“Letting the Uniform Take It”: Emotion absenting and its role in institutional maintenance

Abstract

Emotion regulation is essential to the maintenance of institutions. To date, institutional scholars have focused on how individual actors express or suppress emotions according to internalised institutional ‘feeling rules.’ Drawing on an empirical study of police officers, this article offers emotion absenting as a socially practised, embodied form of emotion regulation. Police officers’ shared emotion absenting enabled them to practise fear in unarticulated yet highly coordinated ways in alignment with their institutional role. The practice of emotion absenting is learned through socialisation into policework and the institution of law enforcement. Because police officers learn to regulate emotions together in subtle ways through the coordination of their bodies, emotion absenting can be functionally invisible in social interactions. This suggests that inappropriate emotions are not necessarily suppressed, i.e. removed from the situation. Rather, our study shows that such emotions may function as a resource among members of a group, especially when these emotions are practised in institutionally competent ways.

Misogyny and Organization Studies

“…Perhaps misogyny is too emotive to research or theorize? Yet organization theorists are increasingly comfortable with emotion and affect in many forms, in workplaces and in theory (Bell & Sinclair, 2014;Fotaki, Kenny, & Vachhani, 2017;Hartmann & Meier, 2023;Vachhani, 2015;Zietsma, Toubiana, Voronov, & Roberts, 2019), and with experiences such as humiliation (Varman, Al-Amoudi, & Skålén, 2023). Despite this, misogyny, along with a number of other emotional and emotive forms of hate and hostility operating as social control, remains mostly in the shadows, unobserved (or ignored), and untheorized.…”

Dialectical Emotional Labour in Digital Person-branding: The case of digital influencers

“…Recent research has considered autonomous modes of emotional labour whereby emotional performance as part of paid labour is internally rather than externally directed (Bridgen, 2011). For instance, workers can go beyond employing emotional displays to incorporate emotional cultural norms by regulating their own performance in accordance with their work roles (Harris, 2002) or in social work practices (Hartmann & Meier, 2023). Researchers generally consider the nature of this private-public boundary in the context of emotional and affective labour (Bridgen, 2011;Weeks, 2007).…”

“…To address our research question, we employed an ethnographic design (Hartmann & Meier, 2023) we conducted a five-year multi-sited ethnography of work practices. The first author collected data from May 2015 to February 2020 using an explorative and iterative process.…”