Fineman Stephen - Emotion in Organizations

Emotion In Organizations

Emotion In Organizations

second edition

edited by

Stephen Fineman

Stephen Fineman

First published 2000

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7619 6624 2

ISBN 0 7619 6625 0 (pbk)

Library of Congress catalog card number 00132715

Typeset by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton.

Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

CONTENTS

Stephen Fineman

Peter J. Frost, Jane E. Dutton, Monica C. Worline and Annette Wilson

Lloyd E. Sandelands and Connie J. Boudens

Vincent R. Waldron

Kathleen J. Krone and Jayne M. Morgan

Stephen Fineman

Joanne Martin, Kathy Knopoff and Christine Beckman

Varda Wasserman, Anat Rafaeli and Avraham N. Kluger

Debra E. Meyerson

Blake E. Ashforth and Marc A. Tomiuk

Michael G. Pratt and Lorna Doucet

Robert Jackall

Gillian Bendelow and Berry Mayall

Karen P. Harlos and Craig C. Pinder

CONTRIBUTORS

School of Management, University of Bath, UK

Department of Management, College of Business, Arizona State University

Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine

Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Department of Psychology, University of Michigan

Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois

School of Business Administration, University of Michigan

Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, University of British Columbia

Department of Management, University of Otago

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College

School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Director, Pacific Consulting Group

Department of Communication Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London

Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, Stanford University

Department of Communication, University of Northern Iowa

Faculty of Business, University of Victoria

Department of Business Administration, University of Illinois

Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion Institute of Technology, Haifa

Department of Psychology, University of Michigan

Department of Marketing, cole des HEC, Montreal

Department of Communication Studies, Arizona State University West

School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

Department of Organizational Psychology, University of Michigan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rosemary Nixon at Sage provided vital support and encouragement to make this book possible. My particular thanks to her, and also to my colleagues at Bath who have kept emotion alive.

STEPHEN FINEMAN

In the first edition of Emotion in Organization (1993) I characterized organizations as emotional arenas to capture the intense activity of lived emotion in organizational life. As emotional arenas, organizations bond and divide their members. Workaday frustrations and passions boredom, envy, fear, love, anger, guilt, infatuation, embarrassment, nostalgia, anxiety are deeply woven into the way roles are enacted and learned, power is exercised, trust is held, commitment formed and decisions made. Emotions are not simply excisable from these, and many other, organizational processes; they both characterize and inform them.

This, in effect, was the key message in the first edition, a theme that, at the time, was relatively muted in the study of organizations. The book developed the point in a number of different directions emotionalizing the way meanings and order are created in organizations, the production and politics of social differences (gender, sexuality), the substance of organizational culture and change, and examining facets of emotional labour.

In looking once more into the emotional arena, what do we see? How have things developed in the intervening seven years? What might we applaud and what might we be more circumspect about? In considering these questions I do not propose a complete review of the diverse literatures on emotion and organizations interested readers may like to refer to recent overviews in Fineman (1999), Pinder (1998) and Ashkenasy et al. (2000). In this chapter I will be partial and selective; I will also preview the chapters to come.

Emotions have developed into something of a sub-discipline in the study of work and organizations. There are now emotion papers and symposia presented at major organizational and management conferences, as well as specialist web-based discussion groups. Professional associations of sociologists, both sides of the Atlantic, run forums dedicated to the study of emotions, reflecting a move towards a passionate sociology (Game and Metcalf, 1996). Applied psychologists have explored the connection between emotion and motivation (George and Brief, 1996; Pinder, 1998), the consequences of affect and mood at work (Estrada et al., 1997; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) and emotional contagion, the catching and passing-on of emotion (Doherty, 1998; Verbeke, 1997). Some aspects of this research have reached the popular management and psychological literature as.

Aesthetics and emotion has been another area of concern. Our work lives are mediated and shaped by material objects machines, technologies, rooms, books, walls, windows, cups, coffee machines. Indeed, some social theorists regard material objects as actors in their own right in organizational relations (for example Callon, 1987; Latour, 1991). We often invest such objects or spaces with emotional qualities, reflecting our own identities and moods my miserable computer, my happy chair, that cosy room, this depressing building, that wretched fax machine, this beautiful book, that ugly corridor. Such emotional/aesthetic experiences have been examined (for example by Gagliardi, 1999; Strati, 1999), where the aesthetic captures feelings of form or flow that are experienced from the places and objects where people work. The machines, office layout, colours, geographical setting, noise, music, task activities, food are objects of sound, sight, touch or smell that trigger feelings of rightness, discord, warmth, harshness or alienation (see ).