Abstract
The development of the sociology of emotions in the 1970s was expected to introduce an emotional dimension to other sociological specializations, even the study of purportedly rational, affectively neutral bureaucracies. Decades later, this new volume, edited by Barbara Sieben and Åsa Wettergren, undertakes this challenge. It presents ethnographic and case-study research on management of emotions in formal organizations. Research settings include nursing, childcare, employment counseling, public service, and business corporations, all settings where employees are expected to self-regulate expressions and feelings. Most projects stem from a 2007 conference of the European Sociological Association’s Network on Sociology of Emotions.
The editorial introduction sets a rich agenda, presenting the sociology of emotions for organizational scholars. It provides an excellent overview of both the sociology of emotions and emotional issues in management. The contributors’ research projects are diverse and innovative. Space here does not permit an adequate summary of all chapters, but key themes can be highlighted.
The book is divided, as in its title, into research chapters about “Emotionalizing Organizations,” showing how feelings are integrated in work processes and organizational structure, and “Organizing Emotions,” studies of organizational effects on the socialization and regulation of emotions. A strength of the research in this book is that it includes less prototypical emotions such as humiliation, caring, and confidence. An insightful analysis by Christian Imdorf of the recruitment and selection of trainees in small Swiss companies found that interviewers used “gut feelings” to make hiring decisions. Reliance upon gut feelings allows decision-making when information is insufficient and when the choice must reconcile or bypass disparate organizational goals for trainees. Bullying in the workplace is analyzed by Charlotte Bloch, showing the social disruption and employee suffering that occur when emotion management fails to restrain hostile emotions. It is valuable to have bullying research on adults. Poul Poder asks why employees may continue to feel disempowered even after structural channels of empowerment have been opened to share information, rewards, and power. He shows how specific forms of social interaction can produce confidence and empowerment. An insightful ethnography by Alberto Martin Pérez describes immigrants waiting in line for work and residence permits in Spain. He observed an emotional script—anxiety, humiliation, anger, and resignation—that immigrants self-regulated in order to avoid being removed from the line or denied the sought-after documentation. Most studies of emotional labor examine only one side of the service transaction, but this chapter also describes the emotions of the government clerks who interact with the immigrants.
Some studies look above the interactional level in organizations to the structural ideologies and control systems that regulate emotions in the formal organization. What are the sources of expression and feeling rules? Stephen Fineman presents a critical perspective on management practices. He examines organizational emotionologies, or emotional culture, as employees are taught how and to whom certain emotions are to be expressed. He shows that a customer service ideology leaves social workers vulnerable to unreasonable client demands. Carmen Baumeler theorizes about organizational regimes, the normative order in emotional culture. She analyzes the popular interest in developing types of emotional intelligence as a tool of flexible capitalism, in which emotions become commodified to please the customer by managing one’s own displays. In a study of Germans seeking government help to find employment, Sylvia Terpe and Silvia Paierl note that the service occupation analogy of unemployed clients being “customers” is spurious when clients do not really have the power to shop around selectively. We faculty might consider this point in universities where an emerging business model casts us as service deliverers to students as our customers. In one of the few studies outside of business or government, Andrea Cossu describes the silencing of hostile emotions as part of Italian Communist Party strategy at rallies in the 1940s. Emphasizing ideas over emotion, and joyous emotions over hostility and anger, the post-war Communist strategy sought to distinguish their party from Fascists, who were associated with ritualized angry emotion.
The contribution of this book is more to bring emotion into organizational studies than to advance theory about the sociology of emotion. A consequence is that the nature of “emotion” is not examined. Indeed, contributors do not agree about what defines an experience or behavior pattern as an emotion, and sometimes do not even define their concepts. Therefore almost any human experience can be termed an emotion, and it can have any set of properties—compelling or manageable, covert or readily visible, harmful or not when suppressed, and so on. The mainstream sociology of emotions shares no greater consensus, but tends to be more explicit about conceptual assumptions. As someone who regards culture as a crucial factor in emotions, I found it remarkable that in a volume with contributors from many nations, there is little awareness that emotional processes may vary according to national contexts. Perhaps the researchers believe that emotions are in a post-nationalist phase, where formal organizations are similar enough across borders to override the effects of different language, history, and institutions.
Future studies of emotions in organizations would benefit from more diversity in the economic structure and type of organization. Except for Cossu’s study of Italian Communists, all the studies here are of bureaucracies in capitalist corporations or liberal socialist governments. The researchers challenge the Weberian ideal of the passionless, purely rational bureaucracy by demonstrating how emotions influence employee morale and client or customer satisfaction. This stance may not differ greatly from Weber’s concept, however, because emotions here are generally seen as manageable. Passion is tamed and brought into rational service for organizational goals.
This volume is an important contribution toward understanding the emotional dynamics of formal organizations and bureaucracies, and into the feeling rules, corporate ideologies, and interaction patterns that construct our emotions. I would recommend it for sociology of emotions courses as a text demonstrating how the field can be applied, and for formal organization courses to show how emotions serve as basic processes in work role relationships.