Grudging Acts

Abstract

This article argues for a greater focus on how, and why, social life is often engaged in through grudging acts. Grudging acts are those activities in which we really would rather not participate but which we perform nonetheless. Such acts play a significant role in how many social practices are routinely sustained, but also reworked or undermined. Yet grudgingness is underexplored in social analysis, and its significance for social arrangements is insufficiently examined. This neglect occurs because foregrounding grudging acts requires a focus on key aspects of social life that often slip from view in analysis, and is an omission associated with a number of significant explanatory difficulties.

Introduction

Grudging acts are those activities we would really rather not do, but which we perform nonetheless. They are the acts we perform with reluctance, as a chore, half-heartedly, sparingly, on sufferance, unwillingly or resentfully. In everyday accounts, grudging acts are those we refer to as lip service, undertaken through gritted teeth, heart sinking, keeping our head down, going through the motions, holding our nose, rolling our eyes or shrugging our shoulders. They can be acts of omission (Scott, 2018), such as biting our tongue, holding back and more generally the exercise of caution, avoidance and self-restraint. But whether as acts of omission or commission, grudging acts represent the things we do (or fail to do) not because we endorse or will such actions but rather because we feel we must perform them.

We routinely take part in grudging acts as part of the shared, collectively constituted nature of social life. Grudging acts demonstrate the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of our commitments to the social arrangements in which we participate (and help sustain), and so the complex nature of our moral engagement and responsibility for such arrangements. Such grudging compliance forms a large grey area of social life, in between dissent and consent, and plays a significant role in how many social practices are sustained, but also reworked or undermined (Bottero, 2019, 2020). Yet grudging acts remain curiously under-explored in social analysis, and their significance to how social arrangements persevere, change or founder is insufficiently examined.

In what follows, I explore the complicated nature of grudging acts and consider why social analysis has neglected their role in social arrangements. To focus on grudging acts means foregrounding aspects of social life which social analysis often struggles to address (Brekhus, 1998; Campbell, 1996; Lahire, 2011; Sayer, 2005a, 2005b, 2011; Zerubavel, 2018), and the neglect of grudgingness reflects these explanatory deficiencies. I develop this argument by considering how grudging acts feature in two sets of debates, in the sociology of work (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016; Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010; Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Graeber, 2018; Soffia et al., 2021), and in theories of social practices (Dreier, 1999; Halkier, 2020; Hui, 2017; Reckwitz, 2002, 2017; Schatzki, 2002, 2015; Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016; Welch et al., 2020). The neglect of key features of grudgingness is associated with recurrent explanatory problems identified in both.

The Complicated Nature of Grudging Acts

When does an act become grudging? The complex, ambiguous nature of grudging acts means they can be hard to categorise. It is not the intrinsic qualities of an activity that determine whether the performance of it is grudging, but rather its relational and interactional properties. A grudging act is not simply an unpleasant one, for example. If grudging acts are commonplace, unpleasant ones are even more so, but there is a fine and shifting line between unpleasant tasks and grudging acts. Attending a pleasurable event such as a party can become grudging if we only go because it is required of us, or because of external commitments – as when we agree to accompany a friend who did want to go but did not want to go alone. ¹ Tasks, irksome or otherwise, become grudging acts when we feel we must undertake them by virtue of the collective nature of such activities – because we feel it is expected of us by specific others, because others refuse to take responsibility for them, but also through some sense of the expectations of generalised others or the normative standards of conduct for practices.

Actions become grudging by virtue of the relational features of our sense of obligation to perform them. Changing a baby’s nappy is not pleasant but as an act of care to the child it may be far from grudging. It can become so however if we feel the task is not properly shared. ² Grudging acts raise the question of how equitably tasks are distributed. Most practices require support activities that enable other purposes. We know someone must clear up after a social occasion, and most would not begrudge the tasks that enable our sociality. But such tasks quickly become grudging when some routinely escape responsibility for them. The fact that many maintenance tasks are often called ‘housework’, ‘scutwork’ or even ‘grunt work’ indicates that our willingness to perform tasks is affected not just by the uneven value we place on them, but also the uneven nature of our obligation to perform them. However, grudging acts also raise questions about the interconnection of acts within wider purposes or commitments, and the hierarchy of motivation within such practices.

There are many tasks, unpleasant or at least unpleasing, which we perform as an integral part of maintaining some larger set of activities or wider purpose and our motivations can only be understood in terms of these wider connections. Most of us do not enjoy queueing, form filling, work meetings or recycling household food-waste, but when undertaken as an enabling feature of some larger purpose or activity to which we do feel committed our performance of them may not be grudging. Queueing to enter a theme park attraction we are excited to attend may be frustrating but not grudging. However, waiting in an automated phone queue to complain about poor service is often grudging. Grudging acts show the complexity of our commitments to perform specific activities – and such complex and variable commitment is important to understanding how social arrangements are sustained or undermined. If we feel maintenance activities are poorly organised, detain us unduly from the connected activities to which we are committed or subvert the wider purpose they supposedly enable then our performance is likely to be grudging. Such time-wasting tasks can quickly become enacted perfunctorily, with resentment or cynicism. Yet if we retain our commitment to the broader purpose they support, we may not only put up with such tiresome tasks we may even adjust them – openly or surreptitiously – for greater efficiency. So, grudgingness can be associated not only with the reproduction but also the transformation of social arrangements. However, when we experience a loss of belief in the wider governing goals that tasks are meant to support, when we feel that the ends do not justify the means, this may lead to more serious disengagement or dissent.

Why does it matter if people’s actions are grudging if they perform them nonetheless? It matters for what it reveals about the organisation of collective practices, if a significant part of people’s engagement in them is half-hearted, reluctant or resentful. Elsewhere (Bottero, 2019, 2020), I have argued that in many social contexts we find ourselves participating in collective arrangements that we find difficult, counter-productive or of which we disapprove, most often because we feel we do not have much choice but to comply. Such compliance is important for the reproduction of social arrangements, but as grudging social participation indicates, this conformity is often pragmatic and tells us very little about people’s level of support for the social relations they sustain (Barnes, 1988). Social relations can be reproduced without widespread consent – people can be sceptical of social arrangements and feel discontent about what they must do – yet still grudgingly participate. People ‘go along’ with social arrangements ‘for a wide variety of reasons’, and we ‘cannot read from their apparent tacit support of an arrangement that they would, for example, resent or resist its change’ (Goffman, 1983: 5).

It is important to recognise the complexities of why people engage in actions they do not wish or support. One explanation points to the constraint arising from power inequalities. Many grudging acts occur because of the unequal resources and external obligations (paying rent, putting food on the table, etc.), which compel people to do things they would not do otherwise. What are the implications of such grudging compliance? Some (Scott, 1990: 183–184, 20) argue certain forms of grudgingness – the public deference that conceals resentment and non-compliance – indicate the ‘realm of possible dissent’. People’s grudging engagement in social arrangements shows some evaluation of their unsatisfactory nature, and may even indicate the potential instability of such arrangements and how they might unravel. But there is a danger of conflating such negative evaluations with the ‘impetus to change’, because ‘most people much of the time do not have control over the circumstances in which they find themselves, nor do they consider as sensible alternative courses of action’ (Warde, 2014: 295).

When assessing the implications of grudging acts it is important not to overstate the degree of personal control that people have, as this neglects ‘the importance of context, an external, collectively accessible, social and cultural environment wherein the mechanisms steering competent conduct are to be found’ (Warde, 2016: 101). People engage with many collective practices as pre-existing features of the social landscape, as ‘givens’ they must negotiate, and this collective steering of practices means there can be situations where few members actively support a practice in which all are engaged, and yet ‘still see their own individual conforming actions within the system as the best possible’, ‘adjusting to contingencies they find themselves unable to change’ a ‘matter of interacting individuals making the best of things’ (Barnes, 1988: 41, 124). Acceptance of the status quo can occur when participants evaluate social arrangements negatively and yet still judge that conformity is the only real alternative. The degree of support for given social arrangements is ultimately an empirical matter, but many social arrangements depend on the accommodating actions of ordinary people whose interests are often not best served by them (Rouse, 2001).

Grudging acts arise from our evaluation of how best to act in imperfect and constraining social circumstances. But such engagements are complex, and the consequences of them partly depend on people’s diverse motivations for grudging participation. Power relations and the collective steering of practices are important, but are only part of the story because grudging acts also arise from normative expectations and accountability, and the role of compromise, accommodation and forbearance in social relations. This article mainly focuses on institutional practices; however, grudging acts are also commonplace in personal relationships and occur through people’s sense of both practical and moral constraint.

To consider such normative force, take friendship. No relationship is free from power differentials, but friendship is often framed as relatively more egalitarian, because it is ‘chosen’ rather than imposed, and lacks wider legal obligation (Blatterer, 2021). Consequently, it is sometimes assumed that friendships can easily be ended. However, work on ‘difficult’ friendships shows people often maintain relationships with friends they find ‘draining, tiresome, cloying, toxic’ (Smart et al., 2012: 92). Relationships with ‘heart-sink friends’ (Spencer and Pahl, 2006: 42) can be kept going ‘notwithstanding irritations, disappointments, boredom and even some antagonisms’ (Smart et al., 2012: 92). Why do people persevere with ‘unrewarding friendships’ when it is ‘feasible to end them’ (Smart et al., 2012: 92, 95)? The answer rests in how ending friendships raises both practical and moral dilemmas. In ‘suffused’ friendship, where interpersonal relationships – and obligations – overlap, it can be hard to end relationships embedded in our broader networks (Smart et al., 2012: 92). However, people sometimes maintain difficult friendships out of a ‘moral regime of friendship’ (Smart et al., 2012: 96), which produces a strong sense of normative obligation. ‘[S]taying true’ to friends can ‘be a sign of ethical standing’ and tied into ‘self-identification’ (Smart et al., 2012: 91) in which, because friendship is ‘valued as an exemplar of morally and socially good relationships’, difficult or ‘ambivalent’ friendships ‘cannot be easily abandoned’ (Heaphy and Davies, 2012: 317, 319, 321).

The consequences of grudging acts for social arrangements are not straightforward. We may engage in acts from a sense of grudging obligation but this does not necessarily mean we would choose to do otherwise. Our obligations also include our sense of moral obligation to others, or to the broader moral or practical purpose that links activities, and we do not always wish away those constraints. We perform many grudging acts for the people we like, love or respect; things we would not willingly do outside of our relations with them, yet insofar as we do not wish away those connections, we do in some sense willingly choose to engage in the grudging acts they entail. The people or practices that:

matter most to actors are not merely things which they happen to like or prefer but things in terms of which their identities are formed and to which they are committed, sometimes to the extent that they will pursue them against their self-interest. (Sayer, 2005b: 39–40)

We make willing commitments in some social spheres, which create grudging obligations in others. Indeed, ‘people sometimes value the things they care about more than themselves’ so the commitments which bring ‘meaning, interest, satisfaction and fulfilment’, can also lead to cumbersome obligations or suffering (Sayer, 2011: 5). Unfortunately, social analysis often neglects such evaluative stances, ‘preferring to account for action in terms of self-interest, or norm-following, or habitual action’ (Sayer, 2011: 8). But reducing our moral evaluations to ‘arbitrary norms backed up by sanctions’ overlooks how our evaluations have an ‘internal normative force’ grounded in our sense of ‘what is good or bad for us and others’ (Sayer, 1999: 413, 412).

Grudging acts occur for a variety of practical, contextual reasons: because we feel a sense of obligation or moral responsibility; because of the weight of expectation; because we know it will help those who matter to us; because it enables us to do some other activity that we do value; because we feel we must pick our battles; because we fear how others might react if we do not; or simply because taking part is easier than swimming against the tide. People ‘go along’ with social arrangements for diverse reasons, and we cannot assume that people’s participation indicates support for those arrangements. But conversely, we cannot assume from the grudging nature of people’s participation that they dissent to the collective arrangements of which they are a part.

Grudgingness entails not just questions of constraint but also the moral and normative nature of our social engagements and indicates our complicity in reproducing social arrangements that we may not will and yet in which we still participate. A greater focus on grudging acts can further understanding of the complex, and sometimes ambivalent, reluctant or half-hearted commitments on which many social arrangements depend. However, this raises a question: if grudging acts are commonplace and reveal the complexity of people’s engagements to social arrangements, why have they been neglected?

The Difficulty of Foregrounding Grudging Acts

Some may be surprised to see the claim that grudgingness is neglected. After all, is there not social analysis that explores such, or similar, practices? What about work on ‘grudging consent’ to political authorities (Tilly, 2009); or the ‘hidden transcripts’ of responses to domination (Scott, 1990) or, more generally, work on the instrumental nature of action (Weber, 1991 [1921–1922])? In discussions of racialised subordination, what about work on pressures towards assimilation, mimicry or ‘wearing the mask’ (Bhabhar, 1994; Fanon, 1986; hooks, 2003)? In interaction and emotion, what about role distance and ‘face work’ (Goffman, 1959, 1961); emotional labour and ‘surface acting’ (Hochschild, 1979); or the ‘side-bets’ tying people into other commitments (Becker, 1960). What about alienation; organisational misbehaviour and cynicism; or ‘bullshit jobs’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016; Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Graeber, 2018; Marx, 2007)? In personal life, what about ‘difficult friendships’ or ‘holding back’ with family (Davies, 2021; Lahad and May, 2021; Smart et al., 2012)? What about work on ambivalence, hypocrisy and secrecy, or compromise and forbearance (Brewer, 2018; Erinosho, 2008; Merton, 1976; Simmel, 1950; Smelser, 1998)?

All of this work speaks eloquently about the faces we must wear, the hypocrisies and double standards we adopt, the compromises and bargains we make, the acts we perform under sufferance or with mixed feelings, and the obligations and commitments through which we become tied into courses of action that we choose – but not entirely freely or willingly. Yet despite providing important insights, there is more limited analysis connecting the different types or sites of grudging acts, and little attention to grudgingness as a more general feature of social experience. Why such neglect? The problem is that grudging acts require us to pay attention to features of social life that sociology often struggles to address.

One reason for neglecting grudging acts is their often unremarkable, mundane nature. As Goffman (1983: 5) notes, interaction is predicated on mutual obligations to orderliness that produce ‘self-sustained restraints’ on what we do: accommodating other’s aims (and ‘face’), biting our tongue about disagreements, and ‘putting up with’ people or situations we find difficult or counter-productive. Such acts are a necessary feature of our shared social life, and we accept we must do things we really do not want to as an inevitable feature of collective arrangements. But while it is impossible to imagine social life without grudging acts, they are often routine and easy to take for granted. However, such ‘background’ features of social life often remain ‘unnamed and unaccented’ in social research, where a tendency to focus on ‘exceptional’ practices neglects ‘those unnamed forms of collective behaviour that constitute the vast majority of ordinary human traffic’ (Brekhus, 1998: 36, Zerubavel, 2018).

In fairness, grudging social practices are acknowledged in sociology: but usually as a background feature to some other focus of analysis (for example whether certain grudging acts ‘really’ indicate people’s dissent to their situation). This highlights another reason for their glossing over: the fact that the unmarked is ‘inevitably more ambiguous’ (Brekhus, 1998: 47). Grudging acts represent ambivalent or ambiguous engagements – but this is a factor in their neglect because practices that elude unproblematic categorisation often slip from view or become reframed in ways that ‘resolve’ (i.e. minimise) ambiguity and ambivalence (Brekhus, 1998: 47). In grudging acts people actively participate in activities they do not endorse or do not really want to engage in, making such activities hard to categorise – consequently they are often ignored, or subsumed under more easily categorised practices, falling victim to a tendency to ‘tidy up’ social experience.

Grudging acts show how our commitments in one sphere of activity often depend on our commitments in other spheres. This is another reason for their neglect because, as Lahire (2011: 208) notes, it is ‘common for sociologists to study the behaviours of actors in the context of a single domain of activity’ with people ‘then always situated on just one single social stage’. Sociologists do of course explore how activities in one sphere affect another, but it is ‘hard . . . to cite studies that have systematically “observed” the same actors across more than two settings, or beyond two types of social situation’ (Lahire 2011: 209). The dearth of work studying individuals ‘across a plurality of stages’ creates an inability to grasp the intra-individual variation in practices (Lahire, 2011: xii, xvi). For Lahire, it is crucial to grasp not only the intersection of different practices but also how social life is formed through people’s trajectories across multiple practices. Such trajectories – and the ambivalent commitments and trailing obligations they produce – are key to understanding the grudging nature of social engagements.

Finally, while grudging acts may be routine, they are also an affective engagement: we are always emotionally aware when our social participation is grudging. But grudging participation shows not just people’s awareness that some of their engagements are unsatisfactory but also how they practically and morally weigh up engagements in relation to other commitments, obligations and constraints. This too helps explain why grudgingness often falls by the wayside. Grudging acts must be understood as forms of ‘practical reason’, about how best to act in difficult situations (Sayer, 2011: 1). However, sociology frequently struggles to address ‘why things matter to people’, neglecting people’s ‘first person evaluative relation to the world’ (Sayer, 2011: 2). Grudging acts show the ‘centrality of evaluation’ in everyday life, a centrality that reflects our ‘condition as needy, vulnerable beings, suspended between things as they are and as they might become, for better or worse, and as we need or want them to become’ (Sayer, 2011: 4). Yet social analysis has often neglected people’s own practical analysis of their situation in favour of a broader analysis of the wider consequences of their actions.

Grudging acts direct our attention to dimensions of social experience often poorly addressed in sociology. I illustrate the problems associated with neglecting grudging acts by considering two sets of debates: predominantly empirical work in the sociology of work and more conceptual debates in social practices theories. In the former, grudging acts are addressed in discussions of the obligations, commitments and constraints that tie people grudgingly into paid work. However, such debates are mired in difficulties dealing with the complexity of people’s motivations and commitments, so grudging acts tend to become ‘flattened’ – reduced to other, more straightforwardly categorised activities. In practices theories, by contrast, despite a sustained account of how motivations and affect are shaped within practices there is an almost complete neglect of grudging acts, with little consideration of how mixed motives or ambivalent engagements affect practices. The failure to engage sufficiently with the complexity and ambivalence that grudgingness entails is associated with recurrent explanatory difficulties identified in both debates. I do not suggest that a greater focus on grudging acts can itself resolve these explanatory deficiencies, but instead argue that the ability to properly address grudging acts represents a litmus test of analytical adequacy. But grudging acts are important and interesting in their own right, and accounts of social arrangements should be able to address the complex role that grudgingness plays within them.

Grudging Acts and the Sociology of Work

The sociology of work and organisation identifies a particular version of grudging acts, in endemic worker ‘soldiering’, cynicism, disengagement and concealed non-compliance. Working life is full of ambivalent practices and ambiguous motivations, where workers do their jobs but with varying degrees of recalcitrance. Yet often the analytical focus is on trying to resolve such complexity, to determine whether it ‘really’ represents resistance or co-option. Consequently, as critics note, much analysis struggles with how to categorise such acts, with persistent disagreements over their wider significance (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016; Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010; Fleming and Spicer, 2007). There is a more sustained focus on grudging acts than in many areas of sociology, but with a tendency to ‘explain away’ such practices and reduce their ambivalence, either by characterising them all as ‘resistance’ or else by minimising their significance by focusing on the unintended ways they reproduce capitalist relations. Here critics identify another problematic slippage in analysis: from workers’ contexts of activity, evaluative stances and motives to higher-level questions of whether their practices undermine or support organisational priorities, or indeed capitalism itself (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016; Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010). But while the implications of grudgingness for wider social arrangements are important, we must first analyse people’s engagements on their own terms to fully understand such implications. A failure to retain sufficient analytical hold on the aims, ambiguity and ambivalence of grudging workplace acts has often meant a failure to fully grasp the complexity of such practices. As a result, it is difficult to assess their consequences for the workplace arrangements of which they are a part.

Workers are frequently engaged in practices to which they are far from committed. One obvious explanation points to the inequalities that constrain ‘formally free’ workers to drudgery, with reliance on paid work compelling workers to ‘a Monday through Friday sort of dying’ (Terkel, 1975: 1). Capitalist work relations produce ‘cynicism and revulsion’ (Braverman, 1974: 151), and as workers find themselves in power relations ‘they cannot leave or change’ resentment forms a ‘major dimension of organisational life’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 69). But power relations are insufficient to explain workers’ compliance. For Lordon (2014: n.p.), the submission of workers is secured through a complex mix of necessity and coercion, but also via the creation of new goals and commitments that – to varying degrees – align workers in ‘voluntary servitude’ to the ‘desires of bosses’. Consumerism is one source of external pleasures and goals keeping workers aligned, however grudgingly, to organisational priorities. But neoliberal management regimes go further, seeking to generate an ‘intrinsic desire’ for employment ‘for its own sake’ (Lordon, 2014: n.p.) via normative controls that attempt to instil in workers commitment to the company. Reviews of research note this kind of managerial regime is often portrayed as a form of ‘responsibilisation’, reconstructing workers into self-actualising subjects who internalise management objectives (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 25; Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010).

However, we should not overstate the grip of normative controls, as they do not prevent grudging acts and indeed often provoke them. While studies show workers are ‘subjectively co-opted’ by managerial ideologies, an ‘important stream of research’ acknowledges that employees ‘dis-identify with management, and . . . are resentfully cynical’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 70). Such grudgingness is explained not just by constraint but also by the contradictions of normative processes in which organisations try – but often fail – to reshape workers’ goals and affective commitments. In the ‘midst of the frenetic attempts to colonise the subjectivity of workers’ we find ‘resentful distancing, incredulity and cynical disbelief’, not least because attempts to instil commitment to the organisation often create ‘a credibility gap’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 71, 70). For some, this dissonance – and the grudging nature of worker compliance – reflects financialised neoliberal workplaces, characterised by transfers of risk to workers and rising insecurity, where managerial control rests ‘largely on market discipline and performance management’ rather than normative controls (Thompson, 2016: 112–113). But the point here is that workplaces combine different types of control so we must ‘go beyond the binary types of analysis by which management is seen as following either a strategy of subjection or responsibilisation, and employees are either committed or expressing opposition’ (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 147). Under regimes of market discipline, workers are more likely to respond with ‘nominal compliance’ but, to combat this, employers also place ‘increasing emphasis on the desirability of overt employee commitment’ – a ‘contradictory combination’, which often results in cynicism and disengagement (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 10–12). Such disengagement is a ‘systemic feature’ of contemporary managerial regimes (Thompson, 2016: 114), with workplaces ‘peopled with characters who do not believe in the roles they play and actively dis-identify with authority, their organisations and the products/services they produce’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 87).

The picture is complex, however. Research shows considerable worker disengagement but also ‘high levels of employee self-reported satisfaction with their work’, with ‘a complex mixture’ of positive attachments to work but also rising concerns – about insecurity, work pressures and unfair rewards (Findlay and Thompson, 2017: 132–133). Despite suggestions that many workers are engaged in ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2018) there is ‘no evidence’ for bullshit occupations where most workers feel their work is not useful (Soffia et al., 2021: 16). The meaningfulness of work is episodic, and ‘connected to specific, isolable events rather than to the job as a whole’ (Bailey et al., 2019: 495) with much paid work a combination of meaningful and grudging practices. Workers are more likely to feel their job is useless in occupations offering limited opportunities for skill use, autonomy or where managers are disrespectful or inefficient (Soffia et al., 2021: 18–19). Soffia et al. (2021: 19, 6) see this as a ‘symptom of bad management and toxic workplace cultures’, which is less about whether jobs are ‘inherently pointless’ and more about the ‘importance of the social relations under which work is undertaken’. To complicate matters further, workers are ‘not passive in the face of efforts to manage the meaningfulness of their work’ and often ‘reaffirm alternative frameworks of meaning’, so that even work viewed ‘from the outside as unskilled, poor-quality work is nevertheless often seen by the workers themselves as invested in complex social interactions and meaning’ (Bailey et al., 2019: 493, 494).

There is considerable complexity in workers’ engagements, therefore, but no consensus about how to characterise such acts or assess their significance. Often the ambiguity of workers’ practices fades from view in analysis that moves too quickly to position them as other, more straightforwardly categorised activities. Many kinds of grudging acts at work are largely assessed in terms of whether or not they really constitute ‘resistance’, but with fundamental disagreements over such interpretations (Collinson and Ackroyd, 2005: 320). Much work falls ‘into the trap’ of categorising any behaviour that ‘does not show total obedience and compliance’ as resistance (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 138), or else suggests ‘it is largely devoid of significance’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 2). Take cynicism. The question of how to make sense of cynicism is ‘contested’ because while cynicism represents ‘a form of escape from power relations that one cannot physically leave’ the issue most debated is whether this simply reproduces domination (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 87–8). A series of studies suggest worker cynicism is merely a ‘safety valve’ enabling workers ‘to perpetuate their own exploitation’, by providing a ‘breathing space’ permitting workers to behave ‘as efficient and meticulous members of the team’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 72,78).

The difficulty here rests in the ambiguity and ambivalence of cynical work practices. Workers often deliberately disguise their recalcitrance to avoid retribution (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Scott, 1990), but many activities are also ambivalent. Acts of cynicism ‘sit comfortably alongside obedient practices of arduous labour’ and are often ‘combined with relatively high levels of work-performance’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 13; Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 74). Such ambivalence is sometimes used to dismiss cynicism – to see it ultimately as consent, with such categorisation framed in terms of the (lack of) consequences for the smooth working of organisations. Indeed, for some, cynicism is functional for workplace power relations because if managers ignore minor infringements ‘more consequential disruptions are avoided’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2007: 9). However, in reviewing such research, Fleming and Spicer (2007: 88) argue it is important ‘not to write off’ cynicism as ‘researchers have tended to do’ because it still represents a constrained form of challenge to corporate control. It is the ‘potential for change’ that makes such practices ‘interesting and important’, because while they may be ‘semi-institutionalised’ they are ‘by . . . nature potentially volatile’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 2).

However, Ackroyd and Thompson also insist that it is simply too reductive to assess workers’ behaviour solely in terms of its consequences for corporate control. They argue we must acknowledge a broader and more ambiguous realm of workplace practices that cannot be understood ‘merely as a form of or step to what has become identified with the term resistance’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 7). Similarly, for Fleming and Spicer (2007: 47–48), while much analysis often draws ‘a strict contrast’ between co-option and resistance such clear-cut dichotomies are ‘not the stuff of real social relationships, which are marked by ambiguity and ambivalence’. However, ‘persistent difficulties’ in categorising practices are linked to the failure to address ‘the distinct rationales’ underlying them (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 153). A full assessment of workers’ behaviour requires attending more closely ‘to the meanings and actor rationales . . . which underpin oppositional practices’, and so acknowledging the ‘variety of motives’ shaping them (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 13; Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 148).

Grudgingness can have quite different motivations, and so different implications for social arrangements. But addressing workers’ motivations for various kinds of grudging acts – and their potential consequences – requires ‘going beyond a binary mode of analysis’ because ‘commitment to work and employee resistance’ are not necessarily opposing principles of action (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 145–146). Commitment to work may actively provoke dissent for example. A series of studies show workers can be ‘very proud of their craftsmanship and also very inventive in finding ways to resist management’, with shopfloor resistance often ‘fuelled by a deep frustration’ about the ‘inability of management to organise operations efficiently’ (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 145). Cynicism ‘may arise from a high level of commitment to other values (such as vocation or community welfare), which are seen to be compromised by corporate actions’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2016: 13). And while some employees may be ‘highly committed to work and prone to oppositional practices . . . others may show low commitment and a tendency to withdraw from any open form of opposition’ (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 146). Nor should commitment to work be conflated with commitment to the organisation, because ‘these are quite different principles of action’ with potentially very different implications (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 145–146). Commitment to work is associated with employees’ stance to their craft, occupational abilities and skills, and can be undermined by ‘inefficient work organisation’ or ‘the growing gap between management discourse and reality’ (Bélanger and Thuderoz, 2010: 146): one reason why managerial attempts to instil commitment to the organisation often backfire.

Research shows the complexity of workplace engagements, but in assessing this the sociology of work often struggles to retain focus on the ambiguity and ambivalence of workers’ commitments. This matters because the complexity of people’s grudging workplace acts, and the diversity of their motives for such grudgingness, are important both for understanding such actions as well as for grasping their broader implications. A failure to retain sufficient analytical hold on the complexity of many grudging acts in the workplace, and the motives for why they are undertaken, makes it harder to assess the consequences of such activities for employment relations and organisational functioning.

Of course, questions of motivation are complex, and have often been unfashionable in sociology. ‘Motives’ are sometimes seen as justifications rather than causes of action and are associated with overly individualistic or psychological explanations of action (Campbell, 1996; Mills, 1940). However, theories of social practices do have a sustained focus on questions of motivation and affect, exploring how practices are ‘teleoaffective’ structures shaping both people’s goals and the emotions necessary to realise them. So, we might expect practices theory to address grudging acts and the ambiguity and ambivalence they entail. Yet, curiously, such issues are barely covered – a lacunae that is connected to a series of explanatory difficulties identified by critics.

Grudging Acts and Practices Theories

Theories of practices offer a distinctive approach to theorising motivation, where the emphasis is less on individuals’ ‘own “psychological” motivation’ for pursuing practices, but rather on how motivations are ‘“embedded into” social practices themselves’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 120). Similarly, affects are not the interior properties of individuals but rather properties of the ‘affective “attunement” or mood of the respective practice’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 119). Recruitment into a practice is seen as decisive for motivations and affects, a focus that sometimes presents individuals as the ‘carriers’ of practices in a deliberate eschewal of individualism. But where does this leave the question of people’s varying motivations and commitment within practices? How are we to understand the disengaged, resentful, perfunctory or cynical performance of practices? It is hard to find much attention to these questions: a neglect bound up with a series of difficulties that commentators identify in practices theory approaches.

Practices theory has simply not devoted much attention to why people might develop a variable engagement to the normative steering of goals within practices, or lack the necessary affects which practices are supposed to generate. This is not to suggest that grudgingness represents the dominant mode through which people engage with practices (or their elements), but grudging acts are commonplace. The degree of support for given practices is an empirical question, but too great an emphasis on practices as teleoaffective regimes makes it difficult to acknowledge grudgingness, let alone analyse why it occurs or how it affects practices. This neglect is surprising because, as Schatzki (2013: 44) notes, when there is a ‘loss of belief in governing ends’ practices can become ‘pointless in the eyes of practitioners’, which can lead to their dissolution. The question of how ‘practices (are made to) matter for people’ or why some practices are ‘more meaningful, attractive and intense’ than others is important for understanding why practices appear, change or disappear, which is fundamentally a question of ‘how people navigate a world of practices’ (Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016: 61).

However, it is difficult to address this question within practices theory because the focus is on how goals and affects are shaped by participation in a practice. It is ‘the conventions and the standards of practice [which] steer behaviour’ and so practices ‘rather than individual desires . . . create wants’ (Warde, 2005: 137). Practices shape motivations, which is also where ‘affects come into play’ because there must be ‘affective incentive’ to participate in a practice: so, to understand ‘how practices work’ we have to understand ‘the affects which are built into the practices’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 120, 116). The right emotions are necessary for successful performances, steering people to ‘execute practices in a certain way’ through the ‘feeling rules which belong to specific practices’ (Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016: 72). Such goals and affects are not static: they evolve through participatory ‘careers’. Experts develop different and stronger commitments than novices, for example. However, such shifts are almost entirely framed in terms of the teleoaffective organisation of the practice. For Reckwitz (2017: 119), as ‘soon as a person is competent to perform a practice and is “carried away” by it, she incorporates and actualises its mood’. There is little consideration of the opposite process, where practitioners’ pursuit of a practice becomes half-hearted or recalcitrant, or where they feel disillusioned, cynical or resentful. And the idea that recruitment into a practice is decisive in shaping wants and desires makes more sense for some practices (recruitment into ballroom dancing for example) than others, such as recruitment into jobs, where people are often less straightforwardly ‘carried away’. ³ To address ‘how practices work’ requires greater focus on the variable nature of commitment – because the uneven nature of people’s motivation and affect is consequential for recruitment into practices and performances within them. Yet practices theory tends to brush over such issues.

By showing how practices generate a variety of goals and incentives, we can see – if we squint – that practices theory could address why people engage in practices grudgingly: why they ‘put up’ with unsatisfactory situations, and ‘go along’ with activities they would rather not participate in. The ‘teleoaffective structure’ of practices provides ‘a range of normativised and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks’ (Schatzki, 2002: 80), so practices theory situates acts, including grudging ones, within the wider hierarchy of motivation and commitment occurring within practice ‘bundles’. This helps explain the grudging performance of ‘maintenance’ tasks for example. Similarly, the teleoaffective nature of practices is fundamentally a normative conception of practices where ‘actors share a practice if their actions are appropriately regarded as answerable to norms of correct or incorrect practice’ (Rouse, 2007: 529). People’s actions are steered – and constrained – through mutual normative accountability, and because ‘humans sanction violations of normativity in all sorts of ways’ people tend to perform the ‘actions that are acceptable or enjoined’ within practices (Schatzki, 2017: 33). Grudging participation can occur through such normative pressures. Practices also steer behaviour through more conventional power dynamics, and Watson (2017: 179) argues for a greater emphasis on how performances are aligned through managerial practices of ‘objective setting, managing, disciplining and incentivising’. Nonetheless, practices theory has concepts – such as governance bundles (Schatzki, 2015) – which focus on managerial regulation. These too could address mixed motivations within practices. So, the real question is why the grudging performance of practices is so rarely addressed.

In fairness, it is acknowledged that individuals may not always be ‘successfully “interpellated” into the underlying motivation structure’ of a practice, with uneven engagement partly a question of ‘lacking corresponding desires and fascinations’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 120). Nor does a normative conception of practices mean that people ‘always do what is acceptable or enjoined’, only that they ‘know that they are supposed to do’, which does not prevent them sometimes acting antithetically – or grudgingly (Schatzki, 2017: 33). But there is a lack of focus on how this uneven engagement with practices comes about. This neglect is connected to a number of explanatory problems that critics identify in practices theories, problems that make it difficult to explore how people’s engagement in practices varies or is shaped by grudgingness.

One problem rests in focusing on emotions as the property of practices. This creates a danger of seeing the affective order of practices as ‘homogenous’ and incorporated by practitioners ‘in an equal manner’, and so failing to allow for the variation in how participants respond to ‘feeling rules’ in practices (Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016: 66). Yet as grudging acts show, people sometimes ‘go through the motions’ of practice goals without the requisite affects. While analysts do acknowledge ‘different types and intensities of affects within practices’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 120, 116) such variation is generally characterised as a feature of a given practice rather than a feature of the wider values, commitments and trajectories of the individuals who perform it. For external critics (Thévenot, 2001: 65, 74), practices theory lacks sufficient focus on the ‘pragmatic versatility required in everyday life’: creating an inability to explore how engagement in any practice is part of a wider ‘dynamic confrontation with the world’, in which people navigate practices in ‘idiosyncratic and path-dependent’ ways and where their engagements always entail an ‘evaluative process’. But even sympathetic internal commentators acknowledge a neglect of the ‘evaluative and reflexive stance that actors are capable of taking towards their own practices’ (Halkier, 2020; Welch et al., 2020: 443–444). Too great a focus on how practices generate goals and shape affect creates difficulties in explaining the variation in how people engage with practices. For Schatzki (2017: 39) addressing this problem requires shifting some of the focus away from practices themselves. Because a ‘given action is at once a component of some practice and a part of some life’, practices represent only one organising principle for action, so to fully understand what people do – including their grudging acts – requires a broader analysis of the relationship of people to practices and how they take up and carry on the same practices differently (Schatzki, 2017: 27, 28, 36).

One potential solution is to focus on how any individual represents ‘the intersection of practices’ (Warde, 2005: 144). Those performing a practice often have very different external engagements, which helps explain practitioners’ varying motives and affect. But despite establishing the individual as ‘the unique crossing point of practices’ (Reckwitz, 2002: 256), there is relatively little work on this with a lack of focus on how practitioners pursue diverse routes through practices, or on how practices are shaped by such trajectories (Hui, 2017). As Hui (2017: 61) notes, ‘more remains to be understood’ about how people’s trajectories across practices affect variations ‘in the performance of specific practices’. Yet if we want to fully understand ‘how practices work’ the question of trajectories is important, because while people represent the intersection of practices, practices also represent the intersection of people.

To explore the sometimes grudging nature of people’s engagements in given practices requires us to think more fully about how participation in any given social setting or practice is shaped by routes across other spheres of activity. Yet this feature of practices remains under-explored, even though such trajectories and trailing connections affect practitioners’ reflexivity and evaluative stances, and their commitment to and motivation within practices. Grudging acts are, after all, bound up with people’s reflexive and evaluative stances on their practices and people’s routes across practices affect both their reflexivity on, and uneven engagement to practices. Being a full participant in a practice sometimes mean we take it for granted, but participating in different practices and ‘contrasting and comparing experiences’ allows ‘a leeway of reflection and change’ (Dreier, 1999: 13). As ‘subjects move across contexts, their modes of participation vary’ and they ‘must act, think, and feel in flexible ways’ so their ‘conduct can be no mere execution of schemata, procedures and rules’ (Dreier, 1999: 10). As a result, Dreier (1999: 13) argues, we should focus on how trajectories across practices affect how ‘we re-flect, i.e. re-consider, re-evaluate and re-configure our participations and concerns’. Yet our evaluative stances on our practices, and our sometimes grudging performance of them, is not just a question of how comparison and reflection is enabled by routes across practices (important though this is) but also about how we bring broader values, responsibilities and feelings to bear across settings. This is a question of how people practically and morally weigh up their different engagements, and how to act for the best across them, in relation to their enduring sense of what they most value.

Such evaluative stances return us to the normative basis of practices. For Sayer (2011: 12), as:

participants in social life, we hold each other responsible for our actions . . . individuals expect each other to take responsibility for doing certain things and we generally try to make things go well – sometimes just for ourselves, sometimes for others too.

Yet despite practices theories framing practices in terms of normative accountability, there is comparatively little discussion of practitioners’ evaluative stances on their own or others’ practices, or how they actually make each other accountable. This is partly because social interaction is ‘relatively under-analysed in practice theoretical discussions’ (Halkier, 2020: 400). But to fully grasp practitioners’ reflexive and evaluative stances on their practices – and why these might be grudging – requires a greater focus on how values emerge from:

the ongoing mutual and self-monitoring that occurs in everyday interactions with others, imagining what our behaviour implies for others and how it will be viewed by others, and generalising from one kind of moral experience to other situations which seem similar. (Sayer, 2005a: 951–952)

Addressing the force of normativity in social life requires us to think ‘less in terms of norms, rules, procedures, or indeed decisions and injunctions about what one ought to do’ and ‘more in terms of the ongoing flow of continual concrete evaluation’, a stance that also focuses on how our ‘ethical sentiments are primarily related to our sense of harm and flourishing’ (Sayer, 2011: 97, 20). Here the things we value are based on our ‘repeated particular experiences and valuations of actions’, which come to guide our actions, as ‘habits of thinking to which we become committed or emotionally attached’ (Sayer, 2011: 26–27). It is necessary to see how the logic of specific social settings or practices is shaped by people’s trailing connections across different spheres of activity, but we also need to understand how people’s sense of how to act for the best is shaped by their moral evaluation of their interconnected responsibilities and commitments within their broader understanding of what matters to them.

Any analysis of grudging acts must acknowledge how collective practices steer behaviour and shape goals and affects. However, current formulations of practices theory struggle to locate how grudgingness, or indeed any kind of ambivalent engagement within practices emerges. To address the significance of grudging acts requires a focus on several factors: people’s varying engagement with practices; how practices are shaped by practitioners’ trajectories across multiple practices; and practitioners’ evaluative stance on the practices they perform. However, practices theory does not sufficiently grapple with these issues. As a result, there is limited analysis of how varying engagements might affect performances or shape how practices are sustained or transformed and so, ultimately, too limited an understanding of how ‘practices work’.

Conclusion

This article argues for a greater focus on the resentful, half-hearted or disengaged engagements on which social arrangements sometimes depend. Grudgingness is under-explored and its significance for how social arrangements persevere, change or founder is insufficiently examined. Yet grudging acts show the complex nature of our engagement with the social arrangements we help sustain, however reluctantly or cynically. Life is full of grudging acts: chores undertaken unenthusiastically for family, forbearance with irritating acquaintances, excruciating social events attended half-heartedly, resented activities performed by rote in institutional contexts (in school, welfare and government bureaucracies) or in the workplace. They are a routine feature of social life so accounts of social arrangements should address the role that grudgingness plays within them.

Why foreground grudging practices? One reason is because grudgingness is commonplace, and worthy of attention simply through its ubiquity. But the neglect of the grudging nature of people’s engagements is also associated with some recurrent explanatory problems in social analysis. Failure to retain analytical focus on the ambiguity of many acts in the workplace has often meant a failure to address the complexity of workers’ practices, making it harder to assess their consequences for workplace arrangements. In practices theories, despite a sustained focus on how practices shape motivations, a neglect of grudging motivation or affect makes it harder to understand practitioners’ varying evaluation of and commitment to practices, features important for explaining change and dissolution in practices themselves.

Foregrounding grudging acts helps place emphasis on some overlooked aspect of social experience. Sociology often struggles to address the unmarked and the ‘inbetween’, but greater attention to grudging acts helps explore the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of our motives and commitments, and the complicated question of how reluctance, resentment, cynicism and disengagement affect the performance of collective social arrangements. A greater focus on grudging acts also helps examine how people’s engagements and obligations in one sphere of activity may depend upon their commitments in other spheres. Finally, a focus on grudging acts helps foreground our complex evaluative stances on our engagements and how we practically and morally weigh up our commitments within a broader sense of our overall situation and what matters to us.