doing good. And yet understandings of what it means to be a professional differ, and accounts of what should (or could) be understood as professionalization vary a great deal.20 A foray into organizational and sociological literature yields a dizzying array of uses, alternately seeing professionalization as a set of practices, a process of building solidarity, or a proxy for bureaucracy. In early scholarship, professionalization was the process by which a group of people performing certain tasks came to be recognized as a coherent occupation. A classic example is medicine: research explored how doctors asserted themselves, moving from a hodge-podge of practitioners to a coherent professional group, complete with training programs and credentials (medical school and the MD), and a guiding ethic (the Hippocratic Oath, among others). Professionalization scholars focused primarily on the “free” professions, meaning those who worked autonomously (compared to those employed by organizations).21 Because research focused on those who were free from managerial constraints, professionalization implied a process by which workers were endowed with discretion and autonomy—for example, if you were a surgeon in an operating room, you needed to know how to problem-solve, as there was no foreman guiding you or managing your time. The definition of professionalization has since evolved from an inductive list of traits to more
Introduction
9
critical considerations of professions’ formation, functioning, and social significance.22 Within the varied analyses of professionalization that the past century of scholarship has produced, two clearly discernible perspectives emerge. Both offer different frameworks to understand professionalization and its significance. In both, professionalization is a “continuous occupational variable,” meaning that it is not an absolute state that can be achieved once and for all, and that some occupations are more professionalized than others.23 Professionalization, in this book, is a process. This first major strand of analysis focuses on the occupational aspects of professionalization—the parts that are related to the job itself. 24 This perspective emphasizes solidarity, meaning making, a kind of occupational purity, and a service motivation as important aspects of professionalization, alongside technical, specialized knowledge and work-related norms, discretion, and values. A “service motivation” simply means a commitment to serving others: it can occur in any kind of organization, among lawyers and economists as well as social workers, for example. This line of thinking focuses on transorganizational processes, such as knowledge, technical jurisdiction, or autonomy within and among professions.25 Professionalism is seen as bolstering solidarity here: it creates a sense of collective identity within an occupation and foments a shared understanding of that occupation’s intervention in the world.26 And so, by definition, a profession must be engaged in the political issues of the moment, creating meaning for the professionals themselves about what they do and why. In other words, public engagement is a defining feature of a profession from this perspective, something particularly clear among professions in developing countries.27 Professionalization, at least in theory, creates relationships among members of an occupation that are collegial, cooperative,
10
Introduction
and supportive.28 For Émile Durkheim, professionalization could help foster mechanical solidarity, in which people feel connected to one another through shared work.29 In this view, professionalization is seen as a distinctive way of organizing and controlling work that is specialized, politically and socially meaningful, and advantageous for both professionals themselves and their clients.30 I call this ethical professionalization. The second major branch of literature explores a type of professionalization in which organizational logics create occupational change and enforce conformity among professional or would-be professional workers. Closely related to managerialism or even bureaucratization, this version is distinguishable from ethical professionalism by the leading role that organizational imperatives and hierarchical design play in it.31 As an organizational tactic, this kind of professionalization emphasizes rationalization and routinization, capturing “the bundles of knowledges and practices associated with formalized organizational management.”32 This perspective also has a historical trajectory: through expanding factory operations in the twentieth century, producers created legitimizing ideologies that deeply linked management to capitalism.33 These management practices spread throughout organizations (including public organizations) as states were remade by the intersection of ideologies of managerialism and the new right. 34 I call this version procedural professionalization.35 I use institutional theory to frame my analysis of procedural professionalization and what it means for the Peace Corps. Some time ago John Meyer and Brian Rowan found that organizations conform to centralized “rational myths” (narratives or accounts that endorse the central value of rationalization) to enhance their legitimacy within their fields.36 Such ceremony can increase an organization’s survival prospects; organizations survive longer when they are successful in conveying how “rational” they are
Introduction
11
to others in their field.37 The “new organizational institutionalism,” of which these thinkers were a formative part, broke with tradition by seeing rationalism as originating within the state—they viewed the state as a powerful force in shaping organizations and purveying these rational values.38 In public organizations especially, these performative, procedural practices show that an organization is “doing what it is supposed to be doing”—producing outcomes, accounting for money and time spent, and the like. That is, proceduralism has a high degree of legitimacy vis-à-vis outside pressures; it helps protect organizations against charges of despotism, demonstrates good citizenship, and helps them be seen as “normal,” taken-for-granted social entities. Ethical and procedural perspectives offer different interpretations of the shifts occurring in organizational cultures in the past sixty years. They find different meaning in the widespread integration of managerial priorities into organizational life that has led to the rationalization of many realms.39 Writers emphasizing ethical professionalism see proceduralism as restricting autonomy and expertise and stymieing workers; they explore how people resist these pressures.40 Support for proceduralism, on the other hand, often comes from managers who see such practices as essential to growth and discipline, and evangelists who tout business tools as a silver bullet capable of solving virtually any organizational ill; managerialism is pushed as an opportunity to infuse entrepreneurial vigor into outdated professions plagued by despotism.41 My focus here is slightly different. While I ultimately describe conflict between ethical and procedural professionalization in the Peace Corps, I argue that this conflict comes from a specific set of institutional pressures, a specific relationship between the organization and the state, and a specific history. Professionalization is part of a larger social process, but it has played out in
12
Introduction
very particular ways in this case. And the Peace Corps, as an organization, has affected and shaped the growth of the development profession itself. Organizational experiences “have independent effects on the constitution of a profession.”42 If professionalization is affected by context— organizational, historical, and institutional—and inseparable from the environments in which it occurs, then analyses must be sensitive to those contexts.43 Thus I locate my study within international development, which is provocative and unusual because of the range of stakeholders, logics, histories, and practices it usually implies.
WHY THE PEACE CORPS? This book explores the death of idealism using the case study of the U.S. Peace Corps, the international voluntary organization run by the U.S. government. The Peace Corps dates back to 1961 and the John F. Kennedy era; it carries meaningful imprints of the heady idealism of the 1960s and the highly gendered and racialized norms of that period, and maintains a dizzying array of responsibilities for an equally dizzying array of stakeholders. The Peace Corps presents itself as an organization for idealists and always has. It has a particular history, which I tell in subsequent chapters. It is, like many other social organizations, a necessary compromise between participants’ ideals and the mundane and often problematic realities of being a sustainable bureaucracy. It is a consequential institution because its former volunteers spread themselves out over the rest of the development industry and beyond, carrying the lessons they learned with them. Approximately half of USAID employees are former Peace Corps volunteers, suggesting that what is taught and learned in this context moves throughout the world with the flow of elite development managers. And it is also a worthy case study
Introduction
13
unto itself, given the resources that the federal government commits to it. The agency, however, is also a vivid example of many— sometimes conflicting—institutional dynamics: it is largely peopled by idealists, among both its staff and volunteers.44 Volunteers are mostly young and privileged; the agency is thus typical of voluntary organizations in the sense that its workers are similar to early-career employees at nonprofit organizations throughout the United States. These volunteers are bound by the incentives and identity of the organization, which is common to many kinds of social organizations (and in fact to almost any organization at all). The Peace Corps, however, is a state-run organization with an explicitly social mission, meaning that it is subject to many of the unique pressures that affect the government in the United States, particularly as regards the legitimacy of its endeavor. As an agency, it ultimately answers to American voters by way of Congress and the president, and it is certainly atypical among voluntary organizations in this sense. It also must remain well within the contours of the foreign policy agenda of the United States, an uncommon (or at least unusually explicit) requirement among other volunteer groups working abroad. Combining state and third-sector pressures, the Peace Corps is thus a stylized version of many of the processes at play in social change work and organizational life. The Peace Corps is also a useful illustration of the death of idealism because of the condensed time frame in which it operates—the changes that occur for volunteers happen very rapidly. Peace Corps service is a two-year undertaking, extending occasionally into a third year. The experience compresses volunteers’ maturation. By virtue of that compression, it vividly demonstrates a transition that occurs for many people who have counterhegemonic leanings in their youth and who, later on, become professionalized players within a hegemonic
14
Introduction
system. In other words, the processes I describe are common in some ways, both in organizations and among idealistic people, but in the Peace Corps these processes are condensed, and so the mechanisms are more visible. It is a site where social and organizational effects of rational society are exposed. While the Peace Corps is an excellent case study for these reasons, I could have selected a less morally ambiguous organization to analyze in this book. One line of criticism, which I have encountered many times throughout the course of writing, points out that the Peace Corps is an imperialist organization, shot through with colonial ideology at worst and insidious orientalism at best.45 The Peace Corps is part of the American diplomatic regime and has been criticized as a colonial project virtually since its inception, as has the practice of international development generally.46 All forms of colonialism “involve a cultural, political, and psychological assault on the colonized.” 47 Colonial systems create social and political categories; a consistent aspect of such institutions is that they define and measure people, in order to structure and enforce hierarchies of power.48 As a part of that process, they define race, gender, and nationality and inscribe them into institutions— such as the Peace Corps—that continue to shape people’s lives. This is visible in the institutions of international relations and international development that form the Peace Corps’ lineage: they are both highly white and highly masculine.49 The agency’s and industry’s progress on these fronts has been uneven at best.50 Should we really be giving voice to an organization with such a troubled history that so regularly conveys such troubled messages and enacts such troubled ideologies? Others, however, have criticized the project because most people who join or work for the Peace Corps have authentically good intentions, and critiquing the organization feels unfair to them, especially in the context of declining voluntarism and civic
Introduction
15
engagement across the United States and a climate of rising xenophobia in the United States and around the world.51 I myself am an elected official, in addition to being an academic, and I am also sympathetic to these concerns. The world is a better place when we engage one another, as imperfect and flawed as those engagements frequently are. Additionally, I wish to make clear that I value volunteers’ motivations, and—while they will be subject to critique in this book—I do think that idealism and prosocial orientation are beneficial. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more voluntarism and engagement across differences, and ironing out the details as we go along? To both these critiques I offer the following response: the goal of this book is not to evaluate the Peace Corps from a normative perspective. In other words, I am not interested in whether it is a “good” organization or a “bad” one. Rather, I am interested in using the experiences of volunteers to understand an ongoing social process that is larger than the agency itself, and that has implications for how American society sees and undertakes social change work. But history is important, of course. The Peace Corps emerged as an aggressively cheerful arm of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus during the Cold War. It was powerfully gendered and racialized, and it has retained those imprints in its organizational character. This history and its contemporary implications shape the character of the organization and have lasting consequences for volunteers in ways that I explore throughout the book. The presence of this colonialist history partly informs the argument that I make here. The idealism driving many volunteers’ desire to “help out” is itself (or at least could be understood as) variously an expression of colonialism, imperialism, gendered heroism, naiveté, white supremacy, or some combination of them. My analysis invariably runs up against other social processes—for instance, the type of idealism that typically shows
16
Introduction
up among Peace Corps volunteers is to some degree premised on national supremacy. Why else would twenty-two-year-old Americans believe that, simply by dint of being American, they are qualified to offer aid? To some degree, buying into the Peace Corps’ imagery is also buying into colonialism and nationalism. The cultural, racial, and gendered scripts that birthed the Peace Corps remain an inextricable part of it, a dynamic that I explore in depth elsewhere.52 The assumptions—often grounded in tremendous privilege—that scaffold volunteers’ idealism also heavily shape their transition away from it. However, to begin a book by dismissing the Peace Corps because of either its flaws or its virtues would be to close off inquiry into a meaningful set of questions. Complicated and paradoxical organizations are still worth studying because—like all organizations—they can be microcosms of other social processes, and they help shape those other social processes. This project has implications for the role of the state, the weak U.S. government, and the power of rational and professional ideals under late-stage neoliberalism. Each of these dynamics entwines with U.S. colonial history. Each tells stories that are orthogonal to that history. The kind of professionalization I describe in these pages is resonant with stories that are told of other public agencies elsewhere.53 And yet there are critical differences. It is precisely this naïve, non-self-reflective idealism that can expose so much about the way that organizations shape the values of their participants.
THE PEACE CORPS AND DEVELOPMENT The development literature contains a raft of excellent critical perspectives that center the experiences of the people who are
Introduction
17
supposedly being “developed.” That is crucially important work. Also important, however, is understanding the logic and the rationale of the extant international development apparatus, which exerts many meaningful pressures on the people and institutions of developing nations. That is part of the rationale for focusing on the work of a U.S. organization; my intent is to discover and analyze how it perpetuates itself and its specific set of ideas.54 But an analysis of the Peace Corps can also shed light, more generally, on the role of the state: I find that, while the Peace Corps is a government organization, its avoidance of all things “political” (described in chapter 2) means that it does not actively talk about states as agents of change. The community development program it advocates is heavily focused on civil society. It is a state organization that frequently trains people in public service by way of nonstate organizations.55 In other words, the Peace Corps teaches people how to be better citizens largely by talking up the virtues of civil society— an important paradox grounded in neoliberal shifts in governance and in the particular nature of the U.S. state. I explore implications of this finding in the conclusion. The primary contribution of this book, however, is explore how rationalist society forces maladaptation within organizations, and what that means for people and programs. Not only does this maladaptation muffle idealism, it fundamentally fails to replace it with any other way to make social meaning or critically engage with work. The structures of rationality, enacted through state organizations, produce orientations and understandings of power that are profoundly apolitical, as I will show. These apolitical orientations challenge effectiveness on every level— among clients, among workers, and within any larger goal of social development. Because the United States is
18
Introduction
an outsized actor in development (diffusing “expertise” through large international institutions, such the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), the consequences of such maladaptation are far-reaching. The implications of the death of idealism are profound on both an individual and a societal level. If we think about idealism as a sense-making emotion—as giving volunteers a framework for understanding their service—then the death of idealism leaves them in search of a new way to organize their experiences. While it is not necessarily normatively “bad” that actors lose naiveté, I do find it troubling— and paradoxical— when they lose their prosocial interest and critical engagement with the institutions that govern their lives. In my data, the death of idealism accompanies these losses. On an individual level, the death of idealism makes people unhappy; cynics struggle to make positive meaning, which negatively affects individual, organizational, and social wellbeing.56 Idealism can help people organize their perceptions of what happens and why, and help motivate their engagement with the world. Among workers, idealism and intrinsic motivation are positively linked to sharing knowledge, taking risks, professional creativity, and willingness to work in prosocial fields, of which international development is clearly one.57 The death of idealism is also relevant to effective programming: looking carefully at what sustains ideals and shapes emotional connection to work is important for understanding how to run sensitive and responsive development and service organizations. Finally, the death of idealism implies a host of political, social, and organizational consequences, as workers move through life with values that have shifted during their participation in an organization. Their understanding of the world changes, and those changes are
Introduction
19
reflected in their jobs, their politics, and their civic and community lives. The kind of procedural professionalization I analyze in this book affects how international development programs are conceived of and executed and brings a new perspective to bear on the question of how and why development organizations tend toward failure.58
METHODS The dataset on which I draw for this book is extensive, including 142 interviews with current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, staff, and agency officials, a survey (N > 2,800), and ethnographic field observations in three different Peace Corps countries. I bind analysis of individual motivation and emotions into an examination of collective politics and working life. I also develop a framework for understanding how microlevel emotional phenomena contribute to and shape macrolevel processes and outcomes via organizational structure. A full description of methods is found in appendix A.
CHAPTER OUTLINE The rest of the book takes these themes one by one. In the first chapter I offer a demographic and organizational outline of the Peace Corps. Chapter 2 traces the emergence of state-led development in the United States, showing how professionalization became a taken-for-granted value within the broad schema of rationalization throughout U.S. institutions. I give parallel histories of the Peace Corps and USAID (founded the same year) to illustrate the ways in which U.S. development came to refer
20
Introduction
to a specific set of ideas and practices that helped these organizations to survive. Chapter 3 shows how development’s movement toward professionalization is transformed from an “ethical” process (in which an organization understands professionalization as an intrinsically motivated ethos) into a procedural one (understanding professionalization as a type of managerial style), and how these different versions of professionalization are transmitted through the organization’s staff. Chapter 4 analyzes the mechanics of how volunteers in the field receive and make sense of professional practices. Using qualitative data and ethnographic work, it explores volunteers’ experiences in preservice training and during service itself. It focuses particularly on the sanitizing of political relationships within communities and host countries, linking those pressures to external forces. Chapter 5 turns to the individual-level consequences of Peace Corps service for volunteers, including both the dynamics of professionalization specifically, and the broader social and political outcomes among RPCVs. The book’s conclusion tackles the effects of these shifts for international development, for civic ideals, and for democracy. The death of idealism has consequences: specifically, the final chapter explores the implications of apolitical social change organizations. I also offer responses to the question of what we should do to combat these tendencies, and thoughts about structures that support intrinsically motivated workers, including strategies for embracing the inherently political nature of social change work.
The Death of Idealism uses the case of the Peace Corps to explain why and how participation in a bureaucratic organization changes people’s ideals and politics. Meghan Elizabeth Kallman details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads to cynicism and disengagement. This deeply researched, theoretically rigorous book offers a novel perspective on how people lose their idealism and why that matters.
“With no places to discuss their potentially life-changing experiences with fellow volunteers, and with many rules to follow and forms to fill out, volunteers in the Peace Corps often encounter an organizational void where their political imaginations and hopes might have bloomed. The Death of Idealism confronts the consequences of this void, and makes important contributions to theories of organizations, the history of American volunteering, and the history of the Peace Corps in particular.”
— NINA ELIASOPH, AUTHOR OF MAKING VOLUNTEERS: CIVIC LIFE AFTER WELFARE’S END “Professionalization is typically seen as universally good in the worlds of government, nonprofit, and development organizations. Kallman shows in her insightful study of the U.S. Peace Corps how it can kill idealism and lead to the failure of development. This is a must-read for anyone interested in public service and civic engagement.”
— ANGELA M. EIKENBERRY, COEDITOR OF REFRAMING NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS: DEMOCRACY, INCLUSION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE “A fascinating account of the conflict between professionalization and idealism in the Peace Corps. Kallman presents an important lesson in how organizational practices affect people’s ideas and values in ways that have long lasting consequences for their lives, professional careers, and, in this case, the trajectory of international development practice in the United States.”
— JENNIFER E. MOSLEY, COEDITOR OF HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS AND THE QUESTION OF IMPACT
MEGHAN ELIZABETH KALLMAN
is an assistant professor at the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is coauthor of The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits (2016) and an elected official in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover photo: Getty Images Printed in the U.S.A.