Emotion

Over the past 30 years, emotion has been firmly placed on the organizational agenda. It is now widely recognized that feelings fuel organizational life and hold commercial value. Contemporary accounts of organizational life often suggest competing accounts concerning developments in how emotion might be viewed. Some suggest that the boundaries between the public and the private spheres are being re-drawn as the result of a general informalization of feeling and flattening of organizational structures. Hence, for example, there is a new emphasis on having fun at work and displaying compassion to colleagues. For others, the focus of analysis is on the very opposite of informalization, where the pressures of modern life have led to a move toward the reutilization of emotion, leading to claims of a post-emotional society. Here, we might relate to emotional rules inscribed as an inherent part of a work role. This does not mean that society or organizations are emotionless, but that the emotions that are presented are carefully manufactured states, imposed and devoid of human feeling.

Within this approach, there is a growing concern about insidious all-embracing management controls that create a sense of alienation from personal feelings, so that only “McDonaldized” emotions remain. This sort of development was a key innovation, prompting Arlie Hochschild's seminal work—The Managed Heart—and her conceptualization of emotional labor that gives an understanding that emotion work can be hard and productive, as well as just something that people do. It is notable when examining encounters that are part of the work role that the rules of conduct that usually govern general social encounters, ensuring that everyone acts appropriately and receives his or her due, do not apply to the interaction that occurs between service provider and customer. This can be further understood in the context of the recent emphasis on the sovereignty of the customer that has created raised consumer expectations. It is especially relevant where the rhetoric of the enterprise culture has re-classified everyone, including, for example, patients and students, as customers, thereby putting extra pressure on front line staff to ensure that the consumers of their services go away happy with their lot. Often, in the absence of adequate resources to support service expectations, there may be unpredictable outbursts and, in such instances, the irate customer demands a skillful performance of emotional control to defuse the situation. In these instances, the everyday rules of normal social encounters change and the emotional exchange becomes unequal—consumers feel within their rights to display dissatisfaction, yet the service provider is expected to meet aggression with pleasantries, sympathy, or, at worst, calm indifference.

However, the very same customers seem prepared to accept the feigned sincerity that occurs within many service encounters. The provision of familiar rituals and scripts by companies such as McDonald's create predictable interactions between customer and worker, where there is little doubt that the worker is merely acting out a given role. As Robin Leidner notes, rather than an insidious form of control, this can actually act as a protective mechanism for workers; the worker's private feelings remain private. Though there is little doubt that many customer interactions are routinized and predictable, that does not mean that they consist of a McDonaldized, off-the-shelf package of artificial humanity. Sharon Bolton's work shows how organizational emotion is a lived, interactional experience with traffic rules of interaction framing how it is expressed and shared. Employees draw on professional, organizational, and commercial codes of conduct and social feeling rules in their interactions [Page 231]with others. The fragile accomplishment of social interaction is continually maintained, not only through formal exchanges but also through episodes of compassion and shared laughter.

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