Workplace emotions in postcolonial spaces: Enduring legacies, ambivalence, and subversion

Abstract

This article analyses the emotions of work in postcolonial spaces, where enduring racial tensions, arising from white privilege, continue to shape people's experiences. Based on a close scrutiny of two interview extracts from field work in India, the article applies a postcolonial perspective to illustrate that colonial dynamics and attendant power relations are daily reproduced or subverted at work. Postcolonial arguments are extended to organizational emotions, by demonstrating how everyday narratives, including those told to researchers, uncover a wide range of experiences of race that may go unnoticed or may not surface through more structured methods. Ambivalence and subversion feature in these extracts as core experiences of emotionally charged postcolonial relations, which are often reproduced or experienced unconsciously. The enduring legacies of colonial history on organizational spaces are discussed, with implications for the emotions of working across racial and geographic boundaries. In a globalized work environment, such legacies may go unnoticed, but their effects are manifest in individual experiences.

Theory as Fantasy: Emotional Dimensions to Grounded Theory

“…The researcher is challenged to tolerate paradoxical feelings and (at the same time) to complete the task that prompted the feelings in the first place. Emotional resonances are integral to the research encounter (Prasad, ; Ulus, ). By paying attention to defences, to projective processes, to the anxieties of doing research, unconscious emotions can become available for interrogation and interpretation by the researcher (Ogden, ).…”

Casualties of debate: A critique of the sociology of emotion

“…Studies of emotion, then, are rooted in scientific objectification and in cultural/body politics, where emotion has always been and continues to be understood as distinctly feminine: the exact equivalent, courtesy of dichotomy, of illogical/irrational/unreasonable, weak, lacking, disruptive, disorderly, uncontrolled/unruly, primitive, risky, animallike, and alien (Ahmed, 2014;Gardner, 2003;Chandler, 2014Chandler, , 2016Holmes, 2004;Lutz, 1986;Munt, 2007). Because emotion transforms stratification and social values into characteristics of certain bodies (Ahmed, 2014), to subjugate emotion and police emotional regimes (Lambevski, 2016;Reddy, 2001) is to subjugate and police women and all things deemed "feminine" (i.e., "less white," "less heterosexual," "less able-bodied," and "less Western" [Ahmed, 2014;Garland-Thomson, 2005;Lutz, 1986;Munt, 2007;Ulus, 2015]). To this list, one might add "poor," as poverty is written on and in the body (Adair, 2002) and is understood as the result of similar deficiencies in morality, selfdiscipline, management, and strength (Royce, 2019).…”

Bridging the contradictions of social constructionism and psychoanalysis in a study of workplace emotions in India

“…When properly analysed, however, these disclosures can furnish valuable insights into the emotional dynamics in sensitive encounters unfolding within fraught postcolonial spaces (e.g. Ulus, 2015) and can be considered postcolonial ethical practices in their own right.…”