Being, Doing, Feeling: The Constitutive Role of Emotions in Professional Identity.

Scholars have shown that professionals construct their identity around specialized knowledge. When this knowledge is replaced, changed, or threatened by an outside group, their identity can be challenged. However, how professionals react when they experience a sudden void of specialized knowledge--that is, when there is no specialized knowledge available to help them carry out their professional duties-- remains unexplored. We address this gap by asking how professionals reconstruct their identity in the absence of specialized knowledge. We carried out an inductive study by drawing on the oral histories of 80 physicians at the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. As the epidemic progressed, physicians questioned and later reframed the role of both specialized knowledge and emotions in their professional work. Most notably, we found that emotions were constitutive of the professionals' identity, in that physicians integrated emotions into the very definition of what it meant to be a doctor. Professionals identify themselves by "who they are" and "what they do;" our study shows that "how they feel" is also integral to professional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]