Shaping the Selves of Young Salespeople through Emotion Management

Abstract

679 DAVID SCHWEINGRUBER is an assistant professor of sociology at Iowa State University. His research, in the symbolic interactionist tradition, is concerned with the cultural and cognitive premises that guide social behavior in a variety of settings, including formal organizations, political demonstrations, and romantic events. NANCY BERNS is an assistant professor of sociology at Drake University. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of crime and violence, social justice, media and popular culture, social constructionism, and domestic violence. She is author of Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence, Media and Social Problems. "It was not obvious to college students beginning their sales training that an inspirational relative or a dramatic experience like escaping your native country in disguise can become a reason to sell books door to door." Downloaded fromThis article describes how a door-to-door sales company trains salespeople to engage in emotion management. Company managers and salespeople engage in emotion mining, the search for and development of potential emotional capital in salespeople's biographies. This emotional capital forms an emotional bridge between a salesperson's current self and the self that is supposed to be developed for the job. The article emphasizes the reflexive relationship between emotion management and the self. Salespeople manage their emotions in an attempt to develop a new, better self, which in turn will be better equipped to do emotion management.

Theorizing emotional capital

“…By contrast, Schweingruber and Berns (2005) examine how emotional capital is successfully developed on the job through the training of book salespersons. Notably, they find that occupational training emphasizes Bemotional mining^and Bemotional bridging,^processes through which trainees produce and use their emotional capital for the purpose of selling books.…”

“…A third theme in the literature on emotional capital is the tension between how rigidly capital as well as habitus is Banchored^by social forces during primary socialization (Manion 2007, p. 91) and its sensitivity to modification (Schweingruber and Berns 2005;Stacey 2011). Cahill (1999 examines the emotional capital that mortuary students gained in early family experiences as critical to explaining their occupational success.…”

“…Cahill (1999) and Schweingruber and Berns (2005) examine the role of occupational socialization in shaping emotional capital. Cahill's study of mortuary students emphasizes student's prior experiences with death and mortuary work.…”

“…For her, women's role in the family supplies them with more emotional capital than men. Following this logic, emotional capital has been developed and applied primarily to studies of education and family (Colley 2006;Gillies 2006;Nixon 2011;O'Brien 2008;Reay 2000Reay , 2004Reid 2009;Zemblyas 2007), though research in the sociology of occupations has begun to use the concept (Cahill 1999;Schweingruber and Berns 2005), particularly in healthcare (Erickson and Stacey 2013;Husso and Hirvonen 2012;Stacey 2011;Virkki 2007). Below I outline three conceptual limitations in this prior work on emotional capital: (1) the concept has been inconsistently linked to gender, (2) its use often conflates capital with practice, and (3) it has been inconsistently theorized as static or dynamic over time.…”

Opening the black box of socialization: Emotions, practices and (biographical) identities

“…Meanwhile, (emotional) memories are also revitalized and reshaped by practices. This is the case of weddings revival through photo albums and family talks, as well as occupational socialization based on dramatic and comic tales repeated by supervisors to young salesmen (Schweingruber and Berns, 2005).…”