This article studies volunteerism through the phenomenon of dropping out. By ascertaining the achievements, difficulties, and dilemmas of volunteers at the Center for Assistance to Victims of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, we explored the process of dropping out as an encore to understanding the meaning of volunteerism that ends with abandoning a desired activity. On the basis of a longitudinal study, we argue that dropping out is not always a product of waning motivation-for many volunteers, dropping out was extremely difficult-but rather the outcome of unabridged discrepancies between "ought" and "actual" experiences. Volunteers expect to feel good about themselves. In contrast, the organization expects them to act as free agents who can independently manage feelings of pain and self-doubt. When such discrepancies between expectations and reality occur, feelings of anger and disappointment set in. As a result, devoted volunteers drop out in order to preserve their positive self-feeling. It is our contention that in order to understand the nature of volunteers' dropout and perseverance, close attention should be paid to processes of self-regulation in the context of the specific relations between the volunteers and the organization.
Emotional labor is what workers do with their feelings to comply with organizational role requirements. This article explores the concept in professional organizations, examining the psychotherapeutic discourse of objectivity, neutrality, and care as feeling rules. Based on a study in a residential psychiatric facility in Israel, the authors found that counselors labored to display aspired professional feelings despite the absence of memos, protocols, or training sessions. Who told them to do so? How did they know what to feel? The authors claim that therapeutic discourse constitutes professional feelings through the use of specific concepts and techniques. However, the term professional feelings disguises a complicated process of negotiation between different ideologies. The difference between two groups of counselors indicates that both scientific and intersubjective knowledge represent modes of emotional control. The authors claim, thus, that emotional labor in professional service organizations is the product of contested professional discourse.
Few days after the tragic events of September 11, Osama bin Laden invited President George W. Bush to convert to Islam. This article explores this fantasmatic "conversion offer" in order to demonstrate the hidden workings of collective hatred and its ambivalent mechanisms. Based on previous work (Yanay, 1989(Yanay, , 1995(Yanay, , 1996, this article claims that collective hatred signifies a failure to mediate between similarity and difference, closeness and separation, isolation and connectedness, at the same time that national and religious groups aspire to be included and be recognized as part of humanity.Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, hatred has become very topical. The concept has been circulated from the White House and the media to our streets, homes, and hearts. It has suddenly appeared in our conversations, ideas, and feelings. Many were surprised to discover "the strong hatred toward America." Others claimed they were not. The concept of hatred is now being freely and abundantly used in lieu of words such as violence and aggression. The shift from aggression to hatred suggests that in times of struggle and conflict, people search for inner emotional motives to explain acts they find hard to conceive and forgive. Yet, the entry of hatred into our daily speech does not help clarify the ways in which hatred works. The wide range of meanings and definitions, and the various contexts in which the concept of hatred is invoked, only contribute to its opaqueness.During the last few years, I have been conducting research on the concept of collective hatred. The vast amount of talk about hatred in our current situation seems to me to provide intriguing materials to study. I view hatred as a social product that is constituted by specific beliefs and values that people internalize as part
In light of a study in Israel, which found that 28% of secular girls and 63% of religious girls expressed strong hatred toward Arabs (Cal and Maislees 1989), this paper explores the difference in emotional experience between the two groups of girls. Through in‐depth interviews, it examines the meaning of national hatred as knowledge produced within a particular cultural discourse. In the case of the religious girls, feelings of hatred are produced through defensive emotion work aimed at securing the position of female religious subjectivity. The experience of the secular girls shows that when no single discourse is afforded privileged status, dissonant forms of knowledge stimulate the transformation of hatred into understanding and taking the role of the other. In both cases, the paper demonstrates the interplay between national discourse (secular and religious), emotional experience (of hatred), and the construction of (women's) subjectivity.
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