Corporate Emotions and Emotions in Corporations

Abstract

Although sociology of organizations never banned emotions from its field of inquiry, first the sociology of emotions elevated them to central research objects. Disparate research on various types of enterprises shows that both managers and employees are much more emotional than most scientists would care to admit. Under constant pressure not to display their fears, anxieties or worries, they have to balance a mixture of emotions attending solidarity and competition with their peers. Whereas managerial roles actually call for occasional displays of anger at subordinates, anger is beyond the pale for subordinates who are supposed to swallow anger, humiliation or fear. Capitalist labour, no matter whether this of managers or that of workers, exacts a heavy emotional toll. While in handling their work managers rely heavily on the emotional support of their peers and secretaries, employees spin nostalgic stories or take to subversive workplace humour. Against this broader perspective, Arlie Hochschild's research and its critique have focused exclusively on the workers' emotional toll. In centre of interest is emotional labour exacted by employers and the many ways of managing undesired feelingswhich this labour requires. Hochschild's critics stress that subordinates often find ways of evading supervision and playing with rules for emotional display, so that they are much less subject to emotion management than her research agenda implies. Although Hochschild's research and its echo produced the only coherent body of theory-guided research to emerge so far within the sociology of organizations under the influence of the sociology of emotions, the chapter ends with an argument that her valuable yet work-focused approach has become constraining in times of disjointed, turbulent capitalism. Social change demands that we enlarge our scope of inquiry to include the experience of lay-off and unemployment as well as work-unrelated emotions and the broader society into our purview.

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

“…Affect refers to the inextricable interplay of body and mind, corporeal and cognitive dispositions, of rational cognition and affective evaluation, of being affected and affecting others. In contrast to Massumi's () seminal work on affects we regard affects as bodily expressions which are always related to discursive contexts, socially produced, learnt and governed by social rules (Flam, ; Scheer, ; Wetherell, ). Additionally, the concept of affective labour differs from emotional labour introduced by Hochschild () as it contextualizes affects in the transformation of economies from material labour towards informatization of production and immaterial labour in the Global North.…”

Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and collective emotions in contentious politics

“…8 Aspects of this conceptualization are hardly novel, such as the notion that institutions can be analyzed in terms of the patterns of social relations that they encompass or in terms of cultural or discursive patternings (although the latter idea is perhaps not accepted across the board). But parallel arguments in terms of matrices of emotional transactions are much less common, at least in explicit and systematic form (for prominent exceptions in sociology and organizational analysis, see Hochschild 1983;Taylor 1995;Albrow 1997;Flam 2002; see also Emirbayer and Goodwin 1996;Emirbayer and Sheller 1999). It is our contention, nevertheless, that even established, institutionalized bundles of (political) practices include a constitutive emotional dimension, that they incorporate the latter very much into their own makeup and cannot be adequately understood in abstraction from it.…”

“Not Getting Any Because of Jesus”: The Centrality of Desire Management to the Identity Work of Gay, Celibate Christians

“…Since The Managed Heart, the study of the social lives of emotions has expanded greatly. Sociologists have talked about managing emotions like shame (Stein 2001), pride (Britt and Heise 2000), fear (Flam 2002;Walsh 2009), anger (Cancian and Gordon 1988;Gottschalk 2003), love (Jackson 1993), joy (Gottschalk 2003), and grief (Charmaz 1997;Lofland 1985). Jackson (1993), for example, explores cross-cultural constructions of love, arguing that this emotion cannot be understood independently from the sociohistorical context from which it is experienced.…”

“…Within the field of sociology in the last thirty years, we have finally begun to pay attention to the power of emotions. We have talked about managing emotions like shame (Stein ), pride (Britt and Heise ), fear (Flam ; Walsh ), anger (Cancian and Gordon ), love (Jackson ), and grief (Charmaz ; Lofland ). Certainly, we have explored sexuality (Collins ; Epstein ; Gamson and Moon ; Nagel ; Plummer ; Seidman ; Stein ) and intimacy (Giddens ; Holmes ; Jamieson ), but we have talked very little about the interconnected feelings of desire and lust (for one rare exception, see Green ).…”