What's love got to do with it? Passion and inequality in white‐collar work

Abstract

Emotion has become an increasingly important aspect of work in the 21st century. In this article, we take stock of the extant literature delineating the role of emotions, especially passion as a cultural schema, in white‐collar workplaces. Scholars have covered extensive ground on emotions at work, but the role of passion remains an underexplored yet significant area. Drawing from recent developments in research on white‐collar work, we argue that the passion schema has become a critical marker in the labor market for sorting individuals into occupations, hiring and promotion within organizations, and assigning value to people's labor. Emergent research suggests that because the expression and perception of passion remain ambiguously defined in the workplace and varies by context, it is pivotal in reproducing social inequalities. In this review, we focus on how privileging passion in the workplace and interpreting it as a measure of aptitude impacts social inequalities by race, gender, and social class. We close by setting an agenda for further research on this topic.

The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of “Do What You Love”

“…If changes to the material structures of work have ushered us into a new economy, cultural scholars assume that there must also be changes to the supporting ideological or cultural structures of work (Kunda and Ailon 2006). Scholarship on professionals who are considered vanguards of precarity, such as tech entrepreneurs or workers in new media industries (McRobbie 2016; Ross 2003), and emerging scholarship on the role of emotions in 21 st ‐century work, find that passion may be an important component of white‐collar work in the new economy (Rao and Tobias‐Neely 2019).…”

“…In sociology, there are only a few studies that center on work passion as the object of analysis (Chia 2019; Duffy 2017; Rao and Tobias Neely 2019; Sandoval 2018; Weeks 2017). The concept of work passion, however, has peppered literature on the cultures of work among structurally precarious professionals for the last two decades.…”

“…Love’s power to depoliticize is centered in obstructing power relations, privatizing the experience of work, and convincing individuals that failure to comply is an individual defect. Most recently, Rao and Tobias Neely (2019) argued that “the passion schema” has emerged as a sign of commitment to work in the new economy, and that it is plays an important role in sorting individuals, hiring and promotion, and assigning value to labor. This inchoate body of work posits that work passion is an “increasingly hegemonic…cultural script and normative ideal” within professional classes (Weeks 2017), which operates as emotional capital of consequence to workplace stratification and inequalities (Rao and Tobias Neely 2019).…”

“…In this article, I offer two central contributions. First, by contributing the first in‐depth analysis of how professionals perceive and use work passion as an ideological tool to understand and navigate work, I answer the call for research to “more explicitly examine how passion is understood, perceived, and defined in workplaces” (Rao and Tobias Neely 2019: 10). Second, this is the first empirical study of professional work passion which compares a diverse sample of more and less precarious professionals in three disparate occupations.…”

“…Because scholars have found that love of the work—what I will henceforth refer to as work passion—often characterizes the culture of work for precarious professionals (Chia 2019; Duffy 2016; Ross 2000), it is possible that the pursuit and experience of work passion constitutes a broad ideology motivating work and controlling professionals in the new economy. In fact, recent scholarship does suggest that passion “is a primary cultural schema adjudicating labor market rewards” in the new economy (Rao and Tobias Neely 2019: 10) and that work passion is an “increasingly hegemonic…cultural script and normative ideal” within professional and managerial classes (Weeks 2017), which diffused from creative market niches into economic centers of production (Ross 2000; Chia 2019).…”