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In this article we explore the notion of emotional capital in relation to language teachers’ emotion labor and the role of reflection in understanding their emotional experiences. We draw on interview narratives with teachers (n = 25) working in higher education institutions in the US and the UK. During these interview conversations, we elicited accounts of teachers’ emotionally charged experiences that arise as part of their ongoing, mundane teaching practice and how they respond to these situations. We argue that as language teachers struggle to orient to the feeling rules of their institutions, they develop the capacity to perform the emotions that they believe are expected of them. This capacity is further shaped through their reflective practice, both as individual reflection and collaborative reflection with colleagues. We thus analyze how language teachers’ accruing emotional capital, developed through emotion labor and reflective activity, can be converted into social and cultural capital. We also point to how language teachers’ emotional capital is entangled in power relations and thus requires careful scrutiny.

This study aims to apply Hochschild's theory of emotional labour to emergency care, and uncover the 'specialty-specific' feeling rules driving this labour. Despite the importance of positive nurse well-being, the emotional labour of nursing (a great influencer in wellbeing) remains neglected.Ethnography enabled immersion in the ED setting, gathering the lived experiences and narratives of the ED nursing team. We undertook first-hand observations at one major trauma centre ED and one district general ED including semi-structured interviews (18). A reflexive and interpretive approach towards thematic analysis was used.We unearthed and conceptualized four feeling rules born from this context and offer extensive insights into the emotional labour of emergency nurses.Understanding the emotional labour and feeling rules of various nursing specialties offers critical insight into the challenges facing staff - fundamental for nursing well-being and associated retention programs.What problem did the study address? What were the main findings? Where and on whom will the research have impact? Academically, this research expands our understanding - we know little of nurses' feeling rules and how specialties influence them. Clinically, (including service managers and policy makers) there are practical implications for nurse well-being.目的: 本研究旨在将霍赫希尔德的情绪劳动理论应用于急诊护理中, 并对推动此类劳动的“特殊”情绪规则进行披露。护士幸福感极为重要, 但目前, 护士的情感劳动 (对幸福感有巨大影响) 仍然遭到忽视。 设计和方法: 人种学常见于ED, 因此, 应收集ED护理团队的生活经验和叙述性资料。目前, 我们已在主要创伤中心ED和普通ED进行观察, 并开展半结构化访谈(18)。主题分析过程中, 采用了自反和解释性方法。 结果: 我们发掘四个由此产生的情感规则, 将其概念化, 并为急诊护士的情绪劳动提供广泛见解。 结论: 了解各类护理人员的情感劳动和情感规则, 有助于深入了解职员面临的挑战, 而此也是护理健康和相关保留项目的基础。 影响: 该研究解决了什么问题? 主要调查结果是什么? 本研究将在何处产生影响, 主要针对谁? 就学术层面而言, 本研究将扩大人们对护士情感规则和专业影响的理解--目前, 人们对此知之甚少。临床层面而言, (包括服务经理和政策制定者) 本研究对护士健康有实际意义。.

Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of lethal violence for combat operations. It is, moreover, a total institution, and the disculturation new recruits must endure creates fertile ground for the inculcation of a specific emotional regime. Further, unlike most other service occupations, the military is both male‐dominated and highly masculine. The paper also makes a case for using memoirs in the study of emotional labour. Being examples of what we call identity writing, they offer different insights to those we might attain through other methods. Indeed, we argue that memoirs provide a fruitful source for future organization studies research into the emotional regime of the military especially. Third, our discussion expands the concept of emotional labour in that the emotional regime the memoirists index: is not undertaken for a specific group of customers; entails a distinctive range of emotions; and involves the conscious cultivation of gendered communities of coping among soldiers.

In this article I analyze the collective management of ambiguous emotions in the case of grief arising from perinatal loss/stillbirth. Based on a content analysis of selected Polish discussion lists for bereaved parents and interviews with moderators of these lists, I conceptualize the experience of grief arising from miscarriage/stillbirth as both culturally “disembedded”—not regulated by a coherent set of feeling and display rules, and interactionally “disenfranchised”—framed by the immediate social surrounding of the bereaved as illegitimate. This study then focuses on subsequent social processes surrounding the collective management of such emotions through interactions within online bereavement communities, leading to the creation of local definitions of the situation of loss and formation of subcultural feeling and display rules of grief. I posit that in a wider perspective these community processes can be seen as grassroots mechanisms that agents use to transform the existing emotional culture of grief.

This study examines interactions surrounding the transmission, enforcement, and assessment of compliance with feeling rules. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how actors within an organization that prepares low-income black and Latino students to attend elite boarding schools serve as both emotional socializers, transmitting particular feeling rules, and emotional gatekeepers, enforcing and assessing compliance with those rules. I find that it was the interactional process surrounding rule reminders—rather than differences in students' behavioral infractions or in the feeling rules themselves—that was most consequential in shaping evaluations of students' compliance with the program's feeling rules. Gendered patterns in these interactions often resulted in male students being treated as behaviorally deviant and female students being treated as emotionally deviant.

AimTo explore emotion cultures constructed in supervision and consider how supervision functions as an emotionally safe space promoting critical reflection.BackgroundResearch published between 1995-2015 suggests supervision has a positive impact on nurses’ emotional wellbeing, but there is little understanding of the processes involved in this, and how styles of emotion interaction are established in supervision.DesignA narrative approach was used to investigate mental health nurses’ understandings and experiences of supervision.Methods8 semi-structured interviews were conducted with community mental health nurses in the UK during 2011. Analysis of audio data used features of speech to identify narrative discourse and illuminate meanings. A topic-centred analysis of interview narratives explored discourses shared between the participants. This supported the identification of feeling rules within participants’ narratives, and the exploration of the emotion context of supervision.FindingsEffective supervision was associated with three feeling rules: Safety and reflexivity; Staying professional; Managing feelings. These feeling rules allowed the expression and exploration of emotions, promoting critical reflection. A contrast was identified between the emotion culture of supervision and the nurses’ experience of their workplace cultures as requiring the suppression of difficult emotions. Despite this contrast supervision functioned as an emotion micro-culture with its own distinctive feeling rules. ConclusionsThe analytical construct of feeling rules allows us to connect individual emotional experiences to shared normative discourses, highlighting how these shape emotional processes taking place in supervision. This understanding supports an explanation of how supervision may positively influence nurses’ emotion management and perhaps reduce burnout.

In this paper we make an argument for why thinking critically about neoliberalism is important for media and communication studies. We advance a case for a critical media analysis that will take seriously the affective and psychic life of neoliberalism as an increasingly central means of governing and producing people’s desires, attachments, and modes of “getting by.” To illustrate our broader theoretical argument, we will discuss the contradictory neoliberal regulation of affective dispositions for women, which prescribe confidence or alternatively, the pleasing, lighthearted readiness to “not take the self too seriously.” We make a case for expanding our theoretical and conceptual vocabulary in order to foreground the relationship between neoliberalism, media and subjectivity in the maintenance of continuing inequalities.

Despite a rich literature in law and society embracing contracts as exchange relations, empirical work has yet to consider their emotional dimensions. I explore the previously unmapped case of surrogacy to address the interface of law and emotions in contracting. Using 115 semistructured interviews and content analyses of 30 surrogacy contracts, I explain why and how lawyers, with the help of matching agencies and counselors, tactically manage a variety of emotions in surrogates and intended parents before, during, and after the baby is born. I establish that a web of “feeling rules” concerning lifestyle, intimate contact, and future relationships are formalized in the contract, coupled with informal strategies like “triage,” to minimize attachment, conflicts, and risk amidst a highly unsettled and contested legal terrain. Feeling rules are shared and embraced by practitioners in an increasingly multijurisdictional field, thereby forging and legitimating new emotion cultures. Surrogacy offers a strategic site in which to investigate the legalization of emotion—a process that may be occurring throughout contemporary society in a variety of exchange relations.

This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project investigating the experiences of UK-based students training on level-2 and level-3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by class and gender. We consider the ways in which students are encouraged to manage their own and the children's emotions and we identify a number of ‘feeling rules’ that demarcate the vocational habitus of care work with young children. We conclude by emphasising the importance of specific contexts of employment in order to understand workers’ emotional labour and argue for more recognition of the intense demands of emotional labour in early childhood education and care work.

This article proceeds in three steps. First it draws out some possibilities for a study of emotions and discusses how advice literature can be used as a source, not only for feeling rules, but also for emotion knowledge, which sets the framework for the possible perception and expression of emotions. Second it places advice literature in early twentieth century India in its historical context, looking notably at the different traditions for giving advice, from which authors drew: moral philosophy, the Sufi tradition and legal sources. Third it focuses on two sermons on anger which one of the most prolific Urdu writers, the reformer and Sufi Ashraf Ali Thanawi, addressed to a male and a female audience respectively.

This article examines everyday constructions of racial subjects, the affective worlds of those subjects, and the potential material consequences behind emotional ethos that are oftentimes in alignment with the interests of state and market imperatives. Under neoliberalism, there has been an intensification in the cultural standardization and organization of feelings and sentiments (Haskell 1985). I examine how feelings and sentiments intersect with everyday evaluations of racial difference and processes of racial learning, particularly among Latin American migrant and U.S.-born Latino youth. What do individuals’ affective worlds tell us about multi-scale experiences of race, racial ideologies, and racialization practices? What kinds of emotional work do embodied practices of learning race require? How does becoming a transnational racial subject in the United States alter one's affective world and perspectives on the emotional subjectivities of racialized others? I approach these questions by drawing from ethnographic materials gathered from fieldwork conducted in public high schools in the Puerto Rican area of North Broadway and the largely Brazilian Ironbound, two predominantly Latino neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, between 2001 and 2008. To a lesser extent, I also draw from research conducted in private and public high schools in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Santurce, Puerto Rico, over several months in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I argue that Latin American and Latino populations in urban areas of the United States navigate unfamiliar racial situations through the development of a quotidian emotional epistemology; that is, through the deployment of a set of rules and assumptions about affect and its adequate expression, interpretations of how others feel or should feel, and the creation or performance of an affective persona. As I demonstrate in the essay, these rules and assumptions are informed by transnational racial ideologies, social practices around performances of Blackness, socioeconomic hierarchies, and expectations of belonging on multiple scales, like the neighborhood, nation state, and the market. I am particularly attentive to how Latin American migrant and U.S.-born Latino youth engage in a process of racial learning that renders them “street therapists” dedicated to observing and correcting “defective” forms of Blackness, developing appropriate feeling rules, and hesitantly embracing a docility valued in an exploitative service sector economy.

This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.

This study examines how others indicate that our emotions violate social norms and how people feel about and respond to those indications. The data come from in-depth interviews with thirty-two people who had recently lost a loved one to murder (“bereaved victims”). Through the symbolic interaction process, bereaved victims came to appreciate the burden their grief imposed on others, and some of them took steps to minimize that burden. Despite their awareness of the burden, however, many of the bereaved expected others to express heartfelt sympathy for their loss. Instead, people offered inappropriate (and even hurtful) responses, including avoiding the topic of their loss, offering unnecessarily dramatic responses to the loss, and telling them to move on. The responses suggest that current feeling rules and emotion norms surrounding grief do not reflect the true extent of bereaved people’s actual experiences, creating awkward situations for potential supporters and the bereaved.

Consumers’ purchase decisions are often influenced by a simple assessment of how long they expect an anticipated purchase (e.g., buying a sports car or a new outfit) will make them happy. Unfortunately, affective forecasts are prone to durability bias (i.e., the overes-timation of the duration of felt emotions in response to a future event). Here, this article suggests that normative beliefs, or “feeling rules,” often underlie emotion forecasts. This account suggests that affective forecasts can be influenced by external normative communications and that conditions exist where affect duration may be underestimated rather than overestimated—thus demonstrating a reversal of durability bias. Such reversals occur when existing norms advocate attenuated emotional responses (e.g., one should not be overly impacted by minor setbacks or small imperfections). This article discusses how marketers can influence consumers’ happiness forecasts by modifying salient norms for consumer groups or product categories.

We conducted an exploratory, qualitative study investigating experiences of women who had developed breast cancer under the age of 40 and who were identified as BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation carriers. These germline mutation carriers face an increased lifetime risk of a second primary breast cancer and an increased risk for a primary ovarian cancer. Thirteen women who fit this criteria participated in three focus groups conducted at a major cancer center in the UK during Spring 2003. We asked broad, open-ended questions that allowed for a wide range of responses about their cancer and genetic testing experiences, physical and psycho-social concerns, family and partner reactions and their need for social support. The women expressed feelings of devastation, loneliness, feeling different and isolation, ambivalence about having to support family members, worries about partner's anxiety and depression, and anxiety about talking to family members, especially children. These feelings were stronger after the cancer diagnosis and compounded by the genetic test results that occurred at a later time. We also found that, at least temporarily, the women experienced what we call "social separation"--emotional distance from, or dissonance with groups they interact with or are part of, e.g., family and friends, frequently leading to a reduction in communication or a change in previously unstated, but accepted normal interaction. We concentrate on a few characteristics of social separation-feelings of aloneness, isolation and separation, use of silence and verbal discretion, the relationship between estrangement and kinship interaction and norm disruption, and are looking at social patterns of interpersonal relationships that may occur when risk and illness statuses are new and framing and feeling rules have not as yet been clearly developed due to a cultural lag.

Aim of the paper. To review the literature relating to emotional labour in the workplace and identify potential sources of emotion within midwifery work. Rationale. There is substantial evidence to indicate that the quality of the relationship between midwife and woman is significant in determining the quality of the childbirth experience for women. Despite this, there is a notable lack of research regarding midwives’ experiences of participating in this relationship, and even less regarding the emotional issues involved. Method. Literature review of relevant midwifery, nursing and sociological literature. Discussion of the theoretical perspectives provided by sociological and nursing research relating to the management of emotion at work and critical consideration of their application to an analysis of midwifery work. Findings. Although these theoretical perspectives may offer significant insights of relevance to midwifery, there is much more that needs to be uncovered. Midwifery work has the potential for creating high levels of emotion work and current changes in the organization of United Kingdom (UK) maternity care may further increase this. Conclusion. It is essential that midwives develop their understanding of emotion at work in order to improve their own working lives, and to meet the needs of childbearing women and their families. More research is needed in this field to develop a body of knowledge to inform midwifery education and practice.