Bureaucratic Heartbeats: Knowledge Production and Emotions in the Norwegian Agriculture Agency

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which knowledge was produced at Landbruksdirektoratet, the Norwegian Agriculture Agency (NAA), a technocratic and bureaucratic government institution in the Norwegian Welfare state. Based on seven months of fieldwork at the NAAs offices in Oslo. Knowledge production is investigated as a process in which there are no clear boundaries between spheres such as politics and science, private and public, nature and culture, and thought and emotion. The daily activities of the employees at the NAA included aspects from all of these spheres. This thesis looks into how the employees negotiated discourses on emotion, as they engaged in the production of knowledge. It is concerned with what the NAA employees regarded as emotion, how they regarded emotions, and how this played out in knowledge production. The employees at the NAA were concerned with a private – professional balance in their role as government bureaucrats. However, they were also engaged as whole persons in the issues they worked with. This created ambivalences and tensions that will be discuss in this thesis. Fieldwork was conducted among employees who worked with land resources, climate and environment, so these topics will be frequently mentioned. I will be concerned with negotiations of discourses on emotion, and negotiations of knowledges about nature and agriculture. It will be argued that these processes are intertwined. Special attention will be paid to the concept of mandate, and how the employees used it in different contexts. Then, how the employees formed alliances for knowledge production. Then, to practices of care among the NAA employees, and how this played its part in knowledge production and in the negotiations of discourses on emotion.