Abstract:
The over-rational portrayal of middle managers has the intended or unintended
consequence of masking and marginalising the emotional dimension demanded in this
role. This research critically examines emotion at work, exploring how it is shaped and
bound up with concepts such as control, power and fear. The framework used
particularly focuses on both the emotions of control, and the control of emotions, which
gives empirical support to the critique of over-rational views of management work.
This research takes place longitudinally within an engineering company who have
recently downsized by 50%, in a community which is tightly knit and lacks alternative
employment opportunities. The overriding narrative of `site survival' is the key local
discourse used, and this is explored through several discursive themes in evidence on
site.
This study explores how managerial emotion work involves the suppression and
expression of emotion on a number of levels, as managers face off to multiple
allegiances, some in direct tension with each other. This study illustrates how
emotions are not merely the business of the individual, but are dynamic social
constructions, and argues for an emotional framework that is relational rather than
entitative. Emotions, their expression and suppression, are subject to, and situated
within, numerous structural factors, and managers are subsequently both constrained
and enabled by their environment. Far from being powerless, it is argued that managers
are able to employ a number of resistant strategies and exert a degree of personal
agency to alleviate tight emotion control.
It is concluded that in times of change, emotion work represents a large but invisible
part of the middle manager's role, yet is unacknowledged, unsupported and unscripted.
By peeping beyond the `over-rational iron cage', this study provides rich empirical
accounts which enhance our understanding of the emotion work carried out by middle
managers.
