Learning the Emotion Rules of Communicating Within a Law Office: An Intern Constructs a Professional Identity Through Emotion Management

Abstract

This article explores different types of emotion a student experiences as she interns at a public defender’s office and proposes several emotion rules based on her experience. After a literature review that locates emotions within the identity-construction process, the author analyzes data from reflective questionnaires to identify various emotions this student experienced that serve as a basis for inductively formulating the rules. Following a discussion of the rules, the article concludes with implications of this research for educators and newcomers to workplace communication environments.

Taking a Rhetorical Perspective on Emerging Communication Practice: Pedagogy as Theory-Building Scholarship

“…Professional uses of implicit forms of reasoning and tacit knowledge are well documented in this selection of articles, including emotional content (Casado-Molina et al, 2022; Pickering, 2018; Xu & Wu, 2020). Important communications are no longer exclusively textual, and many authors addressed the specifics of visual display (Jones et al, 2020; Kernbach et al, 2015; Laidroo, 2019; Melis & Aresu, 2022; Toth, 2013) and narrative structure (Aggerholm, 2014; Laskin, 2018; Rawlins, 2014; Yang, 2013).…”

Emotion, Rhetoric, and Entrepreneurial Experience: A Survey of Start-Up Community Membership

“…Indeed, emotion has been positioned as a typical response to professional communication (Schriver, 2012), a perceived weakness in the writing of MBA students (Lentz, 2013), a means of persuasion available for use by organizational leaders (Venus et al, 2013), and a positive response to managerial humor (Wijewardena et al, 2017). Additional studies (Pickering, 2018, 2019) focus on how students holding internships navigate emotional rules as they construct professional identities and “transition to workplace communication environments” (2018, p. 200).…”

Negotiating Ethos: An Army Corps of Engineers Resource Manager Persuades a Community to Protect a Recreational Lake Area

“…Furthermore, Edwards’s reflective observations on his own communicative processes contribute insights into complex communication choices often not available from organizational representatives in retrospect; this rhetor reveals that the identification process is nonlinear and recursive (Pickering, 2018). This textual grounding of analysis (Meisenbach & Feldner, 2011, p. 564) allows for a strong connection among theory, context, and praxis (Meisenbach & Feldner, 2011) so useful for the fields of organizational communication as we work to make implicit knowledge more explicit (Cyphert et al, 2019).…”