A “gestalt” framework of emotions and organizing: integrating innate,constructed,and discursive ontologies

Adapting a quantum ontology approach

Our gestalt framework centers around Hahn and Knight’s (2020) quantum approach, which applies the ontological foundations of quantum mechanics to the study of organizational phenomena (Barad, 2007; Lord et al., 2015)—specifically, to organizational paradoxes. This approach holds that phenomena exist at three stages of organizing. These are latency, salience, and persistence (Hahn and Knight, 2020). Latency reflects the possibility and potentiality for phenomena to emerge in an organizational context. According to this perspective, structural, material, and biological phenomena may be “real” in a physical sense. However, these phenomena can exist in latency without being recognized by organization actors. Salience, then, reflects the emergence of latent phenomena in sociomaterial contexts. When actors perceive a phenomenon within the context of the organization as sensible (reasonably expected) and sensable (able to be sensed) (Tracy and Donovan, 2018; Weick, 1995), the phenomenon becomes salient. Finally, persistence reflects the continuance of salient phenomena in sociomaterial contexts over time. Through ongoing meaning-making, phenomena become embedded in the organizational structure, culture, and narratives (McPhee and Zaug, 2000), as well as larger institutional systems and structures. The ongoing persistence of such phenomena (discourses of certain emotions in this case), is therefore simultaneously constitutive yet fluid. As an organizing framework, latency, salience, and persistence are cyclic and recursive. They are not discrete categories; rather, they are lenses through which to observe, analyze, and understand phenomena at various stages of organizing.

In their work on organizational paradoxes, Hahn and Knight (2020) mobilized this quantum framework to reconcile what they perceived to be an unclear ontology within paradox scholarship. Just like the ontological debate existent in the emotion literature, the field of organizational paradox—which explores tensions, contradictions, dilemmas, and dialectics—is engaged in a similar debate regarding whether paradoxes are innate (Quinn and Cameron, 1988), constructed (Putnam et al., 2016), or both (Putnam et al., 2016; Smith and Lewis, 2011). In their recent work, Hahn and Knight (2020) demonstrate that paradoxes can be both innate and socially constructed and that these different ontologies show up at stages of organizing (latency, salience, and persistence). According to this view, material or systemic (i.e. innate) paradoxes occur in latency when they exist in an organization’s systems and structures, regardless of whether they are perceived by members of that organization. Additionally, innate paradoxes become relevant in salience and persistence once they are apprehended and promulgated by organizational actors. Thus, innate paradoxes are relevant across all three levels of organizing. Hahn and Knight (2020) contend that socially constructed paradoxes (those created through interaction), are primarily relevant in salience and persistence—even if they reflect ingrained social systems and structures. For example, when actors conjure and then amplify competing tensions, this shows up in salience as either-or thinking, divisive language, and defense mechanisms (Putnam et al., 2016; Smith and Lewis, 2011; Vince and Broussine, 1996). By arguing that opposing ontologies explain phenomena at different stages of organizing, the quantum perspective integrates innate and constructed views without negating the material or social nature of either. While the quantum framework aptly explains organizational paradox, it has yet to be applied to the study of emotions.

We extend and adapt this quantum logic to theorize emotions in organizations. We agree with Hahn and Knight (2020) that seemingly contradictory views can, and do, exist in concert. However, whereas Hahn and Knight (2020) observe two distinct views (the innate and constructed), we observe three (innate, constructed, and discursive). Moreover, whereas Hahn and Knight (2020) suggest that the innate view applies to all stages of organizing (latency, salience, persistence), and the constructed view applies to the latter two (salience, persistence), we simplify the framework by suggesting that there is theoretical and analytical utility to pairing each ontology with one primary organizing stage. We argue that the innate view is useful for explaining and exploring emotion phenomena that exist in latency, the constructionist view is useful for exploring emotion phenomena that emerge in salience, and the discursive view is useful for exploring emotion phenomena that persist over time. This is not to say that these pairings are discrete or immutable categories. Rather, this framework offers conceptual clarity and utility for theorizing how emotions exist and emerge in the context of organizing.

Applying the gestalt framework: more than the sum of its parts

In the above section, we described how the innate, socially constructed, and discursive views of emotions in organizations exist at various stages of organizing. We mobilized Hahn and Knight’s (2020) quantum ontology perspective to propose that the innate paradigm is particularly useful for explaining phenomena that occur in organizational latency; the social constructionist perspective for activities in organizational salience; and the discursive view for phenomena that persist over time and become embedded in systems and structures (McPhee and Zaug, 2000). This layering comprises the gestalt. As such, the gestalt framework serves as an analytical tool that can elucidate each layer. However, the gestalt experience is something phenomenologically more than the mere combination of these layers, and the gestalt framework does more than describe these layers. Put simply, the gestalt view charts how emotional experiences shift, organizationally, from latency to salience to persistence, highlighting the co-creative, recursive, and fluid process by which emotions move across individual and organizational lines. The gestalt view recognizes that it is these aspects and paradoxically, the inability to detach these aspects from one another, that creates the entire, integral, gestalt experience.

As an example, consider the following gestalt analysis of sexual harassment as an emotional organizational phenomenon (Fricker, 2007). Historically, women have been subject to unwanted advances from men at work. Before 1975, there was no shared meaning or language to describe these events. Nevertheless, women routinely responded to them with innate, biological and physical reactions (e.g. disgust, discomfort, fear). Although these unwanted advances may have organized some women’s individual behavior (e.g. choosing not to take the elevator alone; choosing not to stay late at work), there remained indeterminate potentialities for the organizational salience of these private and individual actions. Moreover, any shared emotion experience remained invisible to the women and their organizations behind a fog of privatization and ambiguity. As the primary emotion experience was a physiological one, this stage can best be described as existing in organizational latency.

At a point in time, women began to recognize each other’s shared experiences, and a collective understanding began to form (Fricker, 2007). Although this emerging social construction reflected moments of discourse—indeed, some meaning making happened through conversation—there still existed no cogent or adequate vocabulary to describe what was taking place. It was messy. It was emerging. It did not yet have a name. It did not yet have a discernible villain. It was befuddling, in part because it was paradoxically uncomfortable and persistent, yet unaddressed. The experience, while shared and recognizable as something, was ambiguous and aconceptual as a particular thing. Thus, while reflecting the ever-porous boundaries between social and discursive construction, we describe this moment in time as emerging in organizational salience.

At some point, conversations became more focused and the silhouette of a nefarious foe became visible through the fog. After much vocalizing and dialoguing about what was happening to them, a group of women authored a term that “embraced a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent [unwanted] behaviors” (Fricker, 2007: 150). They called this experience “sexual harassment.” This label was chosen intentionally, after ruling out other options. The messiness and ambiguity of the felt experiences were baked into the meaning and captured in the naming. The term “harassment” also emphasized the directionality of the behavior and identified the villain—importantly, the term “harassment” required no information on the target of the harassment. It mattered not how old, young, beautiful, homely, flirtatious, or aloof the woman was. The term “sexual harassment” organized, mobilized, and constituted the experience in new ways; it sensitized women to otherwise ambiguous events, offered them a means to make sense of their shared experience, and allowed them “realize resources for meaning that were yet only implicit in the social interpretive practices of the time” (Fricker, 2007: 149). Moreover, this authoring became embedded in social and organizational culture, institutionalized through policy and disciplining, and carried forth into the future—for example, with the eventual authoring of #MeToo (Brown and Battle, 2019). These discursive shifts capture how emotional experiences can transcend from salience to persistence, and then continue to evolve.

As a gestalt, “sexual harassment” includes all of its ingredients. It is individually felt, collectively understood, and organizationally (e.g. by way of policy) creative. The shift in understanding, from individual moments of suffering to the gestalt phenomena of “sexual harassment,” allowed women to develop practical wisdom about their personal and shared experience. By understanding the holistic emotional experience of sexual harassment—including physiological reactions, shared meaning-making, and feminine authoring—individuals and organizations are able to see the larger picture and therefore act with insight and discernment, such as more reporting and disciplining (Vijayasiri, 2008) and less ostracizing (Brown and Battle, 2019). In this way, a gestalt understanding can encourage phronesis. What’s more, phronesis can be developed by intentionally naming emotional phenomena. Applied to sexual harassment, Flyvbjerg’s (2012) phronetic questions, “Where are we going? . . .Is this desirable? . . .What should be done?”. . .and “Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?” (p. 60) are embedded into the feeling, constructing, and naming of sexual harassment and #MeToo such that through the act of naming, women were able to understand their emotional experiences with more clarity. Here, the gestalt framework reflects practical wisdom that can be cultivated through an awareness (learned or otherwise) of and integration of the innate, constructed, and discursive elements. In addition to the phronesis developed this way, our gestalt framework also encourages practically wise action by reconsidering assumptions of valence.

Gestalts and valence

In the organization sciences, emotion research tends to assume and overemphasize valence, which is the degree to which emotions are considered positive or negative (Madrid et al., 2014). This may be, in part, a result of the current bifurcation between innate and constructed ontologies. From a purely innate view, certain emotions are pathologized. This view tends to focus on the management and outcomes of emotions. From a purely constructionist view, certain emotions are prioritized. This view highlights how emotions manifest through interaction, and the social implications that ensue. In line with the constructionist view, the discursive perspective explores communicative phenomena that give rise to more or less desirable emotion experiences. One result of all of these framings—and the fact that they are typically considered independently—is that emotions are generally understood as better or worse than others. And this assumption underlies social action (Flyvbjerg, 2012).

When considered like this, prescriptive commentary abounds. The growing emergence of wellness programs aimed at increasing positive emotions (e.g. wellbeing) and reducing negative ones (e.g. stress) confirms a largely unchallenged narrative: that negative emotions are inherently problematic and should be removed. Our gestalt model confronts this common assumption. By integrating opposing ontologies (innate, constructed, discursive), and applying those ontologies to different stages of organizing (latency, salience, persistence), the gestalt perspective leaves room for questions such as, How might valence shift across organizing stages such that unpleasant emotion experiences are a fruitful part of the whole? What if all emotions are always both “negative” and “positive?” and What is obscured when emotions are categorized as either good or bad?

While it may be helpful, theoretically and practically, to identify which general emotions create pleasant experiences and which create unpleasant experiences, the field’s tendency to overstress valence amplifies the importance of certain aspects of experience (e.g. the acute felt emotion) and obscures equally important theoretical and practical considerations; namely, how those emotions occur as an integrated gestalt. When categorized as positive or negative, the identifiable results of emotions (e.g. smiling, crying) are treated as the effects of innate emotions. This may be because physical responses can occur (although not always) involuntarily (Barrett, 2017). However, this perception that the effects of emotions are the effects of emotions—as opposed to the effects of emotion gestalts—diminishes the richness of the gestalt experience. We draw from mindfulness philosophy (Brach, 2017; Langer and Moldoveanu, 2000), and Buddhist psychology (de Silva, 2014; Kornfield, 2008) to argue for that richness by showing that regardless of whether experiences are perceived as pleasant or unpleasant in salience, all conceptual emotions are connected with the phenomenological experience of “dukkha,” that is, discomfort (de Silva, 2005; Kornfield, 2008; Vyner, 2018) in latency and persistence.

When an individual feels a “negative” emotion, such as sadness or anger, it is easy to recognize the discomfort. However, when a person feels a “positive” emotion, such as excitement or happiness, it is more difficult to recognize that these experiences emerge from and lead to discomfort as well. Phenomenologically, a felt emotional experience always occurs in relation to the relative absence of that emotion. Put another way, the moment of a felt emotion is sandwiched between other moments in which that emotion is not felt. For example, when a person feels happy or excited, they always—although often subconsciously—recognize that there was a beginning to the emotion and anticipate that there will be an end. As the adage goes, what goes up must come down. Because of this, people become attached to positive experiences and wish for more of them. The common statement, “I want to be happy” reflects this awareness of the always-almost-present-absence of happiness. Therefore, all emotional experiences—whether categorized as “positive” or “negative”—are always in relation to discomfort (de Silva, 2005; Kornfield, 2008). From our gestalt view, which is based on the notion that the whole of something is composed of yet more than its parts, if something (an emotion) always occurs in relation to something else (the lack of that emotion), then that something else must be included in the emotion’s gestalt. As such, all “negative” emotions are in relation to positive, negative, or neutral prior and subsequent experiences. And, all “positive” emotions are likewise in relation to positive, negative, or neutral prior and subsequent experiences. Our gestalt view recognizes this and therefore holds that emotions are neither positive nor negative; rather, they are fluid co-constructions (composed of physiology, social construction, and discourse) that include both the presence and absence of the acute felt emotion.

Consider the emotional experience of “happiness.” In the Western world, happiness is broadly thought of as a positive physiological and psychological experience (Planalp et al., 2009). This can be seen in America’s treatment of the pursuit of happiness as prescriptive. Beginning at the start of the Scientific Revolution, there was a dramatic increase in the number of publications around the topic “prescriptions for happiness,” re-spiking again shortly after WWII (around 1950) (Google Ngram, 2016). After a brief decline, the topic re-emerged in the last two decades (starting in the beginning of the 1990s). During these times, happiness was described by the scientific community as something people must have or acquire the necessary conditions for—as opposed to something a person can do, be, or practice. Unsurprisingly, the social construction and discourse about happiness as innate and physiological positioned happiness as something we must pursue and attain. And when happiness is attained, it is often framed as quick and fleeting (e.g. laughter, butterflies in one’s stomach). Arguably, this framing pushes the felt experience of happiness beyond people’s cognitive horizon; it is always somewhat out of reach (Achor, 2011). When happiness seems fleeting, certain activities (e.g. striving for professional goals, practicing retail therapy) make a great deal of sense. While these types of responses are not inherently problematic, they are certainly incomplete. Returning to phronesis, a gestalt view allows for an expanded understanding of the range of phenomena that co-create emotion, and the range of practically wise actions a person can take. Without this view, organizational understandings of emotion remain tethered to the separate ingredients, lacking the ability to respond to the whole gestalt.

The gestalt view recognizes the ways that social expectations about happiness influence how, when, where, and at what cost the experience of happiness is considered desirable and achievable. By applying the gestalt view, we can see how the same general emotion, for example, “happiness,” can produce incredibly different sensations and observations (Kuhn, 1962). For example, in cultures where happiness is not contextualized in this prescriptive out-of-reach way, calm and tranquil sensations may be experienced as happiness (Kornfield, 2008). A gestalt view of happiness surfaces the physiological, social, and discursive elements, and the positive (comfortable) and negative (uncomfortable) elements, that make up the larger gestalt experience. While it is important that scholars identify the difference between happiness as a physiological experience, constructed conceptualization, or languaged representation, it may be even more useful to hold each in generative tension with one another. As a gestalt, the physical experience of happiness (e.g. butterflies in one’s stomach; tranquil calm) changes based on social conditions (e.g. happiness today compared to pre-WWII; happiness in the US versus other countries). Conceptualizing happiness as a gestalt provides space for this dialogue by acknowledging the critical ways the different “layers of the cake” shape how emotions function in our reality, when they become (un)available to us, in what ways they are available, and why our relationship with them is often so complicated. The gestalt view also addresses how the object of observation (physical, social, discursive) can shift as phenomena are foregrounded or backgrounded, depending on the context and conditions. In short, a gestalt perspective takes a phronetic approach to emotion theory by encouraging researchers to challenge common valence narratives embedded in emotion theory, to reconsider the subsequent prescriptive commentary, and to shine light on expanded possibilities for action.

Theoretical implications

Our gestalt framework offers three primary theoretical contributions. First, framing emotions as gestalts allows for the integration of opposing frameworks, which may liberate emotion studies from over-structuralized ontologies. By adapting the quantum ontology to the study of emotions, the gestalt view illuminates how emotions are indeed constituted by innate biology, social interaction, and discourse—however, at various phases of organizing. A gestalt view urges emotion theorists to rethink the way emotions are formed (in latency), become collectively experienced (in salience), and endure through the larger discourses surrounding them (in persistence). This framing encourages questions that go beyond talking about what emotions do, and instead seek to understand the complex biological, social, and discursive experiences that shape them.

Second, the gestalt framework provides an analytic tool for researching and theorizing emotions and organizing. Researchers can use the gestalt view to chart the process by which emotions emerge, exist, are learned, and become embedded in organizations. In doing so, they can theorize about the ways emotional experiences exist—for individuals and the collective—as constellations of biological, social, and discursive phenomena. Moreover, the gestalt view allows scholars to identify how each of these elements interact to comprise unique gestalts; yet, capture the way those gestalts are something phenomenologically more than their elements. Much in the same way that a capable chef is more flexible with the proper tools in their kitchen, the gestalt framework expands the theoretical emotion pantry. Additionally, the development of the gestalt framework is, in and of itself, a reflection of the gestalt model. The authoring of the term “emotion gestalts,” and the theorizing about how they emerge, form, and function, creates the potential for people to experience the world of emotion in new ways. Phronetic research is concerned with how dominant values inform social commentary, including theory (Flyvbjerg, 2012). Applied to theories of emotions and organizing, a phronetic approach questions how prevailing views (e.g. innate, constructed, discursive) shape people’s emotional experiences, whether those philosophies promote virtuous action, and how future theorists should respond to them. Just like the term “sexual harassment” changed how women made sense of unwanted advances at work, and how feminist scholars explored those advances (e.g. Fricker, 2007), the new concept of “emotion gestalt” may shift the way emotions are conceptualized and enacted. In this way, our crafting of the gestalt framework reflects a discursive construction of emotion theory, and the persistence stage of organizing, among emotion and organizational scholars.

Third, the gestalt framework has promise as an emancipatory tool in feminist and decolonial scholarship and practice. Rather than reducing emotions to either innate experiences or social constructions, this framework can better place the unique contexts of sexism, racism, and colonial legacies that contribute to complex emotional systems (Benson and Kirsh, 2010; Sherwood, 2009). Critical scholars interested in studying and transforming the emotion experiences of marginalized populations may use gestalt as an analytic tool and theoretical framework. In their research on racism and restorative justice in the workplace, Opie and Roberts (2017) argue current frames of diversity and inclusion work fall short; to truly show Black lives matter in the workplace requires examining colonized emotions in organizations (Benson and Kirsh, 2010). By upending existing perspectives of emotions, a gestalt view can move organizational understandings of emotions beyond traditional definitions into the intersections of human experience. For example, Chen (2018) reimagines silence as a powerful—not meek—communicative tool within colonized spaces. This new historical, contextual, embodied understanding goes beyond definitional views of silence to help (re)elucidate decolonized ways of being. As critical scholars develop finely tailored and context-specific terms that (re)articulate social phenomena, a gestalt understanding can provide insight to these evolving concepts—including their recursive innate, social, and discursive elements. Further, gestalt understandings of experiences can offer liberation from previously gendered or racialized emotional labels. Kleinman (2002) explains how erasing the experiences of women into male-based terms makes it easier to exercise power and control over that group. This “symbolic annihilation” can obscure emotional experiences, even from those who are experiencing them (p. 302). Thus, as reflected in the term “sexual harassment,” authoring a new gestalt can be liberative and constitutive (Fricker, 2007). The gestalt framework helps explain how messy and complex experiences can be co-constructed to create new salient meanings, which are organizationally constituted in the form of policies, laws, workplace protections, and other substantiating conversations. Further, a gestalt framework demonstrates the ways in which phronesis can be used to reclaim gestalts that structure or orient behavior in ways that preserve power structures or disenfranchise others.

Practical implications

Our gestalt approach opens up new possibilities for the practice of emotions in organizations. Additionally, the gestalt view calls attention to aspects of emotion that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, and in doing so “may bring out new ways of practice” (Sandelands, 1991: 260). First, a gestalt view has the ability to change people’s relationship to their learned emotions by allowing individuals to reframe their experiences so that emotions are perceived in dynamic and multiplicitous ways, promoting a more mindful relationship between the experiencer and the experienced. By considering the assemblage of facets that crystallize in the arising (Tracy and Trethewey, 2005) of emotion, people may recognize that seemingly personal emotions are also imbued with cultural connotations, expectations, and valance. The notion that emotion is beyond the self may create some distance between the felt emotion and the person’s identification with it, allowing space for greater individual agency (Kornfield, 2008).

Second, a gestalt view encourages practical wisdom (phronesis) by asking people to reimagine emotional valence such that emotions are neither inherently positive nor negative; rather, they are fluid co-constructions that include both the presence and absence of the felt emotion. Instead of focusing on managing negative emotions, but alternatively embracing the view that pleasant and unpleasant emotions are part of a larger whole, people can learn to respond to those emotions with equanimity (Brach, 2017)—a component of practical wisdom. Equanimity is a state of composure based on an appreciation for all emotional experiences and an awareness of the fluid impermanent nature of those experiences (Kornfield, 2008). This composure involves an unflappableness characterized by “being calm rather than fearful” and “looking for ways to engage with what seems to be inconsistent in the eyes of others” (Gaim, 2018: 504). This approach influences people’s ability to embrace experiences instead of resisting them (Gärtner, 2013). When people practice equanimity, the goal is not to get rid of certain emotions; nor is the goal to accept the emotions as permanent states. Somewhat paradoxically, equanimity encourages people to acknowledge that emotions exist without becoming tethered to them (Brach, 2017). By inviting both pleasant and unpleasant experiences as part of a larger whole, equanimity encourages people to “ride the waves” of their life with more ease and calm—and, to see expanded possibilities for action (Bernard, 2011). A gestalt view encourages this line of thinking by opening up new ways to see and feel the world.

Third, a gestalt view of emotion may allow people to create and learn new emotional experiences in organizations. Gestalts are constituted as a function of their recurring “together over and over in action after action as we go through our daily lives” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1991: 71). They come to feel stable and whole as they are (re)produced. However, gestalts are fluid; they have the ability to shift over time (Kuhn, 1962), to be given new meanings and functions commensurate with social discourses (Lakoff and Johnson, 1991), and they are continuously braided into and out of new cultural, social, and linguistic contexts. To return to our cake metaphor, the process of baking is a process of becoming, and the gestalt framework helps us focus not only the existence of emotions (i.e. the innate biology) or the being of emotions (i.e. social construction), but also on the ongoing becoming (i.e. discursive development) of those emotions at both the individual and organizational level (Tracy and Donovan, 2018).

An awareness of the innate, social, and linguistic construction of emotions as gestalts may provide a roadmap for navigating how emotions may be created and then learned by people and societies and, thus, promote the conscious crafting of new emotional experiences through talk and text. Moreover, people may give themselves access to new experiences by recognizing an ambiguous experience and then (re)claiming it as an emotion gestalt of its own. For example, the term “sexual harassment” opened up new ways of knowing and experiencing something both deeply personal and highly collective (Fricker, 2007). As such, there exists a transformative power in the potential of emotion gestalt shifts—and the possibility for taking back power by adopting new emotion vocabulary. By understanding emotions through the gestalt framework, and utilizing the framework to create and label new gestalts, people may develop a broader spectrum of human experiences.

Future directions

Drawing from Kuhn’s (1962) argument for cross-paradigmatic conversations, we contend that our gestalt framework encourages a generative richness that is useful for expanded, alternate, multiplicitous theorizing—both within and outside of organizational scholarship. One way this might unfold is with a stronger emphasis on discourse and languaging in the construction of emotions (Barrett, 2017). In particular, we are inspired by the possibility of managing and creating novel emotional experiences through intentional communication (Barrett, 2006; Barrett et al., 2007). Future work should investigate this empirically, and theorize more explicitly about the relationship between discourse and crafting new emotions in organizations. Additionally, future work would benefit from exploring relevant emotion experiences through the gestalt framework. In this paper, we considered the broad experience of emotional labor and the specific experience of sexual harassment. Future work may consider new and emergent emotion gestalts—such as the collective workforce anxiety experienced in light of the COVID-19 pandemic (Banjo et al., 2020)—through a gestalt analysis. As Weick (2007) aptly put it, “it takes richness to grasp richness” (p. 16). Finally, the domain of organizational materiality and affect provide an interesting avenue for future research. Affect is “the ongoing flow of sensory force that animates the world” and has been conceptualized as that which precedes the conscious awareness of emotion (Ashcraft and Kuhn, 2018: 179). From a gestalt perspective, affect may serve as another “ingredient,” not only in the social construction of feeling, but also in its material production and perceived valence. Future research may value teasing out the potential implications between emotion gestalts, affect, socio-materiality, and valence.