This chapter draws together evidence on the impact of the challenges and dilemmas of public service modernisation for the staff members and volunteers involved with Law Centres. As has already been suggested, one of the criticisms that has been levelled at New Public Management systems is that they presuppose negative views of human motivation, assuming that employees in general, and professionals more specifically, need the discipline of targets imposed from above (Le Grand, 2003). As a result, critics have argued, target-type cultures actually risk alienating public service workers, undermining the very motivations and commitments that brought them into the public service professions in the first place.

There is, in addition, evidence from research to suggest that such motivations and commitments to the public service ethos may be deeply rooted in professionals’ own personal histories and identities (Hoggett et al, 2009). This can add to the dilemmas that are faced in the context of public service modernisation, dilemmas which may be experienced emotionally as well as in more practical ways. The term ‘emotional labour’ covers a range of meanings and usages, from varying perspectives. It could refer to employers’ demands that service workers such as air stewardesses should keep smiling ‘as though they really meant it’ to reassure their passengers, constituting additional exploitation of the employees in question, it could be argued (Hochschild, 1983; Standing, 2011). But the term has also been applied to the emotional engagement of nurses, for example, giving of themselves emotionally as they care for seriously ill patients (Smith, 1999). It is in this latter sense that the term has been used to understand the particular dilemmas faced by public service workers in the contemporary policy context (Hoggett et al, 2009).

The first part of this chapter builds upon earlier discussions in relation to Law Centres’ ethos and values, as outlined in Chapter Three, providing fuller accounts of people's motivations. This leads into the discussion of the ways in which people's motivations had been affected by the introduction of more marketised approaches to the provision of legal aid. As the discussion argues, there was evidence of considerable stress, including emotional stress and burn-out, together with some evidence of alienation and demoralisation. But this was only part of the picture, as the penultimate section of this chapter demonstrates on the basis of evidence from staff and volunteers alike.