Emotion Management and Professional Socialisation in the Medical Field

Abstract

While a plethora of research has studied emotion management and its antecedents, the role socialisation plays in emotion management is underestimated in recent research. Additionally, scarce emotional socialisation research limits itself to the focal organisation. Therefore, this paper examines how emotion management is framed through a professional, cross-organisational socialisation process. Based on a qualitative study of the emotion management and socialisation of gynaecologists, I show how the professional socialisation phase of future gynaecologists comprises different organisations, of which each provides one important learning step towards the specific emotion management of gynaecologists. The profession-specific socialisation of gynaecologists places medical feeling rules in the foreground in such a way that these might shape every handling of emotions, although organisational feeling rules and individual decisions on how to deal with emotions are able to supplement it later. Finally, I discuss Bourdieu’s nexus of field and habitus as a promising conceptualisation to further theorize on the phenomena.