‘Nowhere else sells bliss like this’: Exploring the emotional labour of soldiers at war

Abstract

Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of lethal violence for combat operations. It is, moreover, a total institution, and the disculturation new recruits must endure creates fertile ground for the inculcation of a specific emotional regime. Further, unlike most other service occupations, the military is both male‐dominated and highly masculine. The paper also makes a case for using memoirs in the study of emotional labour. Being examples of what we call identity writing, they offer different insights to those we might attain through other methods. Indeed, we argue that memoirs provide a fruitful source for future organization studies research into the emotional regime of the military especially. Third, our discussion expands the concept of emotional labour in that the emotional regime the memoirists index: is not undertaken for a specific group of customers; entails a distinctive range of emotions; and involves the conscious cultivation of gendered communities of coping among soldiers.

Silence‐breaking butterfly effect: Resistance towards the military within #MeToo

“…Its cornerstone is isolation from the outside environment (Goffman, 1961, p. 11). According to Godfrey and Brewis (2018), the total institution is literally transforming civilians into military personnel with deculturing strategies reproducing 'the last bastion of masculinity' (Addelston & Stirratt, 1996;Hale, 2012). According to Godfrey and Brewis (2018), the total institution is literally transforming civilians into military personnel with deculturing strategies reproducing 'the last bastion of masculinity' (Addelston & Stirratt, 1996;Hale, 2012).…”

“…Military organizations are also greedy (Coser, 1974), which means that they are demanding institutions that require a great deal from their organizational members, both psychologically and physically. They are, during peacetime and missions, a definition of a total institution (Godfrey & Brewis, 2018;Goffman, 1961). Its cornerstone is isolation from the outside environment (Goffman, 1961, p. 11).…”

“…This is a prerequisite for male bonding. According to Godfrey and Brewis (2018), the total institution is literally transforming civilians into military personnel with deculturing strategies reproducing 'the last bastion of masculinity' (Addelston & Stirratt, 1996;Hale, 2012). Uniting different backgrounds and identities, the military organization is giving all the chance to 'become a man' (Kimmel, 2004;Sasson-Levy, 2003).…”

“…women are socialized to internalize the norms and ideologies of the military organization which leads to 'acceptance' (Atzori, Lombardi, Fraccaroli, Battistelli, & Zaniboni, 2008;Bennett, 2017;Miller, 1997). Military organizations can be characterized as total institutions, which means that their members are isolated from the outside environment (Godfrey & Brewis, 2018;Goffman, 1961). It is difficult both to be part of and to resist the dominant norm of a total institution (Goffman, 1961;Hearn, Sheppard, Tancred-Sheriff, & Burrell, 1989;Magley, 2002).…”

More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

“…Management dictate what the appropriate 'feeling rules' are in a given organisation and context, and employees are expected to embody these norms, regardless of their own personal feelings, through surface or deep acting (see Grandey, 2003). Hamilton and McCabe (2016) stress the importance of organisational context for understanding emotion work, and studies of this and emotional labour in different settings have shed light on the role of workplace norms and culture, technology and employment status in understanding how emotions are performed and experienced in employment (McCabe & Hamilton, 2015;Rivera, 2015;Godfrey & Brewis, 2018). Hochschild (2012) pointed to some gendered aspects of emotion work and emotional labour, as she argued that women's lower social status means their feelings are considered to be less important than men's.…”