The Crusade repertoire draws on imagery of the parliamentary workplace as a battleground where representatives wage royal battles and demise is a constant possibility. The repertoire constitutes the events that transpire in the parliamentary workplace as moral matters, of symbolic importance and related to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘life’ and ‘death’. Although there are ‘sides’, just as in The Game repertoire where there are ‘teams’, within The Crusade repertoire the sides also invoke notions of traitors, and the battles take place in an environment of subterfuge where rules are few. The battles waged on this field are part of a long-term campaign and seldom are they waged singularly. When a campaigner does initiate a cause with little collegial support, it is on behalf of some other group.
Participants in this research project did not directly use the word ‘crusade’ in reference to their work as they did with The ‘Game’ and ‘Performance’ repertoires. What participants did refer to were the ‘values’ that were a part of their work, their
responsibility as ‘representative’ of other people and causes, and of emotions that drove their action in ways not immediately self-serving.
Institutional knowledge and practice
When parliamentarians deploy The Crusade repertoire, there is no talk of enjoying the interchange as though it were a form of entertainment, as there often is when The Game repertoire is deployed, although other parliamentarians are occasionally cast as the sort of people who enjoy ‘seeing blood’. The Crusade repertoire constitutes as institutional knowledge the understanding that interaction between parliamentarians is battle, with the possibility that workers will be wounded, often, but not inevitably, with fatal consequences for their parliamentary career. They make sense of their emotional response to events in the workplace as phenomena that come from the ‘inner essence’ of their ‘being’, and of a ‘compulsion’ to act, regardless of concern for their own survival.
Within this repertoire, institutional practice involves attacks that can be ‘brutalising’. Whether or not the wounded survive a defeat depends on their ability to recover, sometimes quickly and at other times over a longer period. In the case of one MP who was rumoured to have had some sort of moment of ‘weakness’, a participant commented:
Now, in their case, it would be a convention against mentioning those sort of things nearly all the time but … because they so obviously recovered, when I say recovered I don’t even know what it was, but they have been so competent and so tough that it’s almost okay again [to attack them in the House] (Parliamentarian C).
The outcome of the deployment of this repertoire is that attacks are not of minor or superficial importance, as they are in The Game. Rather than accounting for the institutional practice of fighting as ‘not emotionally stressful’, as in The Game repertoire, The Crusade’s fighting or persecution of fellow parliamentarians results instead in a loss of confidence and standing by the person who has been the subject of attack. One participant recounted an experience in which a fellow party member was interrogated in the House over a situation where their honesty was called to question.
Now, I don’t think that anyone ever found [out anything] but it certainly looked a bit dodgy. [They were] plainly ashamed of [themselves], internally. I don’t know whether [they were] ashamed because, I don’t think there was anything dishonest, but they just thought that they had been such a mug … But even
though the rules say that’s it, you are not allowed to mention it again, just about every second or third time they would get up to speak or say anything [opponents would allude to the incident and]… it would just whack them because it was something they didn’t feel good about … and so that they would be trying to ignore it, trying to speak, but you could tell, we could tell sitting beside them … [they] lost half their gas. That was, again, nothing effective about their attacks it was simply because they didn’t feel good about themselves and therefore couldn’t overcome it (Parliamentarian C).
The attacks launched here are not of the same nature as the attacks launched in a game. It is parliamentarians’ sense of ‘self’ that suffers. This has implications for the experience of emotion understood through The Crusade repertoire. Inability to fend off an attack in The Game does not result in shame but may result in embarrassment at a person’s lack of ability or weakness. One MP, deploying The Game repertoire, comments on their verbal exchange with another MP:
… I do kind of slap myself a little bit sometimes for my behaviour because I did enjoy it I’m afraid and the thing was with it was that it was a game (Parliamentarian A).
Shame and embarrassment are two distinct emotions (Parrott, 2003, p. 34). Expressing embarrassment suggests a flaw in presentation, a momentary lapse. What is at least alluded to through The Game repertoire in the above extract is embarrassment. Shame, on the other hand, is linked more closely with ‘who’ a person is in moral terms (Parrott, 2003, p. 34). The expression of shame, therefore, is closely linked with notions of the self and of the morality of one’s actions and hence is significant in identification of The Crusade repertoire in the previous extract.
The Game and The Crusade repertoires share some terms and tropes given that the language employed during encounters in sport often have aspects in common with the language of war. Both repertoires suggest a level of conflict between people wanting to be victorious in their goals. Only The Crusade repertoire employs terms to do with mortality.
I suspect that humans have evolved institutions that try and test people – I mean one day they might have life and death responsibility and if they quiver in the headlights you don’t want them (Parliamentarian C).
Another central difference between the two repertoires is The Crusades’ invocation of moral purpose. In talking about another party’s repeal of a particular act, a parliamentarian commented:
… They were punching their fists in the air and it was like a real victory … even though we had no hope of defending against it because we were such a small opposition. I knew that none of them knew what was going to happen to the people that I went to Parliament to represent and that’s what upset me. It wasn’t so much that they had won and we had lost it was just that sense of helplessness knowing that they didn’t know what they were going to do to people … I don’t actually believe that they were even thinking about that as politicians because that bill was written for them by [a lobby group]. There is no way that their officials wrote that bill (Parliamentarian A).
To suggest that a party has allowed an interest group to write their policy is to call into question the morality of the party and its actions. On the other hand, the MP claims the personal experience of being ‘upset’, positioning themselves as caring in relation to the instrumentality of the other party.
The moral nature of parliamentary work is not only to do with honesty but is also to do with loyalty and the causes that the parliamentarian takes up. The Crusade repertoire produces institutional understanding of decisions as matters that are about loyalty and hence as particularly precarious ones. The following participant comments on how they make decisions about what to support and what not to support.
Someone who’s picked you up when you are feeling bruised, who has come in here and said ‘you look terrible. Let’s go and have a cup of tea’, and when the time comes … something you don’t have a strong view about but they do, your personal view would be the opposite to the way they want you to go, what do you do?
I: Have you been in that situation?
Oh, I think every politician does it frequently, whether you know it. I: How do you usually decide?
There isn’t a rule. I think some politicians make a rule. I think some of them just say ‘lord who will trump all’ and simplifies the whole issue for them. Some will say ‘what’s in my best interests’? Some will say ‘what does purity require of me’. Purity of intellectual assessment. I don’t know. I know the way that I would normally resolve it would be, there’s some bottom line things that I won’t vote for, stuff that I think is bad but where I… often you are making a decision on very limited information and very fast … I think in most walks of life there are circumstances like this but politics is a very – it’s much more lonely than usual. Most social structures have hierarchy that resolve a lot of that, ‘it’s not
my decision’. But in parties, things are always – because the nominal hierarchy has no power other than constant persuasion (Parliamentarian C).
The parliamentarian takes part in a complex weighing up of potential decisions and their moral consequences. Loyalty is not a simple matter. There are a number of ways that different decisions could be subsequently understood as expressions of loyalty. The question is more about whom and what the parliamentarian is loyal to; ‘purity of intellectual assessment’ or ‘my best interests’. Decisions involving morality are ‘lonely’ ones.
Authenticating emotional experience
In spite of the similarities between The Game and The Crusade repertoires, it is important to differentiate between the two because they carry significantly different implications for the understanding of events, emotions and identity. Deployment of The Crusade repertoire allows for, even calls for and glorifies, the expression of emotion in the parliamentary workplace. Understood through this repertoire, emotion is ‘authentic’. The deployment of The Crusade repertoire requires parliamentarians to understand the things they do at work quite differently than The Game and The Performance. They understand their actions as ones that are motivated by a ‘genuine’ self and that it is the emotions of self that direct their decision-making.
[My membership in the party is based on] a basic political philosophy, which you do feel emotional attachment to. The reason that I’m in [this] party is not because academically I think it’s the best thing but emotionally I feel that the things that we do are helping the people that we represent (Parliamentarian E).
Understood through The Crusade repertoire, parliamentarians consider their own emotions in relation to workplace experiences as proof to themselves and to others that they are not involved in a game or a performance but in the serious moral business of a virtuous campaign. This repertoire produces an understanding of emotion as phenomena that are ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’.
The conflict that I personally had was something between something deeply … human to me, a part of who and what I am, as compared to a cold, hard piece of law that we were making decisions upon that affected the [community] … For right or for wrong I felt compelled through some kind, form, of deep connection … but suddenly something strikes you as being very, very important, beyond anything I should feel about it, and that I would go blindly with (Parliamentarian B).
Terms and tropes to do with an incontrovertible need to act a certain way are indicative of The Crusade repertoire. This MP constitutes the moral crusade as an issue connected to something ‘deep’, a part of ‘who and what’ they are. The conflict or tension here is not between themselves and a parliamentarian foe but within themselves.
The Crusade repertoire allows parliamentarians to claim victory on behalf of those people less powerful than themselves. It also allows for feelings of pride, self- importance, even righteousness.
I mean, I have just had a victory so I am feeling very pleased with myself. A woman … came to see me about it – [an inequitable consequence of the benefit payment structure]. She came to see me last year – we’ve now got her [situation sorted] But we’ve also got the government to announce a change in policy and this will apply to everyone from 1 July next year. So we have had a major victory. But if I hadn’t done what I did it wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t brought it up in the first place and stuck to her guns it wouldn’t have happened. If we hadn’t had a government that was prepared to make some changes it wouldn’t have happened. So it requires a combination of the three. I: Did it require some emotion about the situation as well?
Absolutely, because you had to actually convince officials … and he agreed with me that it wasn’t fair and I think that once you get that sort of feeling that it is not fair then you all become committed to finding a solution. To actually feel that something is not fair you have to have some emotion, right? (Parliamentarian A).
This parliamentarian’s ability to claim a ‘victory’ illustrates how The Crusade repertoire can be deployed to understand action. The fight is a moral battle for justice in this situation, justice for the woman involved and for other people like her who may be, in their understanding, similarly disadvantaged.
Neither of the other repertoires involves the invocation of ‘genuine’, ‘deep’, feelings in the way that The Crusade repertoire does. The emotional dimensions of workplace experience are understood as something sourced from ‘the very essence’ of an ‘inner being’. Through The Crusade repertoire, parliamentarians can posit their commitment to this ‘authentic’ emotion as responsible for their action (a vote in favour of the bill) knowing that how they are subsequently ‘seen’ by others may be at odds with how they see themselves.
No, not really. One. I will tell you this one because I think it’s a very good example … At the very essence of my inner being is an abhorrence of [the subject of this bill] … There was a side of me that found it despicable … I mean I felt repulsed … I hated that bill. … I still felt sick voting for it, I really did. Nothing is going to change that. … so [some people] interpret my voting for that bill … [as] support [for it] … which I find deeply offensive. But that’s because they haven’t bothered asking (Parliamentarian A).
In this account, the battle is between how an affirmative vote in the House may be understood by others ‘as promotion and support’ when the parliamentarian’s understanding of self as a moral person means they find such a suggestion ‘deeply offensive’. Yet they are willing to run the risk of misrepresentation through a ‘deeper’ commitment to a ‘greater good’. Thus, the account establishes emotions as compelling and as authentic guides to action.
Like the other repertoires already considered, The Crusade repertoire constitutes the feeling rules of the parliamentary workplace in particular ways. It creates a feeling rule that suggests the parliamentarian’s anger, compassion and confidence in the propriety of their actions are all emotions that ‘ought’ to find expression in the workplace. The association between emotion and self creates the conditions whereby workplace emotional experiences are taken to support claims to the vocational authenticity of occupational identity. That authenticity is demonstrated by positioning through The Crusade repertoire. It is through The Crusade repertoire that the parliamentarian is able to meet the feeling rule to ‘be’ both passionate ‘and’ rational.