The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps 9780231548465

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THE DEATH OF IDEALISM

THE DEATH OF IDEALISM DEV ELOP M ENT AN D ANTI - P OL I TI C S I N TH E P EAC E COR PS

MEGHAN ELIZABETH KALLMAN

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Meghan Elizabeth Kallman All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, author. Title: The death of idealism : development and anti-politics in the Peace Corps / Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019044169 (print) | LCCN 2019044170 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231189682 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231189699 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231548465 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Peace Corps (U.S.) | Volunteers—United States— Attitudes. | Volunteer workers in community development— United States. | Volunteer workers in social service— United States. | Idealism. Classification: LCC HC60.5 .K35 2020 (print) | LCC HC60.5 (ebook) | DDC 361.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044169 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044170

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow

To Tim and to ERB, who both believe in the best of humanity.

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So it is possible that the benefits of history— which are manifested in the growth of context and in the proper sense of background and foreground— are not available at the moment, because no one now wants to make himself foolish by pretending to know what a background might be or what might constitute a context. George W. S. Trow, In the Context of No Context

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

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1 The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers 21 2 The Development of Development: The Peace Corps and USAID 61 3 Ethical and Procedural Professionalization Among Peace Corps Staff 95 4 Volunteers in the Field 117 5 Home Again: Political, Civic, and Occupational Consequences of Volunteering 165 Conclusion 217 Appendix: Book Methodology Notes

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Index 295

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book took a long time to write. It entered the world—skeletally—in 2016 and grew upward and outward from there. Along the way, I received support from some extraordinary mentors, including Mark Suchman, Patrick Heller, Nitsan Chorev, Josh Pacewicz, and Scott Frickel. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to friends and colleagues, particularly Carrie Oelberger, Ora Szekely, Christopher Graziul, and Timothy Syme, who provided insightful feedback, pep talks, and, when necessary, beer. I benefited tremendously from discussions at my home program, the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston; the Organizations and Social Change track at the UMB College of Management; the Work, Occupations and Entrepreneurship program at Brown University; the FEAST Summer Institute; and the University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA) program at the University of Antwerp. My colleagues at professional meetings, too numerous to count, provided collegial and insightful input. I am especially grateful to Sam Cohn for his inspirational suggestion about a title.

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At the beginning of this project, two grants from the National Science Foundation afforded me the resources and opportunity to think and write deeply. Different portions of research and writing were also supported by the Jukouwsky Summer Research Award, the Steinhaus-Zisson Research Grant, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Feinberg Research Award, and a graduate fellowship from the Cogut Center for the Humanities. For this support I am very grateful. To Douglas Bauer and Cindy Dickinson, who taught me some of my most important—and transferable—lessons in prose, I offer deep, if belated, thanks. Finally, I note that it takes an act of faith to let a researcher in to explore the inner workings of your organization, especially when you are reasonably sure that her account will not be wholly complimentary. I deeply, deeply appreciate the many Peace Corps volunteers and staff who permitted me to sit in, take notes, observe, pry, and explore their experiences and their gatherings. In giving me access, you gave me a gift.

THE DEATH OF IDEALISM

INTRODUCTION

[The Peace Corps] gave rise to my last burst of true idealism. Returned Peace Corps volunteer, 1960s, Turkey

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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

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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 Z 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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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 Z 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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Y 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.

1 THE PEACE CORPS AND ITS VOLUNTEERS

One of the things I hold in high esteem about the Peace Corps is that it really is an excellent crucible of youth. And it was interesting for me, sort of growing up isolated and wealthy—I mean, I had already sailed across the Atlantic when I joined—but it was just complete isolation from all of those abilities. And I knew that if something bad happened to me, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter! And I had to live with that. You have to build up the social skills to be able to able to navigate that. RPCV, 1990s, Togo

T

he man quoted above is a somewhat stylized version of a Peace Corps volunteer— a young, white American, privileged in the context of both his country and the world as a whole. He is also typical in describing the Peace Corps as formative; tossing back lattes in the New Orleans café where we met, he spoke matter-of-factly about his experience of twenty years ago, recounting the ways in which his service shaped his life and his very successful entrepreneurial career. In many ways, he embodies the paradox that is the Peace Corps: celebrated in

22 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers

a raft of travelogues and first-person memoirs, virtually ignored in the social science literature, an afterthought in writing on development, and nonetheless highly unique in the matrix of U.S. state institutions. The Peace Corps is a national voluntary service program of the U.S. government that sends volunteers to the developing world for service tours of two years. It is not the only national voluntary organization; apart from the armed forces, the United States has operated several similar programs over the years. For instance, in 1933 Franklin  D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, through which nearly three million unemployed men planted trees, built dams and hiking trails, and fought wildfires. Although the Conservation Corps was terminated after less than a decade, several other national service programs persist.1 Among them are the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, although the Peace Corps is arguably the best known. Its international work is usually related to social or economic development, and it has three formal goals: “1) to help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women; 2) to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served, [and] 3) to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.”2 Volunteers—who are all American citizens—are usually in their early twenties, are paid a stipend consistent with the standard of living in their host communities, and are given a modest “readjustment” allowance upon successful completion of service. Although there are several loan forgiveness programs available and volunteers receive full medical benefits, the financial incentives for participation are relatively minimal. In 2014 volunteers worked in sixty-four countries grouped into seven regions: sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Asia, the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands.

The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers Z 23

The Peace Corps headquarters is a sleek concrete building in a wealthy part of Washington, D.C., virtually indistinguishable from other buildings in the area. The main entrance is imposing—when I visited there were metal detectors in a businesslike row, uniformed security officers, and large framed pictures of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and then director Carrie Hessler-Radelet on the walls. The Peace Corps director is a presidentially appointed position; directors typically either have been volunteers themselves or have other experience in international development. People enter and exit the building, swiping security badges and vanishing up a series of elevators lining the hallway behind the checkpoint. The operation is dedicated to “supporting and providing strategic guidance to overseas posts, recruiting and selecting future Volunteers, promoting programs to encourage returned Volunteers to continue contributing to the  Peace Corps mission, and performing central oversight functions.”3 A host of additional administrative and operational tasks are run out of this building. The central organization and its subsections are standard modern bureaucracies: hierarchical and specialized, with designated staff attending to volunteer programs, safety, global and financial operations, innovations, and the like. Peace Corps posts worldwide are managed under the central office in Washington, D.C. An American country director, who is supported by programming, medical, safety and security, training, financial, and administrative staff, leads each overseas post. Two or three of the support staff are typically American, and the remainder are what I refer to as “local staff ”—host-country nationals employed by the Peace Corps. Staff posts in the United States partly comprise former volunteers as well, though RPCVs are more heavily represented among American Peace Corps staff abroad. Field-site staff are typically limited to five years in a position, although the same is not true of employees

24 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers

at headquarters; in addition, there is something of a revolving door between USAID and World Bank projects and Peace Corps staff posts abroad. Some local staff keep their jobs for a long time—eighteen years, in the case of one man I met during my research. The agency is funded by Congress, that is, by U.S. taxpayers. In 2018 its budget was $432 million; in addition, country programs accept host-country contributions (in-kind and cash) in service of different projects.4 Congress requires that these contributions are treated as “fiduciary funds” that belong to the host country, held in trust by the Peace Corps.5 This organizational design—and the fact that it is a part of the federal bureaucracy— mean that the Peace Corps is arranged in keeping with the rationalized principles of the state. This, unto itself, meaningfully shapes the kind of work that is done and the field of possibilities in which to do it. Although it pays stipends, the Peace Corps calls itself a volunteer organization, which is significant, as voluntarism in the United States has a unique history. Americans volunteer a great deal. Given the weakness of the U.S. central government and the general aversion to government intervention in corporate or social affairs, voluntarism and civic action have been a crucial part of both American identity and American governance virtually since the country’s incorporation.6 In the years after the United States was colonized, voluntary organizations played a significant role in the young country’s economic development because the state was perceived as either ineffective or unsuited to most tasks.7 Many northern states, in particular, offered public subsidies to private charitable organizations that served widows and orphans, the poor, and others. This laid the groundwork for several centuries of public incentives for extrastatal engagement on social issues and established

The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers Z 25

a strong norm that such work should be undertaken by nonstate actors rather than by the government. (As a cultural matter, even the liberal U.S. citizen has a built-in disdain for governmental structures.) Voluntary organizations have historically been politically important as well: over time, in a pluralistic polity from which many were excluded (including, notably, women, people of color, and religious minorities), associations were alternative paths to building careers, practicing professional and democratic skills, and advocating for shared interests. These associations shaped, among other things, the American party system and became important vehicles for mobilizing public opinion.8 Because of this weak-state legacy, there are both institutional and cultural foundations in the United States that strongly favor voluntarism. Also contributing to the high levels of voluntarism in the United States are high levels of religiosity.9 American religious congregations have had an outsized influence in teaching adults transferable civic skills, among Protestants especially.10 By working with your congregation to rebuild someone’s barn after a fire, for instance, you learn to trust your neighbors, mediate and resolve your conflicts, and make decisions as a group. Since the 1960s, however, U.S. religion and its influence on politics have shifted dramatically: while the family-oriented, traditionalistic 1950s saw an increase in religious membership, the 1960s and its social movements led many younger Americans away from their parents’ congregations. Protestantism and Catholicism sustained particularly heavy losses, and by the 1980s the center of gravity in U.S. religion had shifted toward evangelical and fundamentalist— and politically conservative— Christian churches whose primary civic influence tends to be in national politics rather than in local associations.11 The Peace Corps’ founding coincided with the beginning of this shift.

26 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers

Both influences—the institutional blueprint of the weak state and the strong traditions of religious associationalism in the United States— converged in the genesis of the Peace Corps. Although Peace Corps volunteers are, as we shall see, quite a bit more secular on average than most American volunteers, the unique political and institutional influence of the country’s history is visible in their motivations and experiences. The term volunteer, however, is itself something of a misnomer when applied to the Peace Corps, although that is the word that the agency uses to refer to its cadre of development workers. Scholars have frequently theorized volunteering as a leisuretime activity, an approach that is obviously inadequate to understanding a program like this.12 Voluntarism is also analytically slippery because of its relationship to the labor force: volunteer opportunities have been used to sharpen occupational skills or to make connections that eventually lead to paid employment, particularly for marginalized groups who are excluded from other kinds of professional development. And importantly, Peace Corps volunteers are paid, albeit modestly. Indeed, economic analyses of voluntarism typically understand it as “unpaid work provided to parties to whom the worker owes no contractual, familial, or friendship obligations.” Unlike the labor market and the informal sector, volunteer work is theoretically uncommodified; unlike household labor, it is freely undertaken and can thus be seen as a type of “human effort that adds use value to goods and services.”13 But a wholly economic analysis of voluntarism misses the point of this book, which is to understand how ideals are reshaped by organizations in the context of work that draws principally on those very ideals. John Wilson and Marc Musick define volunteering as simultaneously being (1) productive work

The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers Z 27

that needs people to do it, (2) collective behavior that requires social capital, and (3) ethically guided work that requires cultural capital.14 Throughout this book I emphasize the second and particularly the third components of their definition; I am interested in motivation and meaning making that both prompt and result from Peace Corps service. Additionally, if we think about volunteering as “engaging in an activity with the expectation of some social or emotional benefit that have a value greater than the market value of that work,” we come to see it a matter of degree rather than an absolute.15 Peace Corps volunteers, who generally have a relatively low skill level and who receive a stipend, are in some ways more akin to low-wage workers than to volunteers. And yet their idealism (and their privilege) meaningfully differentiates them from other low-wage workers. In bare theoretical terms, I make no claims about idealism as an inherent piece of voluntarism across different organizations. I don’t claim to know, for example, what motivates Salvation Army or Habitat for Humanity volunteers. In empirical terms, however, idealism is a major motivating aspect of the Peace Corps volunteers whose experiences I recount. That is, as volunteers they seek social and emotional benefits through the work, which they understand as acting on their ideals, and they have economic and professional support in doing what they do, which shapes who participates. They bring a unique set of motivations and demographic characteristics to their service, which I detail here. Their organizational involvement and their pay make them more like wage workers, and the salience of their organizational experiences is more similar to that of employees than to that of “volunteers” as traditionally defined. And yet their work is ethically guided in a way that most low-wage work is not, and their ideals are a fundamental part of their service.

28 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers

VOLUNTEER RECRUITMENT A crucial piece of understanding how volunteers experience their service is to understand both how they came to serve and how the organization presents itself to potential participants. In general, volunteering is more common in individualist communities, and the Peace Corps has always traded on that aspect of American culture.16 It recruits primarily through a language of idealism and service, underpinned by the promise of adventure and self-actualization. This has been the case since its inception. Consider, for example the recruiting poster from 1961 in shown figure 1.1. Other themes in recruitment trade on ideas of patriotism and even a degree of cosmopolitanism, as the ad from the 1970s in figure 1.2 illustrates. More contemporary recruiting materials, such as ads from 2015 shown in figures 1.3–1.7, heavily emphasize the same themes, and the idea that an individual volunteer has the power to reshape lives. They draw heavily on ideas of autonomy and suggest a back-to-basics sense of idealism, with a dose of self-realization and promise of adventure into the bargain. None-too-subtle messaging (figure 1.8) distinguishes between “career” and “purpose” and clearly places the Peace Corps in the latter category. These ads also emphasize individual agency in their recruiting. Language prioritizes both the individual volunteer’s needs (for personal, nonmonetary enrichment) and the individual’s agency (the perceived ability to help). Once volunteers arrive in their placements, however, the Peace Corps’ discourse, training materials, advancement programs, and the like shift dramatically and attempt to channel those same impulses into occupational outlets. The focus moves from “purpose” to “career” with astonishing speed, particularly in contemporary materials. This new discourse still emphasizes personal enrichment, just in a different way (figure 1.9).

FIGURE 1.1

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 1961. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 1970s. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.2

Some corners of the world can’t.

800.424.8580 peacecorps.gov

Life is calling. How far will you go?

“Peace Corps PSAs,” Peace Corps Recruiting Poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps, http://www.peacecorps.gov /media /psa /print /.

FIGURE 1.3

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.4

For dreamers who do.

Live, learn, and work with a community overseas. Be a Volunteer.

peacecorps.gov FIGURE 1.5

Peace Corps “Out of Home” recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.6

There isn’t an app for this.

Live, learn, and work with a community overseas. Be a Volunteer.

peacecorps.gov Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.7

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.8

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.9

38 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers

For nearly thirty years the Peace Corps recruited heavily for master’s degree programs in international development through a collaborative program in which students earned credits toward the degree in a number of different universities, using their Peace Corps service as a practicum (figure  1.10). The program was retired in 2016, with more emphasis now given to undergraduate Peace Corps preparatory programs. The Peace Corps Prep is a certificate program that focuses on preparing college undergraduates to be Peace Corps volunteers, including a new focus on sector-specific skills, language, cultural competence, and professionalism. In both programs, however, the discourse changes quite dramatically, shifting from an emphasis on service (“for dreamers who do”) to professional (“the job market is global”). This shift is important context for understanding the experience of volunteers that I describe in this book.

Peace Corps recruiting poster, 2015. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps.

FIGURE 1.10

The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers Z 39

VOLUNTEER PLACEMENTS The Peace Corps is a worldwide program. Its reach has expanded somewhat since its inception, although both Latin America and Africa have consistently received some of the highest proportions of volunteers. The global distribution of volunteers shortly after the agency’s founding is shown in table 1.1. Table 1.2 indicates how the distribution has shifted in the past fifty years. The work of Peace Corps volunteers is the focus of the agency. The areas and fields in which volunteers work have also shifted over the course of the Peace Corps’ history, reflecting both the changing priorities of host countries, and the changing priorities within the Peace Corps and development itself. At the agency’s inception there was a good deal more focus on agriculture and infrastructure than there has been since the turn of the twenty-first century. Table 1.3 gives the distribution four years after the Peace Corps’ founding.

TABLE 1.1 VOLUNTEERS BY REGION OF SERVICE, 1961

Region

% of total

Africa

34

Far East

23

Latin America

26

Near East/South Asia

17

Source: Peace Corps, “First Annual Peace Corps Report” (Washington, D.C.: Peace Corps, 1962), 77, https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.peacecorps.gov/manuals /cbj/annualreport_1962.pdf.

40 Y The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers TABLE 1.2 VOLUNTEERS BY REGION OF SERVICE, 2014

Region

% of total

Africa

45

Latin America

23

Asia

12

Eastern Europe & Central Asia

10

Caribbean

4

Pacific Islands

3

North Africa & Middle East

3

Total

100

Source: Author's survey data.

Fifty years later the work areas are framed quite differently. The number of fields has been condensed, and there is an increased focus on economic development and the teaching of English. The relatively heavy emphasis on education has been consistent, but public administration and public works in particular have largely been phased out. The global distribution of volunteers in 2014 is shown in table 1.4. Volunteer positions vary widely, and a great many change during the volunteer’s service. This is often due—as we will see later—to the complications inherent in central planning for widely dispersed projects in disparate parts of the world. Some 16 percent of volunteers in my survey reported that their primary Peace Corps project changed entirely from the one that they were initially assigned, while 63 percent reported that they took on other projects on top of their primary assignment. One volunteer remembers:

The Peace Corps and Its Volunteers Z 41 TABLE 1.3 VOLUNTEERS BY REGION AND WORK AREA, 1965

Work area Agriculture

Latin America

Near East / South Asia

Africa

Far East

% of total

437

424

136

—

7

Rural community action

1,600

369

396

190

20

Urban community action

903

60

34

8

8

Elementary education

53

—

665

265

8

Secondary education

461

970

2,673

199

33

University education

292

4

64

45

3

16

—

33

22

1

754

101

162

338

11

Public works

56

99

176

—

3

Public administration

33

48

58

—

1

Vocational education

95

72

130

19

2

204

—

24

—

2

Multipurpose

—

1

—

—