Emotion and Organizing

Emotion and Organizing

Ten years ago I opened this chapter with an assertion: ‘Writers on organizations have been slow to incorporate emotions into their thinking…’. Today, I can state confidently that things have changed. The last decade has witnessed a considerable growth, in some areas an explosion, of organizational-emotion research (e.g. see Gabriel 1999; Mann 1999; Fineman 2000b; 2003b; Ashkanasy et al. 2002; Frost 2003). But this should not been regarded as a standalone activity. Organizational researchers have become attuned to emotion from a range of influences, especially developments in psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy and the brain sciences (see Oakley 1993; Game and Metcalfe 1996; Oatley and Jenkins 1996; Miller 1997; Nicholson 1997; Planap 1999; Damasio 2000; Williams 2001; Moldoveanu and Nohria 2002).

Emotion has now become almost respectable as a management subject in its own right. Its early stigma - as peripheral to organizational conduct, of marginal interest to serious practitioners and researchers - has faded. While the field is far from controversy-free, we now find emotion included in mainstream introductory textbooks on organizational behaviour (such as Watson 2002; Robbins 2003; Buchanan and Huczynski 2004; Fineman et al. 2005). Emotion is to be seen as the lifeblood of organizing, entwined with, rather than separate from, various meaning-making and cognitive processes (Barry 1999; Forgas 2000; Isen 2000). Emotionalising organizations has given fresh insight into many key issues and processes, such as decision making, leadership, conflict, organizational change, social/gender differences, aesthetics, learning, resistance, harassment and bullying (Fineman 2003b).

Such has been the influence of emotional theorising, some are concerned that emotion cake may now be over-egged; that the ‘core rational logic’ of organization has now been lost (e.g. Bolton 2000). This is a misreading. Rationality, as a dominant rhetoric of organizational purpose, remains intact. Emotions may be ‘everywhere’, but organizational attempts to contain and sustain them in the service of predictable means and ends have certainty not disappeared. Indeed, on the fateful 11 September 2001, while some employers dealt openly and empathetically with the trauma (Dutton et al. 2002), others withheld news of the disaster; the event was not to disrupt the normal flow of production (Driver 2003). Managing the tensions between managerial purpose and the desires of those charged with executing the purposes are, as ever, part of the dynamic and fragile order of organization. What emotion research has exposed is the hitherto uncharted, or silenced, emotions and emotional structures that sustain and shape them (Albrow 1992; Fineman 2000c). ‘Pure’ rationality may be illusory, but it is both a stubborn and functional one in which we all conspire.

How such issues have been explored does, however, continue to reveal some traditional disciplinary alignments. Much of the sociologically inspired research attests to socially constructive perspectives on emotion. Emotion, accordingly, is strongly shaped by social learning, cultural protocols and societal structures, and is often politicised (e.g. Hochschild 1983; Jaggar 1989; Ratner 1989; Stearns 1993; Barbalet 1995; Harre and Parrott 1996; Lupton 1998; Gergen 1999; Frijda et al. 2000; Sturdy and Fineman 2001; Solomon 2002; Fineman 2003a). Feeling ‘rules’ and emotion-display conventions mark the way in and beyond organizations.

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