Emotion

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of seeing themselves as authentic, real and whole persons. The fantasies become a way of closing the gap by having the incompatible identity-regulating discourses meet. Paradoxically, the idea of being more than work is exactly what renders them capable of submitting themselves (i.e. subordinating the off-work identity) and being just about work.

Another way of manoeuvring identity regulation, according to Collinson (2003:

538), is to perform a ‘dramaturgical self’ as a form of impression management. This brings us to emotions and, more specifically, emotional labour. It would be intuitive to assume that a rational model of organisation comes with the exclusion of emotion.

I have previously shown how, for example, Weber’s (1924) bureaucratic organisation and notion of rational-legal authority both rest on the dehumanisation of organisation and, with that, a disregard for the personal, including emotions (to the extent that we may think of emotions in intrinsic terms). From that perspective, emotions would simply get in the way of organisational efficiency and productivity, thereby rendering the organisation ‘irrational’. However, as studies of emotional labour in organisations attest, emotions are an organisational phenomenon in the sense that organisations attempt to either rationalise desirable emotions or regulate through normalisation those deemed undesirable.

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requirements of an occupation. This may, on a side note, potentially leave employees with emotional dissonance akin to cognitive dissonance (see e.g.

Christensen & Muhr, 2019), because the management of appearance takes over what was formerly private territories of the self. Regardless of whether you really feel empathetic towards a passenger (the customer), that is what you are required to convey – and convincingly so. Hochschild (1983: 96) argues that through the process of aligning one’s emotional display with the expectations of one’s role in the organisation, employees get estranged from their own feelings, as eloquently captured in this quote, which is a recruiter’s advice to new candidates: ‘[T]he secret to getting a job is to imagine the kind of person the company wants to hire and then become that person during the interview. The hell with your theories and of what you believe in, and what your integrity is, and all that other stuff.’ But becoming the person that the organisation wants is easier said than done, considering the many and different scenarios that flight attendants have to have an adequate emotional reaction to.

Recruiters look for someone who is smart but can also cope with being considered dumb, someone who is capable of giving emergency safety comments but can also handle people who can’t take orders from a woman, and someone who is naturally empathetic but can also resist the numbing effect of having that empathy engineered and continuously used by a company for its own purposes. (Hochschild, 1983: 98)

The training of accurate emotional display begins already during recruitment with guidelines for how candidates are to behave in accordance with a number of predefined feelings, such as being sincere, unaffected, polite or flirtatious/kind,

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depending on the customer. In other words, the flight attendants have to give up control over how the work is to be done, thereby becoming deskilled and devalued (cf. scientific management). The organisation, the airline, makes use of a disciplinary practice in requiring regular weigh-ins (Hochschild, 1983: 102). If the weight standard is exceeded, the flight attendant risks losing their job. Hochschild (1983: 108) finds that companies want ‘real’ people; not just surface acting (where the employee does not hide the pretence of taking on a role) but deep acting (that covers the pretence because the employee acts as if). Deep acting is a matter of doing the emotional labour necessary in order to reduce any dissonance between the organisation’s values and goals and the employee’s values and feelings. Through deep acting you become organisation-man, much like Kunda’s (1992) account of employees calling themselves ‘Techies’.

Emotion management is located in the intermediate space between deeply held beliefs and physical appearance. Emotional labour, as Hochschild (1983: 136) writes, poses a challenge to a person’s sense of self: ‘The issue of estrangement between what a person senses as her “true self” and her inner and outer acting becomes something to work out, to take a position on.’ I take from the quote that the flight attendants know how incredibly much they have to smile and how that demand runs counter to how they feel. And yet they are still smiling. Thus, the flight attendants are not, as a Marxist analysis would suggest, victims of false consciousness, in which case the solution would be to enlighten and have them realise how their employer exploits them. They appear to already be well aware of what they are doing and that what they do might do them a disservice. The matter at hand, therefore, seems to be one of enlightened false consciousness (Fleming, 2010; Johnsen, Muhr, & Pedersen, 2009; Zizek, 1989). They resort to a cynical mode of reasoning (Sloterdijk, 1988; Sloterdijk, Eldred, & Adelson, 1984), so even

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when some develop what Collinson (2003: 539) calls ‘resistant selves’ and, for example, laugh to let off steam (Hoschchild, 1983: 105), the laughter may prove to have no critical, as in subversive, effect, since the laughter is exactly what allows the flight attendants to distance (disidentify) themselves just enough to continue doing the emotional labour demanded of them by the organisation (Karlsen &

Villadsen, 2015). My reason for mentioning this is that identity-based control, including rules for how to feel and how to express feelings as set by management, leads to identity-based resistance. But as Contu (2008) points out, and as seems to be the case with the flight attendants; resistance may in some instances end up reproducing that which it attempts to resist.

Hochschild’s (1983) account of the emotional labour done by flight attendants is an example of disciplinary practices for bringing about the ‘right’ feelings as required by the airline organisations. Indirect supervision (1983: 117) is one such example.

It relies on the flight attendants’ sense of what passengers will communicate to management that they will, in turn, communicate to the flight attendants. This practice is an ideal candidate for what Grey (1994) calls a Panoptic technique, where Panoptic refers to Foucault’s (1977) idea of the Panopticon as an ideal diagram of discipline. In short, the Panopticon is a design for a prison where the prisoners are housed in a circular building with guards stationed in a tower in the centre of the complex, from where they can observe any of the prisoners without the prisoners knowing when or if they are being watched. The prisoners, then, will have to discipline themselves as if they were under observation, by adhering to the norms and demonstrating good behaviour. In the same fashion, the disciplinary power of indirect supervision trains the flight attendants to examine themselves through (hierarchical) observation and normalising judgment.

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The example of flight attendants has served to show the appropriation of emotions that are wanted by the organisation. Other studies have shown the practices set in place to regulate undesirable emotions in a similar fashion; emotions that are believed to be disruptive of organisational functioning.

Organisations use various means of regulating socially undesirable emotions, including normalizing. We define normalizing as institutionalized processes by which extraordinary situations are rendered seemingly ordinary. […] By

‘institutionalized’, we mean processes that are embedded in the organisation’s structure and culture such that they exist independently of any given person. Thus, we focus on mechanisms that appear to be shared by group or organisational members. (Ashforth & Kreiner, 2002: 215–217, my emphasis)

The process of normalisation will render the out-of-the-ordinary more normal and, therefore, less likely to stir up feelings that are unwanted from the perspective of the organisation. Through self-policing and emotional conduct, employees may arrive at an emotional display that is consistent with their professional identities (Coupland, Brown, Daniels, & Humphreys, 2008). And it is important to note that power as normalisation ‘does not work by violence upon the body but rather by observing, examining a body and leading it to become more efficient’ (May, 2006:

83, emphasis in original; see also Deetz, 1998). The development of appropriate emotional displays has consequences relationally and structurally as well as institutionally, and the move from a research focus on intentions (i.e. the motivations behind power, such as ensuring productivity or freedom) to the how of power has allowed for investigations of its effects – including those that are

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unintended. Ashcraft (2007, 2013), for example, has shown that it is not only people who get a sense of identity from their work; occupations also derive identity from the groups of people that they are normally associated with. Think of the gender-segregated labour market with male- and female-dominated workplaces – reinstating identity, power (and emotion) as central organisational phenomena.

In reviewing the literature on power, identity and emotion in organisation studies, I have utilised Fleming and Spicer’s (2014) framework as a heuristic for explaining dissimilar conceptualisations of power as either possessive or relational. I used the latter conception to dwell on the notions of identity and emotion in organisational contexts, providing examples along the way to show a movement in organisational control from exerting power over the outside – that is, competencies, skills and qualifications of the worker who was allowed, even expected (cf. Weber, 1924) to maintain a split between the private and professional roles – to power being realised through (not over) the inside of employees – that is, the self, the individual employee’s notion of self as reflexively understood. This movement has also changed meanings of identity, which traditionally has been understood as an inner core that is stable – an essence – to an understanding of identities (plural) in flux and only momentarily stable, since they are constantly contested and depend on, although not determined by, the discursive and social identities available. Tracy and Trethewey (2005) summarise this strongly – and beautifully – using the metaphor of self as crystalised.

Certainly crystals may feel solid, stable, and fixed, but just as crystals have differing forms depending upon whether they grow rapidly or slowly, under constant or fluctuating conditions, or from highly variable

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or remarkably uniform fluids or gasses, crystalized selves have different shapes depending on the various discourses through which they are constructed and constrained. (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005: 186)

The organisation is, in this regard, but one place from which discourses are produced. Consequently, individuals are not seen as unitary, coherent or autonomous. They are not separate entities, nor are they separable from social relations and organisational processes. Ultimately, this part of the review has brought us to more contemporary debates in the research field of organisation about co-optation of the so-called whole person; that is, a form of neo-normative control where employees are expected not to internalise the organisational culture (normative control) but to externalise themselves to the organisation. ‘Neo-normative control entails exhortation to “be yourself”’ (Fleming & Sturdy, 2009:

571, emphasis in original; see also Endrissat, Islam, & Noppeney, 2015), and it reveals an organisational interest in employees’ authentic feelings.

Prior to the interest in the complete person, feelings were protected from the organisation either through a private/professional split of identities or the possibility for cynical distancing to organisational control. With neo-normative control, however, organisations may harness feelings as a resource that can be exploited just like regular labour to enhance output. This development has led some scholars to talk of a personality market rather than a labour market (Hanlon, 2016), since organisations are interested in hiring the private self as much as the professional – an extended Marxist critique (Marx, 1970) given that it is not just the labour of the worker that is appropriated by the organisation; the worker is too. The organisation consumes labour and personality. The point of my review is not that identity

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regulation in organisations is bad per se, but that it has consequences for employees’

self-understanding and potential (Maravelias, 2007). And herein lies the difference between normative and neo-normative control; normative control seeks control through employees’ conformity to the organisation’s culture and values.

Conversely, neo-normative control operates through employees’ diversity, through the valuation of difference, of every single employee’s expression of self.

2.6 FROM ORGANISATION AS AN ENTITY OF BEING TO ORGANISING AS