The purpose of this paper is three-fold: first, to argue that Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s state-of-mind has implications for a Heideggarian understanding of social atmosphere or “mood,” itself understood as the domain in which we realize our meaningful attachment to the world; second, to link Heidegger’s account of Dasein to sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s analysis of affective labour in order to underscore Hochschild’s critique of affective labour by showing it to occur at the very site of our free and meaningful (...) involvement in the world; third, to demonstrate the relevance of Heidegger’s analysis to concrete sociological analysis. I begin by arguing that Heidegger’s existential account of affective life reveals affective life as: an accomplished attachment to worldly specificities, grounded on socially constituted significance, and our responsibility. Second, showing Hochschild’s account of emotions to be compatible with Heidegger’s work, I consider Hochschild’s analysis of airline stewardesses, clarifying how the affective lives of individuals and the shared, public dimension of affective life are both undermined by affective labour, specifically in terms of the way that communicative interactions are manipulated in commercial settings. Resulting from the manipulation of affective life by companies are various challenges to our freedom: an inability to find meaningful projects; a lack of substantial measures in terms of which to choose our projects; and the inability to recognize such choices as constitutive of affective life and as our responsibility. Connecting these consequences to the three aspects of affective life noted above, it is concluded that affective labour threatens the inherently social character of freedom and also suppresses and inhibits the existential involvement in the world through which we realize meaningfully our freedom. (shrink)

Negotiating proves a precarious ability. The development of the arts of compromise and negotiating is not self-evident. Confrontation, flight and direct physical attack prove much more tempting in human history. How did these skills develop? The typical power and dependency network that evolved in western Europe in particular, is a significant factor. Different patterns of emotion management emerged in interaction with changing power balances. These patterns bred the skills of negotiating and compromise.

This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and emotional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as “inter-affection” that are part of the inter-corporeality of the “Flesh” of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational life-worlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of (...) affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined. (shrink)

In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as `immaterial labour', `affective labour' and `precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and Laura Grindstaff, the latter drawing on Hochschild's concept of emotional labour), which we believe may be (...) more useful than autonomist concepts in developing empirically informed critique. The main body of the article then consists of an ethnographic account of working on one particular television programme, an account that aims to build on these theoretical debates. We analyse how the power to provide exposure or not to individuals in the talent show genre in contemporary television (a feature that derives from the symbolic power of producers to make texts that are then circulated to massive numbers of people) and disputes between commissioners and independent producers about how best to go about doing so (an organizational issue) are registered in the form of stress, anxiety and sometimes poor working relations among project teams of young television researchers (a matter of working conditions and experiences). We especially focus on how additional pressures are borne by these workers because of the requirements to undertake emotional labour, involving the handling of strong emotions on the part of talent show contributors, and to maintain good working relations in short-term project work, requirements generated by the need to ensure future employment. Ultimately, then, we support the view that creative work is `precarious' — but we go beyond the generalizations involved in concepts such as immaterial labour and affective labour to show the specific ways in which precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in one industry. (shrink)

Foucault observe que, par rapport aux relations de pouvoir, une personne est toujours « ... confrontée à des phénomènes complexes qui ne se soumettent pas à la forme hégélienne de la dialectique ... Du coup, ce qui a fait grandir le pouvoir, alors il s'habitue à l'attaquer. » Le pouvoir est invariablement retiré, réorganisé et réinvesti dans de nouvelles formes et modalités. Dans une approche hétérotopique, l'émancipation de l'uniformité émotionnelle et de la résistance aux scripts émotionnels se transforme rapidement en (...) une nouvelle forme de gouvernance où la résistance devient une discipline qui, à son tour, offre des opportunités de résistance. Michael Polanyi a identifié deux types différents de connaissances : explicites (transmises à l'aide d'un langage formel qui peut être codé par des artefacts) et tacites (impliquant une expérience directe qui ne peut pas être communiquée dans pas de mode codé). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18685.69607. (shrink)

In a heterotopic approach, emancipation from emotional uniformity and resistance to emotional scripts quickly turns into a new form of governance where resistance becomes a discipline that, in turn, provides opportunities for resistance. Emotional intelligence seems to exemplify Foucault's arguments that power is exercised both by what is allowed and by what is forbidden, both through collusion and opposition. In this sense, if emotional labor could be understood as a technology of domination, emotional intelligence seems to be a technology of (...) the self. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34616.37123. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the practices of emotion work in the financial services industry as they are constructed in interviews with people employed in different financial organizations. The issues of emotion work in organizations are generally investigated in terms of emotion management, impression formation and negotiation or accomplishment. The previous research has also uncovered that emotions and market moods influence how people make financial decisions under conditions of fundamental uncertainty. In this study, I adopt a critical-interpretive approach and seek to develop (...) an in-depth understanding of organizational practices through which people employed in the financial services industry maintain emotion-reason dualism. This approach allows us to shift the analysis from categorizing what counts as rational versus emotional decision making to examining discourses that constitute claims of preferred rationality and devalue the significance of emotions at work. The transcripts of 23 interviews with 17 people employed in different financial organizations constituted the data for this study. The analysis of the interview discourse shows that emotions are conceptualized as an antipode to rationality, threat, weakness and as a source of stress. On one hand, the strategies of internal emotional control reflect the participants’ desire to take control over their feelings in order to fit into the discourse of preferred rationality. The concept of emotion also shapes the tactics of impression management. The interviewees were consciously aware of which feelings they wanted to display, and how to use emotions in order to build and maintain networks of relationships with different market participants. On the other hand, the simultaneous co-existence of negation and practical utility of feelings at work in the participants’ narratives suggests that meanings associated with preferred rationality and marginalized emotionality fluctuate along the following dimensions: absence-presence, chaos-order/discipline, weakness-power and subjectivity-objectivity. These findings open up a new space to explore the concepts of emotionality and rationality as socially constructed phenomena that are reproduced in the practices of emotion work. The focus on discourse not only offers a communication centered model of rationalized emotion, but also unveils social aspects of financial management. (shrink)