Emotion in Organizations

Stephen Fineman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761966258, 9780761966241
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228210
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

`This is an insightful book... offers an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at work within organizations, but also offers ways forward for new researchers. [A]n original contribution to the area of occupational psychology. The book is appropriate for people who want to study organizational behaviour and occupational psychology. It is thought-provoking and practical? - Profbooks.com Reviews

This Second Edition contains key themes with all new contributors and is a completely separate work from the first. Emotion in Organization presents original work from leading scholars in the field, they engage with emotion as a qualitative phenomenon which shapes and is shaped by organizational life. Examining how emotion cannot be simply separated from thinking, judgment, decision-making and other so-called rational organizational processes, the book challenges us to build a passionate theory of organizations.

The introduction reviews the expansion of organizational emotion studies and their appeal to several social-scientific disciplines. Divided into four parts, the book reveals through stories, interviews, confessions, ethnographies and observations the way feeling and emotion lie at the heart of organizational functioning.

1 EMOTIONAL ARENAS REVISITED

STEPHEN FINEMAN

In the first edition of Emotion in Organization (1993) I characterized organizations as emotional arenas to capture the intense activity of lived emotion in organizational life. As emotional arenas, organizations bond and divide their members. Workaday frustrations and passions – boredom, envy, fear, love, anger, guilt, infatuation, embarrassment, nostalgia, anxiety – are deeply woven into the way roles are enacted and learned, power is exercised, trust is held, commitment formed and decisions made. Emotions are not simply excisable from these, and many other, organizational processes; they both characterize and inform them.

This, in effect, was the key message in the first edition, a theme that, at the time, was relatively muted in the study of organizations. The book developed the point in a number of different directions – emotionalizing the way meanings and order are created in organizations, the production and politics of social differences (gender, sexuality), the substance of organizational culture and change, and examining facets of emotional labour.

In looking once more into the emotional arena, what do we see? How have things developed in the intervening seven years? What might we applaud and what might we be more circumspect about? In considering these questions I do not propose a complete review of the diverse literatures on emotion and organizations – interested readers may like to refer to recent overviews in Fineman (1999), Pinder (1998) and Ashkenasy et al. (2000). In this chapter I will be partial and selective; I will also preview the chapters to come.

The expanding arena

Emotions have developed into something of a sub-discipline in the study of work and organizations. There are now emotion papers and symposia presented at major organizational and management conferences, as well as specialist web-based discussion groups. Professional associations of sociologists, both sides of the Atlantic, run forums dedicated to the study of emotions, reflecting a move towards a ‘passionate sociology’ (Game and Metcalf, 1996). Applied psychologists have explored the connection between emotion and motivation (George and Brief, 1996; Pinder, 1998), the consequences of affect and mood at work (Estrada et al., 1997; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) and emotional contagion, the ‘catching’ and passing-on of emotion (Doherty, 1998; Verbeke, 1997). Some aspects of this research have reached the popular management and psychological literature as emotionalized issues such as workplace envy, intimacy, harassment and stress. Emotional intelligence, in particular, has received considerable attention from organizational consultants and psychologists (such as Goleman, 1996; Abraham, 1999), a phenomenon I reflect upon in Chapter 6.

Aesthetics and emotion has been another area of concern. Our work lives are mediated and shaped by material objects – machines, technologies, rooms, books, walls, windows, cups, coffee machines. Indeed, some social theorists regard material objects as ‘actors’ in their own right in organizational relations (for example Callon, 1987; Latour, 1991). We often invest such objects or spaces with emotional qualities, reflecting our own identities and moods – ‘my miserable computer’, ‘my happy chair’, ‘that cosy room’, ‘this depressing building’, ‘that wretched fax machine’, ‘this beautiful book’, ‘that ugly corridor’. Such emotional/aesthetic experiences have been examined (for example by Gagliardi, 1999; Strati, 1999), where the aesthetic captures feelings of form or flow that are experienced from the places and objects where people work. The machines, office layout, colours, geographical setting, noise, music, task activities, food are objects of sound, sight, touch or smell that trigger feelings of ‘rightness’, discord, warmth, harshness or alienation (see Chapter 8).

Traditional psychoanalytical perspectives on workplace emotion have been relatively eclipsed by the growth of social constructionist approaches. Organizational psychoanalysts regard the organization as a cauldron of repressed thoughts, fantasies and desires (see for example Jacques, 1995; Amado, 1995; Gabriel, 1999). Unconscious defences about anxiety, fear, envy and hate are expressed as dysfunctional organizational agendas or practices, requiring the consultant’s ‘treatment’ – to expunge the ‘demon of irrationality’ (Gay, 1998: xviii). The social constructionist’s line is very different. At its extreme it refutes the idea that emotions are ‘in’ people, ready to be studied. What matters is how our sensations, thoughts and feelings are labelled and displayed, and that has everything to do with the social and cultural contexts that provide the rules and vocabularies of emotion. Emotions, therefore, are intersubjective, a product of the way systems of meaning are created and negotiated between people (Parrott and Harré, 1996; Griffiths, 1995).

Some social constructionists focus on how social norms and ‘feeling rules’ shape work behaviour (Scheff, 1990; Hochschild, 1983). In this view, different work organizations will inherit the wider emotion rules of the society of which they are a part (for example on shamefulness, embarrassment, pity, kindness), but they also adapt them to create their own codes of emotion propriety – such as what is ‘right’ for the medical doctor, the social worker, the hamburger salesperson, accountant or police officer. Sometimes the two different sources can be in tension – what the company or profession requires of the worker is very different from customary, societal, forms of emotional behaviour. Distress at work has to be disguised, attraction suppressed, annoyance left unspoken. Conflicts are especially revealed in situations where corporate emotional indoctrination is pervasive and transnational – such as McDonald’s insistence that staff in its Moscow branch should serve Big Macs with a smile, despite the wider cultural predilection to greet customers with a grimace. Or the ‘smiling training’ for Inuit employees of the Greenlandic Co-operative supermarket chain. The Inuit have no tradition of smiling or greeting others with a ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ (Jones, 1999).

There are social constructionists who prefer to look to the broader interrelationships between social groups (classes, occupations, elites), ‘structures’ which explain emotion-clusters and their effects. Shifts in the balance of power or status between interdependent social groups can generate fear or anxiety in one or more of the groups, emotions that signal that their vested interests are being threatened in some way (see Barbalet, 1995; Kemper, 1991). Resistance, rebellion and subjugation such as in worker lockouts, strikes and repressive controls can, in these terms, be traced to emotions – especially fear – arising from a loss or gain of power or control. We may view ‘smile strikes’ accordingly. A newspaper story tells of a Californian supermarket where unionized, female, shopworkers actively resisted being forced, under surveillance, to eye-contact customers and smile at them. They claimed it increased their exposure to sexual harassment from customers (Zeidler, 1998).

Reconciling perspectives?

Historically, emotion research has been imbued with biological and psychological determinism. It is important that organizational researchers should now give more attention to the social and relational context of emotion, and this book represents a shift in this direction. But we have moved a long way from unconscious forces at work and the organizational psychoanalyst’s couch. Arguably, a full exploration of emotion in organizations that fails to take into account individuals’ biographies and unconscious processes is as untenable as an account that ignores social structures and wider cultural/economic processes.

Researchers of emotion can (and do) duck these issues by claiming disciplinary allegiance (for example to psychotherapy, psychology, sociology or anthropology), or pointing to their preferred level of analysis – societal, group or individual. This, of course, is an old chestnut in social science, which is rarely dinted by exhortations to be interdisciplinary. Indeed, a recent special issue of the journal Human Relations attempted just such an emotion project. A call for papers which integrated psychodynamic (including psychoanalytic) theory with organization theory attracted relatively few submissions, of which even fewer were judged worthy of publication (Neumann and Hirschhorn, 1999).

One difficulty is that the psychoanalytic branch of psychodynamic theory has a language and metaphorical structure that is self-enclosed, hard to challenge or refute. There is also a clinical preoccupation with a limited range of emotions, mostly anxiety-associated. But integrating the psychological and the organizational/societal should be beyond bolting together different, staunchly defended, theoretical perspectives, a process that can often generate more epistemological heat than light. Ideally, we require theory that collapses the individual/organizational/social distinctions from the outset, and builds explanations interrelationally. To an extent the works of Giddens (1984, 1991) and Foucault (1970, 1979) do this, although they have yet to be widely exploited for emotionality. This does not preclude attempts at disciplinary eclecticism – or conversations across disciplines. For example, Gabriel (1998), a strong advocate of a psychoanalytic perspective on organizational emotions, offers a helpful critique of how Freudian frameworks need to incorporate social constructionist insights. More specifically, Long (1999) uses the psychoanalytic notion of social-defences against anxiety to explore consumerism as a societal discourse and practice. Conversely, we find some social constructionists able to engage with Freudian theory and essentialist notions of emotions – emotions we purportedly all share (Craib, 1995, 1998). There are also ‘mid range’ sociological theorists of emotion, such as Gibson (1997). Gibson takes it as axiomatic that the rational/hierarchical nature of organizational structures will produce certain emotions amongst its members, such as anger and fear; but, more locally, emotional meanings will be negotiated interpersonally through ‘conversational’ rituals, loyalties and power. Finally, John Elster’s writings on emotion are worthy of mention – a grand multidisciplinary journey through social psychology, history, neuroscience, fiction and the philosophy of science (Elster, 1999).

Labouring with emotional labour

Arlie Hochschild’s seminal work on emotional labour (Hochschild, 1979, 1983, 1993) rightly deserves a central place in organizational emotion theory. It has captured the attention of management and organizational scholars (see for example Morris and Feldman, 1996), and is addressed in two chapters in this book. Hochschild has shown that much work, especially face-to-face service (such as flight attendants, debt collectors, waitresses, secretaries, fast food operators) involves having to present the ‘right’ (that is, managerially prescribed) emotional appearance to the customer or client, and that involves real labour on the employee’s part. Sometimes the employee contract includes having to ‘feel good’ about the customer too. Organizations can ensure that employees more or less comply by refining their personnel selection methods, inculcating required scripts and regularly monitoring performance.

For frontline workers, the ‘emotional proletariat’ (Macdonald and Sirianni, 1996), smiling, being ‘nice’, ‘pleasant’, ‘happy’, ‘in control’, requires acting – either ‘surface’ or ‘deep’, according to Hochschild. The emotional labour required to achieve the prescribed ends involves, at best, feigning a convincing act that can be dropped during work breaks and at the end of the day. At worst it is stressful and identity confusing: ‘Who am I really?’; the disjuncture between displayed emotion and private feeling is severe. Hochschild has emphasized the psychological damage that this can cause, but other writers have been more circumspect. If we look across the studies of emotional labourers there is much to suggest that workers will often find ways of insulating themselves from the corporate scripts (see for example Wharton, 1999). Indeed, some are more than content to ‘fake in good faith’ in the service drama (Adelman, 1995).

Emotional labour and managing emotions are not restricted to low-skill service work. They can be found in the face-to-face work of doctors, psychiatrists, managers, teachers, nurses, police officers, professional carers, academic professors and paralegals (see for example Pierce, 1999; Brown, 1997; Leidner, 1999; Ashforth and Humphrey, 1995). Professional and organizational norms underpin what people in such roles should and should not display or feel. These are processes that define and reinforce deference patterns, worker hierarchies and power relations. Emotion work helps keep the organization organized; when emotion management fails, so can the organization. Copp (1998), for instance, shows how instructors in a sheltered workshop were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings and commitment about work, but found it impossible because of the boring, poorly paid assembly-line work offered to clients. The instructors struggled for organizational meaning and control and some experienced burnout.

Emotion work is a crucial to social regulation and, as such, it should not be left unquestioned. What degree of emotion engineering can we tolerate, even enjoy, and why? When is it a comforting part of social transactions and everyday rituals and when is it oppressive labour? Such questions will implicate structural and ideological factors. Gender expectations about workers, and the emotion traps that they can create, illustrate the point. For example, Martin describes the situation of the US policewoman:

On the street, they must not be too emotional in responding to volatile situations; yet the woman who conforms to the emotional display rules of policing (that is, is inexpressive) is regarded [by male officers] as unfeminine. (Martin, 1999: 124)

Similar tensions could be expected in other occupational settings where someone of the ‘wrong’ sex occupies the job: the male nurse, male midwife, male secretary, female engineer, female firefighter, or female building construction worker. Such people are having to work with (or against) gender emotion-stereotypes in meeting the expectations of their peers, superiors and subordinates, as well as of their ‘customers’. If we are concerned to democratize the workplace, how might we more effectively separate gender from ‘the job’? And if emotional labour is a key, but hidden, feature, should it not be acknowledged and financially remunerated like other aspects of employee labour? (see O’Brien, 1994; Steinberg, 1999).

In search of authenticity

What happens to the true self under regimes of emotion management? The ‘problem of authenticity’ is a recurring theme in the writings on emotional labour, a common premise being that the true, essential, self is compromised or consumed under certain emotion-management work regimes. A typically suggested remedy is to redesign the job in ways to permit more authentic expression. For some writers authenticity is a phenomenological matter – what we happen to feel to be authentic or inauthentic in our selves in a particular setting (see Chapter 10). For others, the issue is more a positivistic one – there is a core self ‘in there’ which represents the authentic person, yet camouflaged by the trappings of social convention.

But there are scholars who diverge from these interpretations, suggest...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Emotional Arenas Revisited
• Part I: Emotional Textures
• Part II: Appropriating and Organizing Emotion
• Part III: Working with Emotion
• Part IV: Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index