Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts

Abstract

The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. Our findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are little acknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US-dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.

Emotionalising hope in times of climate change

“…Through emotions we experience the world, make sense of it, and learn to differentiate between what we care about and what we do not care about (Dewey, 2008). Background emotions (Barbalet, 2011) guide routinised action in a flow of activities in the present that extends naturally to the short-term future (Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2022). Background emotions denote the subjective experience of low-intensity, action-internal emotions.…”