To cite this content:
Fineman S. (2024), “Getting Critical about Emotion”, Emotion Researcher, ISRE’s Sourcebook for Research on Emotion and Affect, Rebecca Dickason (Ed.), https://emotionresearcher.com/getting-critical-about-emotion/, accessed [add date].
Former Professor and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behaviour at the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK, Stephen Fineman has contributed uniquely and diversely to the field of Emotion Research. He has been instrumental in bringing emotion back into organizations, both through teaching and through publishing. His works include The Blame Business (2015), Work: A Very Short Introduction (2012), Organizing Age (2011), Organizing and Organizations (with Y. Gabriel and D. Sims, 2010), The Emotional Organization: Passions and Power (2008), Understanding Emotion at Work (2003), Emotion in Organizations (first edition in 1993, second edition in 2000 – the second edition is a completely separate work from the first).
The following text is a short section from Stephen Fineman’s invited talk to a mixed audience at Birkbeck College (London, UK), in the context of the Alec Rodger Memorial Lecture (July 8th 2009). The full talk (“Getting Critical about Emotion”) can be viewed here.
Getting Critical about Emotion
Stephen Fineman
Firstly, I’d like to say how honoured I am to be invited to address you today.
My association with Birkbeck actually goes back over 40 years. I met Alec Rodger for the first time in 1967 when he interviewed me for a post-graduate degree in his department here – then the Department of Occupational Psychology. It was a brief interview, but centred on a crucial question: am I the sort of chap, he asked, who would like to specialise in fitting the man to the job, or fitting the job to the man? (This was before the days of gender sensitivity). I chose fitting the man to the job, but I was required to familiarise myself with fitting the job to the man, which included he curious world of ergonomics.
I fondly remember the ‘groundbreaking’ work I did for my ergonomic project. One task was to find out the optimal height to fix a wall can-opener on a wall – I think it was 4ft 2 1/2 inches [1]. As you’d all know, this has now been converted to metric to become a European standard. The other was an ergonomic appraisal of my battered Morris Minor. I concluded that it failed on most ergonomic criteria – but was nevertheless a great car.
All this is, of course is, nostalgia, and nostalgia is an emotion. And emotion is what I want to talk about today.
If you think of some of life’s key events or arenas: national politics, MPs’ expenses, downsizing, hiring and firing, shareholder meetings, fund-manager behaviour, employee appraisals, negotiations, workplace conflict … Take away the emotions and what’s left? An eviscerated, lifeless, picture of human organization.
It was picture that I confronted initially some 15 years ago when I started writing about emotion. What had the field of organizational behaviour got to offer? I concluded, then, ‘not very much’. The discipline appeared emotionally anorexic [2]. By this I meant that, when we dealt with emotion – which wasn’t that often – it was slimmed down to an almost unrecognizable form. Reduced to what could be conveniently measured – such as on scales of stress, job satisfaction, alienation, wellbeing or anxiety. It said more about the investigator’s feelings about feelings, than about the feelings of the people they were interested in. And of course, it needed a number or statistic to make it real.
Emotion was treated as a separate input or output variable, and was much less important than the stuff in-between – the cognitive, thinking, processes. These were the raw elements of rational thinking, cherished in well-ordered, masculine, organizations. Emotions were sand in the machinery. You want feelings? Then go to novels and plays, not to the organizational sciences. Of course, the legacy of Freud was around. But that spoke most clearly about the demons we all carry with us, and the anxieties we take into our organizations. And how they needed fixing.
I’d like to say that that we’ve all moved on from this now. Not so. Some of my academic colleagues and many consultants are wedded to the paradigm. And some make a sizeable income from it. But I can say that there’s now definitely another player in town. Emotion isn’t sand in the machinery; it lubricates and makes the machinery, infusing virtually all those activities that we call organizing and managing. We’ve discovered emotion.
The frame-shift has come from a mix of directions – especially sociologists, feminists, anthropologists and historians. Together they bring us a rich and exciting picture of emotion and its crucial role in human affairs. You won’t find many numbers or statistics in their work, but instead qualitatively-rigorous pictures of the way people feel their world, in their own terms. And especially the influence of the wider contexts in which they perform, which shape their feelings.
Imagine, for a moment, your organization as a patchwork of emotional arenas and zones, where different emotion-expectations apply – shaping behaviours and outcomes. The corridors, offices, meeting rooms, coffee areas, IT spaces, car parks, atriums and cloakrooms are all coded differently for our everyday emotional dramas. It’s where some feelings are revealed and others suppressed or hidden – depending on who you’re with and what you want to achieve. Some of this is on the dark side of organizational life, like the abuse of power in harassment, bullying and oppressive leadership. There are the conflicts and stresses of survival under pressure; the feelings of failure and burnout. In contrast, there’s the lighter side, like subversive moments, flirtations, spontaneous fun-times, the thrill of success or winning, a promotion, bonding with close colleagues.
And then there are those events in-between, happenings where mixed emotions tug you in different directions – such as being part of an organizational change, downsizing, laying-off somebody you know well, tough negotiations, or whether or not to be a follower. Real-life emotions are mobile and rarely fall-out into neat, discrete, categories. Love can mix with anxiety and fear; boredom with hope; surprise with sadness; thrill with anxiety; frustration with anger and compassion. This is, of course, challenging for those who wish to freeze emotions and extract them from their contexts.
Underlying this picture there are a few key principles to consider:
- There’s subjective feeling and there’s emotional display – and they don’t always correspond – for good reason. Our ability to relate to others, to organize things with others, depends on a re-presenting what we feel for public consumption. Not always, but often. All this is the stuff of emotion work, at times tough even tortuous; other times automatic and effortless.
- Thinking and feeling, or cognition and emotion, entwine. They serve one-another and can’t be wrenched apart – although we might like to believe they can. So concepts such as ‘rationality’, ‘goals’, ‘strategies’ and ‘objectives’ are important to the rhetoric of management, but they’re enacted, made possible, through feeling. Decision-making is steered and resolved by our feelings – here-and-now feelings and ‘what might happen if’, feelings. Our feelings are tiebreakers when we have competing choices. So our hunches, gut feelings, fears, sense of ease and unease, are central, not peripheral, to decision-making.
- Feelings are a key readout on how we’re doing in the world. Some of our learned, and very social, emotions are crucial to moral judgments. Indeed guilt, shame and embarrassment, are the bedrock of our moral orders, which would collapse without them. As, indeed, has happened in some communities.
- Audiences matter – a lot. What can we reveal of our feelings, and to whom? What do you hide and what do you fake? How does your audience’s, gender, ethnicity or organizational position shape what emotions you can show or share? The elephant in room here is power – who’s permitted to express what to whom. In other words, whose emotion-rules prevail. This goes right to heart of the social construction of emotions and the intricate and sometimes precarious balance that we negotiate with one another – in and out of our work settings. It also characterises what has now been called a critical approach to emotion.
The term critical here goes beyond its common usage of being circumspect, or looking for flaws or errors. It’s rooted in a mix of philosophies in social theory that suggest that our emotions and our sense of who and what we are, are shaped by social forces and structures that value or promote certain sentiments and feelings and devalue others.
What are these forces? Well, think of celebrity images and icons. Think of the particular forms of aggressiveness – like the Alan Sugar approach to leadership. Think of the celebration of gendered body-images in popular culture. Think of the way social class and religion define the ‘right’ sort of joy, guilt or happiness. Think how educational and political institutions drip-feed what success or failure should mean in a modern market economy. And think of the media presentations which shape our feelings about city fat-cats, royalty, politicians, academics, asylum seekers, Muslims and Jews…. And I could go on.
In short, our feelings are never all our own. There are powerful emotion-definers out there, doing a fair bit of the emotion work for us. In this light, critical researchers are pretty much a bunch of worriers. They worry about how these hidden and not-so-hidden persuaders work on our emotions. And they worry about how these persuaders can manipulate and oppress people – in and out of organizations. Emotion, in these terms, is always ideologically shaped and infused with power. And we’ve even invented a word for the infusions – emotionologies [3].
We manage, negotiate and display our feelings in myriad subtle ways. We use voice intonation, body language, particular words, narratives, stories and physical props. This is a beautiful, but hit-and-miss, process. Sometimes we struggle, such as when we’re in unfamiliar territory, a strange land or facing a crisis. Our globalised economy exposes these differences – such as when we press one culture’s emotion-ways onto another culture – with sometimes bizarre results.
For instance, when the first McDonalds hit Moscow it baffled Muscovites. They were perfectly content with service-with-grimace, a legacy of times of many hardships. A smile, goes the Russian proverb, is much too precious to waste on buying chickens or cabbage. Then along came McDonalds and their all-American smile – which all new recruits had to emulate. It really puzzled customers – who wanted hamburgers, not a smile and a ‘nice day’. And even with chronic unemployment, some employees couldn’t stick it and left the job.
[…]
[1] Around 128 centimetres.
[2] See Fineman 1993, p. 9. (Fineman S. (1993). “Organizations as Emotional Arenas”, in S. Fineman (dir.), Emotion in Organizations (pp. 9-35), London, Sage, First Edition).
[3] See Stearns & Stearns, 1985. (Stearns P.N., Stearns C.Z. (1985). “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, The American Historical Review, vol. 90, no 4, pp. 813-836.)
