Forms Of Emotion Work Research Articles

"How you keep going": Voluntary sector practitioners' story-lines as emotion work.

The voluntary sector acts as the last line of defense for some of the most marginalized people in societies around the world, yet its capacities are significantly reduced by chronic resource shortages and dynamic political obstacles. Existing research has scarcely examined what it is like for voluntary sector practitioners working amidst these conditions. In this paper, we explore how penal voluntary sector practitioners across England and Scotland marshaled their personal and professional resources to "keep going" amidst significant challenges. Our analysis combines symbolic interactionism with the concept of story-lines. We illuminate the narratives that practitioners mobilized to understand and motivate their efforts amidst the significant barriers, chronic limitations, and difficult emotions brought forth by their work. We position practitioners' story-lines as a form of emotion work that mitigated their experiences of anger, frustration, overwhelm, sadness, and disappointment, enabling them to move forward and continue to support criminalized individuals. Our analysis details three story-lines-resignation, strategy, and refuge-and examines their consequences for practitioners and their capacities to intervene in wicked social problems.

Love, Stigma, and Resistance: “Therapeutic Microaggressions” in a Prisoners' Wives' Support Group

This article derives from ethnographies of therapeutic interventions in a support group for prisoners' wives in Israel. The study's main inductive findings reveal that love and the emotion work of prisoners' wives are constructed as the primary site for achieving the clinical objective: modifying the prisoners' wives' spoiled self and encouraging their adoption of a psychological self. The findings reveal a dramatic clash between the therapeutic emotion work of love that the group facilitators proposed and the collectivist emotion work to which the prisoners' wives subscribed. These forms of emotion work are associated with ethnic hierarchies and experiences of stigmatization by the prisoners' wives during the therapeutic sessions. In this context, the article suggests the concept of “therapeutic microaggressions” to describe how interactions in clinical sessions can reinforce inequality.

Emotion work among pregnant and birthing women

Backgroundprevious research has examined emotional labour as an important component of the occupational work of midwives and gynaecological nurses. Fewer studies explore emotion work by women during normal pregnancy and birth, and existing studies emphasise emotion work based on the midwife–woman relationship. This study explores use of emotion work during pregnancy and birth among a sample of women. Objectivethe study objective is to identify the mechanisms and purposes of emotion work among women during pregnancy and birth. Designdata consist of 18 in-depth interviews with women regarding their pregnancy and birth experiences and seven online pregnancy journals. Data were analysed to identify themes in participants׳ descriptions of emotion work during pregnancy and birth. Findingsparticipants described four methods of emotion work that included shifting cognitive focus, exerting control, social support and using technology. Participants used emotion work for the four main purposes of maintaining their own and their babies׳ health, coping with negative events, managing pain, and achieving their desired birth. Although some emotion work was undertaken in relational context with the midwife or partner, much of the emotion work described took place in solitude. Implications for practicesocial support from midwives or partners was a form of emotion work that facilitated positive interpretations of the birth experience.

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender, Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.

“Women's Work”? Women Partners of Transgender Men Doing Housework and Emotion Work

Despite increasing family studies research on same‐sex cohabiters and families, the literature is virtually devoid of transgender and transsexual families. To bridge this gap, I present qualitative research narratives on household labor and emotion work from 50 women partners of transgender and transsexual men. Contrary to much literature on “same‐sex” couples, the division of household labor and emotion work within these contemporary families cannot simply be described as egalitarian. Further, although the forms of emotion work and “gender strategies,”“family myths,” and “accounts” with which women partners of trans men engage resonate with those from women in (non‐trans) heterosexual and lesbian couples, they are also distinct, highlighting tensions among personal agency, politics, and structural inequalities in family life.

Echoes of Columbine

The authors describe how school leaders at seven sites where school shootings occurred engaged in surface and deep acting, two forms of emotion work (Hochschild, 1983, 1990) in response to their understanding about what feelings were appropriate or inappropriate in crisis situations. Data are drawn from three qualitative studies over a 9-year period. Analyses of data regarding emotion work yield four lessons for school crisis leadership: (a) personal definitions of leadership guided responses to the shooting, (b) the extent that the crisis changed leaders' work, (c) the high personal toll paid by leaders, and (d) the change in the sense of what is possible. Ideas about leadership and emotion, including display rules, are culturally bound, which has implications for leadership training, development, and policy changes in schools.

Acute Loss and the Social Construction of Blame

Using interview and observation data from white and African-American parents of murdered children, this article explores a primary social process accompanying acute loss: the social construction of blame. Findings reveal that race and class are primary forces that shape not only the experience of loss, but also attributions of cause, designations of blame, and the construction of post-mortem identities. While poor Black informants encountered avoidance strategies on the part of authorities (e.g., police) when their child was murdered, whites and upper middle-class Blacks received emotional support. This differential treatment by authorities led to either legitimate or disenfranchised grief, both of which were addressed by the strategy of “sanctification,” a form of emotion work.

Comfort and Struggle: Emotion Work in Family Life

Though family life is typically associated with emotion rather than work, the concept of emotion work reveals the effort behind family feeling. Existing literature on family emotion work emphasizes caregiving and interpersonal support—activities associated with the housewife ideal of the industrial age. This article examines not only such caregiving and support activities but also several other forms of emotion work that become visible when we consider families whose lives diverge from this privileged ideal.