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Abstract

Feminist scholarship has highlighted that emotions are not innocently subjective, but social and political, calling attention to the ways in which the anger of oppressed groups has historically been discredited. Further, scholars have criticized the historical opposition of reason and emotion and recognized the uses of anger in opposition movements and social change efforts. Building on feminist scholarship on emotions, this article contributes to the study of how emotions are constructed in social work, particularly in terms of the epistemic potential of service user anger for social work. Based on an empirical analysis of focus groups with 64 frontline workers, the following research question is examined: What cultural repertoires do frontline workers apply to understand service user anger? Four cultural repertoires are identified: strategic, therapeutic, social contextual, and administrative justice. The article discusses how these four cultural repertoires can be used to connect anger to different forms of knowledge, highlighting the implications of repertoire type in understanding the epistemic potential of service user anger. The article discusses potential consequences of applying each cultural repertoire and cautions against allowing demands of emotional control prevail in social work. Further, it highlights reflexivity about the construction of emotions in social work and how the social position of the service user matters for these constructions as a critical competence in social work.

Keywords

anger emotions epistemic justice cultural repertoires employment services

[The citizens] who affect me the most are the ones who try to make traps. They want to find errors, they want to read the law, they need to know that they are right, and they need to hold their ground […] I think it sometimes makes sense to engage with the anger, acknowledging that there is an anger, put it into words as something that is allowed […] asking “what is it that makes you want to tell me these things or respond in this way?” It may make it possible to talk about “what is frustrating me” or “what is making me insecure” or “what is it about you—I mean me—that is provoking the citizen.” (Ari, frontline worker, interview)
Anger is often considered a negative emotion to be controlled or avoided because it undermines collaboration, harms social relationships and may develop into aggression and violence (e.g., Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024). However, a growing scholarship highlights the prosocial and positive outcomes of anger expression (Averill, 1982; Geddes et al., 2020; Monrad, 2024), and as the quote above indicates, engaging with service user anger can provide novel insights into lived experiences. This article highlights the epistemic potential of anger expressed by service users for social work. It identifies the cultural repertoires that frontline workers use to make sense of anger and discusses how service user anger can inform the knowledge base of social work.

Emotions are crucial in relationship-based practices (Ingram, 2013), and their role in social work remains uncontested. Researchers have investigated the emotional labor of social workers (e.g., Moesby-Jensen & Nielsen, 2015), how social workers understand and use their emotions in practice (O’Connor, 2020), and how power and care intersect in social work practices (Engen et al., 2021; Nissen & Engen, 2021). This article is inspired by feminist scholarship highlighting how emotions are political (Warner, 2015), and power works by making the emotions of dominant groups (e.g., white men) more legitimate than the emotions of subordinate groups (e.g., black women), discrediting the participation of subordinate groups by rendering their expressions too emotional (Ahmed, 2004a; 2004b; Hochschild, 1979, 2003; Ost, 2004). Further, feminist scholarship has called attention to the ways in which people are tied to social obligations through the emotions they are expected to experience and express, and how these emotive expectations are a powerful form of social control (Ahmed, 2004b; Hochschild, 1979). This scholarship is important for social work, as it calls attention to gendered and classed emotional divisions (Illouz, 2007) with implications for the interpretation of service user emotion, potentially allowing some groups less legitimacy when expressing their experiences through emotions. This raises important concerns about the role of social work in reproducing inequities through emotions. Further, it calls attention to the construction of service user emotions in social work, and how tacit norms for user emotions may work to discredit service users who are unable or unwilling to conform to these expectations. These are important concerns for critical feminist scholarship, as emotional forms of dominance may tacitly work against efforts of empowerment and social transformation.

This article begins to address these concerns by focusing on the cultural repertoires that social workers apply to understand service user anger. Emotions are seen as knowledge sources that allow for understanding and appreciating the world and communicating one's experiences (Hochschild, 2003; Srinivasan, 2017; Van Kleef, 2009). Anger is an important political emotion in terms of resistance and voice (Holmes, 2004; Lyman, 1981). Anger may hold significant epistemic potential for social work practice, particularly in terms of service user voice. However, service user anger is an under-researched subject (for exceptions, see Laursen & Henriksen, 2019; Monrad, 2024).

The current age is popularly framed as the “age of anger,” as promises of freedom, equality, and prosperity are combined with massive disparities in power and status, leading to feelings of resentment and anger (Mishra, 2017). It is difficult to ascertain whether anger is on the rise because emotions have different meanings across historical contexts (Malmqvist, 2021). Righteous anger is increasingly called for and celebrated across the political spectrum (Rosenwein, 2020). However, many Eastern and Western intellectual traditions (e.g., Buddhism, stoicism) have a long history of skepticism toward anger (Malmqvist, 2021; Rosenwein, 2020). While narratives of just anger as a natural response to injustice have existed historically (e.g., in Rousseau's philosophy) and are becoming increasingly widespread (Rosenwein, 2020), anger is often regarded with suspicion in the public sphere. People who express anger risk being labeled as uncivil, irrational, immature, or associated with violence (Broberg, 2024; Duffy, 2017; Sparks, 2015), which may prevent their concerns from being heard and legitimized.

Scholars have described the gendered, racial and classed emotive order allowing subjects different spaces for expressing emotions depending on their categorial location (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Hochschild, 1979; Kyed & Özkaya, 2025; Lorde, 1997). Feminists have called attention to the silencing of women's anger and the need to reclaim the right to be angry (Lorde, 1997), as well as the intersections of gender and race casting the emotions of white women as comforting and the emotions of women of color as distracting (Lorde, 1997; Srivastava, 2006). This highlights an emotional stratification, where women, people of color, youth, people from the lower classes and people with disabilities may find their anger pathologized, constructed as immature, distracting, or dangerous and hence policed by others (Broberg, 2024; Duffy, 2017; Kyed & Özkaya, 2025; Özkaya, forthcoming; Turner, 2015). These groups have historically in different ways been made inferior by being labeled emotional, in contrast to the construction of the elite as rational and therefore superior (Ost, 2004). Hence, the experience and expression of emotions takes shape in a gendered, racialized, classed, and ableist social order, that contributes to a stigmatization and delegitimation of the emotions of subordinate groups. This makes it imperative to reflexively engage with the role of social work in policing or legitimizing the emotions of service users.

Emotions and emotional competencies have become increasingly important in contemporary capitalism. Scholars have described how capitalism has become cognitive, connectionist, and emotional, with the commodification of the personal placing new emphasis on personal traits and social skills (Illouz, 2007; Jensen & Prieur, 2024). Social and emotional skills have become normative demands: “The ideal socially skilled human being of today appears to be disciplined and self-controlled, but still self-assertive, emphatic and communicative” (Prieur et al., 2016, p. 440). People are expected to talk about their emotions but simultaneously remain in control of their emotions to be seen as competent social actors (Illouz, 2007; Wouters, 2004). Illouz (2007) presented the concept of emotional capitalism, arguing that “the making of capitalism went hand in hand with the making of an intensely specialized emotional culture” (Illouz, 2007, p. 4) characterized by a focus on one's own emotional life, aspirations for self-realization, and the use of therapeutic language and specific techniques to understand and manage emotions (Illouz, 2007). Core to emotional capitalism is an entanglement of emotional and economic practices and discourses, making emotions “entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained, quantified, and commodified” (Illouz, 2007, p. 109), inscribing psychic suffering in economic transactions (e.g., pharmaceutical industry, self-help literature, advice industry). The culture of emotional capitalism places a significant focus on emotions and requires people to constantly monitor, manage, control, and articulate their emotions—demands that may tacitly be carried into social work practice. Illouz (2007) describes emotional capitalism as ambivalent, carrying both disciplining (surveillance and commodification) and emancipatory (deliberation) potentials. These potentials call for social work reflexivity, as emotional capitalism places demand on peoples’ abilities to discipline their emotions and invites people to resolve their suffering through the market (buying access to self-change approaches), casting suffering in individualized terms. In particular, the combination of emotional capitalism, a neoliberal discourse of self-management and the dominance of biomedical approaches may make the subject personally responsible for identifying and addressing their suffering, adjusting their cognitive patterns and health behaviors (Brown, 2019; Brown et al., 2022). Emotional capitalism, neoliberalism and the dominance of biomedical approaches entail a risk that intense displays of emotions are pathologized and decontextualized and met with short-term programs to adjust individual thought patterns and health behaviors, rendering structural causes of suffering invisible and potentially undermining collective social justice efforts. At the same time, however, emotional capitalism may create new practices and discourse for deliberating about the fairness of emotional norms and practices in interpersonal relationships. How do social workers attend to service user anger in contemporary emotional regimes? What meanings are ascribed to angry service users, and what are the implications for social work practice? This article presents an empirical study of how social workers ascribe meaning to service user anger to examine the following research question: What cultural repertoires do frontline workers apply to understand service user anger? Based on the analysis, the article discusses what knowledge social workers can gain by engaging with service user anger.

The article makes the following contributions. First, it contributes to the study of how emotions are constructed in social work practice, with important implications for feminist scholarship. For social workers it is a critical competence to reflect on how the emotions of service users are constructed as legitimate or illegitimate, how the social status and position of the service user matters for these constructions (e.g., in terms of gender, race, class, and disabilities), and how contemporary constructions of the proper neoliberal subject (self-controlled, well-articulated) may restrict some service users from participating. The article begins to address these questions but also calls for further research on the construction of emotions in social work practice. Secondly, the article examines the construction of service user anger, identifying four cultural repertoires of anger: a strategic repertoire where anger is an attempt to evade responsibility or gain power in social interactions (through manipulation or threats), a therapeutic repertoire where anger is a sign of a psychological self-defense mechanisms or underlying mental health conditions (trauma or disorder), a social contextual repertoire where anger is a sign of a vulnerable social position (deprivation), and an administrative justice repertoire where anger is a response to injustice in encounters with the state (discipline and administrative burdens). These cultural repertoires indicate the different ways in which frontline workers make sense of user anger, and they have important implications for social work practices. The four cultural repertoires can be used in collective reflexive processes in social work, discussing when and how each cultural repertoire works to silence or acknowledge user experiences and how they connect user emotions to different forms of knowledge.

Theoretical Framework

Feminist scholars have discussed whether social marginality provides epistemic privilege, calling attention to how oppressed groups may have different perspectives on the world than dominant groups and include broader interests, values and experiences (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1992; Janack, 1997). However, oppressed groups may face epistemic injustice, having their credibility as knower undermined by prejudice and a historical and structural lack of interpretive resources to conceptualize and convey their experiences (Fricker, 2007). Fricker (2007) argues that social disadvantage can produce epistemic disadvantage introducing the notion of testimonial injustice, where a speaker receives a deficit of credibility due to prejudice. Women have for instance historically been considered less rational than men, thereby undermining their credibility by associating them with intuition. If a prejudice works against the speaker, the social identity and expressive style of a speaker may be used to undermine the credibility of the speaker (Fricker, 2007). Oppressed groups may find their credibility systematically undermined, making it crucial for social work to reflect on, identify and counter epistemic injustice (Johnstone, 2021). The construction of emotions in social work is important in this regard, firstly because emotions have historically been used to discredit the credibility of women (among others), and secondly, because emotions may play an important role in knowledge processes. The concept of epistemic emotion has been used to describes the role of emotions in guiding and regulating the search and processing of knowledge (e.g., Arango-Muñoz, 2014; Brun & Kuenzle, 2008; Morton, 2010), such as in curiosity driving inquiries. Historically, emotions and rationality have been considered antithetical, but the divide between the two is being increasingly destabilized by scholars in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Lerner et al., 2015; Phelps et al., 2014; Seo & Barrett, 2007; Wettergren, 2019), with some suggesting that emotions and rationality form a continuum (Barbalet, 1998). In this view, emotions are crucial to rational action because they help people sense the world, prioritize different goals, and gain the energy to act and communicate (Lerner et al., 2015; Monrad, 2024). The notion of epistemic emotion calls attention to the emotions of frontline workers as knowledge-seeking subjects and is thus important for the foundation and validity of knowledge in social work (Brun & Kuenzle, 2008). As emotions also provide ways to communicate one's experiences and negotiate social relationships, they hold significant epistemic potential and serve as windows into the lived experiences of users.

Only a few studies have engaged with anger in encounters between social workers and service users (e.g., Laursen & Henriksen, 2019; Monrad, 2024). However, in the context of resistance movements, Srinivasan (2017) identified three approaches to viewing anger: as counterproductive, energizing resistance, or apt. The first line of reasoning holds that anger is problematic and counterproductive in resistance movements (Nussbaum, 2016), as it may, for instance, lead to vengefulness. The dictum is to never get angry, regardless of the circumstances; progress will be swifter if one is not shrill about it. In contrast, anger has also been described as productive and a driver of social change because it mobilizes energy for resistance (Cherry, 2021; Lorde, 1997). While the counterproductivity and energizing resistance approaches both emphasize the outcomes of anger, the third approach is not about whether anger is fruitful but about whether it is an apt response (Srinivasan, 2017). The aptness approach suggests that anger may help individuals sense and understand injustices (Srinivasan, 2017), and in this sense have epistemic potential (allowing for understanding the world). At the same time, anger is often used to undermine the credibility of oppressed groups (Broberg, 2024). Therefore, it is important to examine the meaning ascribed to anger in social work practice. This entails reflecting on cultural repertoires for anger and the knowledge that is accessible depending on how anger is interpreted.

To examine frontline workers’ interpretations of anger, the concept of cultural repertoires (Swidler, 1986) is applied to denote the cultural tools available for actors to make sense of their experiences and devise strategies to solve problems. Cultural repertoires are collections of knowledge, skills, and symbols that serve as narrative resources that guide people's interpretations of experiences and their behaviors. As such, cultural repertoires are cultural toolkits that can be used to deal with problems (Swidler, 1986). Von Poser et al. (2019) used the notion of emotion repertoires to describe the cultural repertoires that guide the practice, embodiment, and interpretation of emotions. In this article, the focus is on the discursive level of emotion repertoires, specifically on interpretations of user anger in social work

The study methods and data underlying this article are presented below. The subsequent findings section identifies different cultural repertoires of anger and is followed by a discussion of the knowledge that can be gained from applying these repertoires.

Methods and Data

Case

This article is based on focus groups with caseworkers in Danish social and employment services targeting disadvantaged unemployed citizens with social and health problems, such as drug use, homelessness, mental health conditions, and disabilities. The Danish welfare state provides social benefits to unemployed citizens (without time limits) and makes extensive efforts to (re)integrate them into the labor market using (unpaid) work placements as one of the primary measures. Employment services combine caring (e.g., mentor programs) and disciplinary (e.g., financial sanctions) measures. Access to social benefits depends on service users actively participating in measures such as work placement or job training. Disadvantaged citizens are expected to participate actively in interventions, but they are not obligated to accept any job offer. A large share of the frontline workers in social and employment services across Danish municipalities are educated social workers (with a bachelor's degree), but with significant municipal variations.

Methods

The study was part of ongoing research at the LISES-center (Local Innovation in Social and Employment Services) that focuses on client participation and tries to develop new understandings of and approaches to employment services for claimants in vulnerable positions (Andersen et al., 2017).

Field work was conducted in six Danish municipalities. It included interviews with claimants, focus groups with caseworkers and observations of conversations between claimants and caseworkers. This article builds on focus groups with caseworkers. The six municipalities are engaged in efforts to develop a more participatory approach to employment services and are, therefore, not representative of Danish employment services in general. The selective nature of the sample was not crucial to the analysis conducted, as the intention was not to make general empirical claims but to use the data to develop a theoretical understanding of the cultural repertoires of anger used by practitioners and their implications for social work. The municipalities’ goal of developing their employment services was what facilitated the in-depth field work and continuous research visits over several years. This kind of access would not have been possible without the mutual research-practice collaboration built over years.

All participants provided their consent to participate in the study. National and university guidelines on ethics and data protection were followed for the data collection and analysis. All participants were given pseudonyms, and their identifying information was masked to ensure confidentiality.

Data

Nine focus groups involving a total of 64 frontline workers in social and employment services were held. Some participants were caseworkers, while others were coaches, job consultants, or educational advisors for the young unemployed; they had diverse educational backgrounds, and all of them worked with unemployed claimants. 60 participants were women, 4 were men.

During the focus groups, the participants were asked to recall and share their experiences with angry claimants. The participants were asked to describe their encounters with and responses to claimants expressing anger and to discuss whether it was helpful when claimants expressed anger.

The advantage of collecting data through focus groups was that the setting allowed for shared meaning making and tapping into shared narratives to uncover ways of talking about and coping with claimant anger (Demant & Halkier, 2025). The group context enabled participants to recall relevant events and engage in mutual dialogue about their experiences, interpretations, and actions. Focus groups tend to emphasize collective meaning making, with a bias toward consensus and against individual experiences and feelings, especially if these are tabooed. Thus, focus groups allow insights into shared narratives but not sensitive, subjective experiences and actions that may be perceived as unprofessional or illegitimate. Since this study was conducted to identify cultural repertoires for interpreting user anger, this limitation was not a significant disadvantage. Rather, the group context allowed for cultural repertoires to be brought forth through shared meaning making and narratives of anger in social work practice.

Procedure

All interviews were recorded, transcribed ad verbatim, and analyzed in Danish. The passages quoted in this article have been translated by the author into English. Translating and interpreting emotion words entail particular difficulties, as the use of emotion words are somewhat (sub)culturally specific, and therefore the meaning of emotion words can be locally variable. However, this problem not only relates to the translation to English, but also the analysis of emotion words across subcultural context and e.g., urban—rural areas. I have tried to address this concern by providing context for the quotes, however, fully addressing these contextual variations in the use of emotion words would require a study of its own.

The data were coded and grouped thematically. First, all descriptions of anger were identified and categorized according to the meaning ascribed to anger by the interviewees (e.g., as dangerous or fruitful). These units of meaning were grouped according to themes, and similar themes were collected into larger groups, e.g., anger as potentially dangerous, anger as deriving from trauma, anger as a strategic effort to evade demands, anger as a natural response to administrative injustice. These themes were then cross-read with sociological literature on cultural repertoires (Swidler, 1986; Von Poser et al., 2019) and feminist scholarship on emotions (in particular Ahmed, 2004b; Hochschild, 1979; Illouz, 2007) and scholarship on anger (e.g., Averill, 1982; Holmes, 2004; Lorde, 1997; Lyman, 1981). This abductive process resulted in the identification of four different cultural repertoires used by frontline workers to make sense of anger: strategic, therapeutic, social contextual, and administrative justice. These repertoires are outlined in the following section.

Findings

Four cultural repertoires of anger were identified: a strategic repertoire where anger is an attempt to evade demands or gain power in social interaction (manipulation/threat), a therapeutic repertoire where anger is understood as a way of protecting the self from underlying fears or is a sign of underlying mental health conditions (trauma or disorders), a social contextual repertoire where anger is a sign of a vulnerable social position (deprivation/ marginalization), and an administrative justice repertoire where anger is a response to injustice in encounters with the welfare state (administrative burdens/discrimination). It is important to note that these four repertoires are not irreconcilable alternatives; frontline workers often combine repertoires to reflect on, for example, how bureaucratic procedures trigger mental health conditions. However, each repertoire is described and discussed separately in the following sections to clarify the differences between them.

Strategic Repertoire

The strategic repertoire involves interpreting anger as a strategy used by service users to gain power or evade responsibility for the demands posed by active labor market policies. When anger is seen as a strategy used deliberately to gain power in an interaction, the response is to stand firm and maintain one's demands to ensure procedural fairness and disrupt a seemingly illegitimate attempt to gain unfair advantages.

A caseworker described his experience with an unemployed male claimant who had claimed benefits but avoided contact with employment services for several years and taken an aggressive approach. The caseworker had demanded that the claimant show up for a meeting, and when the claimant failed to appear, the caseworker sanctioned him financially (withheld a part of his benefits). The caseworker described how the claimant's angry response made the caseworker feel certain that the use of financial sanctions was appropriate:
I would have been more open to not sanctioning if the person had been more cooperative, but because of the passive aggressiveness that I encountered and the unpredictability that I sensed, it does not make me give leeway. On the contrary […] suddenly their duties and responsibilities are our fault. So, it [the financial sanctions] means that the person can’t support his family, [and] now it's our fault because they can’t uphold their own responsibility. So, it's an uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling to deal with, but that's where we also need to stand firm, and it's almost the most challenging task. It's not just about showing compassion. (Paul, frontline worker, interview)
Here, user anger was interpreted as an attempt to avoid the demand of participating in activation processes and meetings. Since anger was seen as a strategy to push responsibility and blame onto the system, it was considered illegitimate by the caseworker. The strategic repertoire thus seems to rely on a rational choice framework. User anger is viewed as a strategy that could help them gain advantages and avoid costs. The repertoire also places a neoliberal emphasis on taking responsibility for one's own life, suggesting that it's important to stand one's ground when confronting user anger (e.g., users should not learn that their anger works in their favor). As the quote above indicates, the challenge is to not empathize with user anger but instead reinforce demands. This was also related to thoughts about procedural fairness: if some users could use anger as a strategy to get ahead in line (e.g., faster case processing), this would be unfair to compliant users with relative disadvantages who must wait while caseworkers deal with loudly complaining or aggressive users.

The strategic repertoire focuses on the strategies pursued by users: the different courses of action available to users and how users select strategies depending on what they perceive as possible, fruitful, or costly. This repertoire may have the implication that social problems are individualized and disadvantaged users are seen as responsible for problems caused by structural conditions. However, if the strategies applied by users are understood as embedded in the social contexts in which they unfold, the repertoire can allow for insights into the coping strategies of users. If anger is seen as a rational strategy in encounters with social work, it may follow that the user does not have a lot of other options or resources available to voice their concerns. Acknowledging the limited resources and communication options available to the user paves the way for reflections on whether the participatory setup limits users in vulnerable positions from participating effectively. An alternative interpretation of anger as a strategy is that it is an easily available, well-rehearsed action repertoire in the cultural context in which the user is immersed. This understanding involves contextual rationality of the subculture in which the user is engaged (Laursen & Henriksen, 2019). For instance, repeated exposure to violence can lead to a trivialization of violence (Henriksen & Bengtsson, 2018), with victims, perpetrators, and witnesses adapting to violence and aggression by becoming desensitized. Strategic uses of anger may also reflect different social identities and cultural logics (e.g., hypermasculinity; Bengtsson, 2016) wherein anger, aggression, and violence are used to defend honor and gain power and respect (Laursen & Henriksen, 2019). Therefore, perceiving anger using a strategic repertoire does not require an individual rational choice perspective but can direct attention to the user's social position and subculture, enabling an understanding of the contextualized rationality guiding the user's actions and of how anger is used to defend social identities. These insights are important to build alternative modes of engagement with users from these marginalized communities (Laursen & Henriksen, 2019).

Therapeutic Repertoire

The therapeutic repertoire involves interpreting anger as caused by underlying fears, trauma or mental health conditions. When anger is a seen as a sign of psychological defense mechanisms or mental illness, practitioners look beyond the anger to identify any underlying psychological or psychiatric conditions and if relevant make referrals for mental health treatment. They may also engage in self-protective measures against issues they fear may escalate into uncontrollable, violent behavior.

As a caseworker describes her interpretation of user anger:
But I also believe that anger is often disguised fear. “I damn well won’t go into that work placement, and it's unpaid labor.” In reality, it's about, “I’m afraid.” If you delve deeper, sometimes that's the case. (Arden, frontline worker, interview)
In the therapeutic repertoire, frontline workers look behind and beyond anger to address the veiled psychological cause of the reaction. In this repertoire, anger may be a sign of shame, fear, trauma or disorder and is understood in the context of biographies marked by abuse, neglect, trauma and, sometimes, a lack of mental health treatment. While the veiled cause of anger may differ dramatically (from mental health conditions to fears), they all draw on a psychological and psychiatric knowledge in interpreting anger as a sign of a psychological self-protective mechanism or condition. As an illustration of the interpretation of anger as resulting from a mental disorder, a caseworker reflected on a claimant's intense and persistent expression of anger as follows:
He is explosively angry and has been furious with me for about six months. […] He is completely out of control. It's frustrating to have someone like that, and I find it hard to shake it off […] because it becomes so personal and malicious. He writes me a letter about three times a week, around 4–21 pages each time, criticizing how incompetent I am […]. He is bipolar and completely caught up in those mood swings, completely immersed in his illness, and it has nothing to do with me. (Jennifer, frontline worker, interview)
Using the therapeutic repertoire, the frontline worker looked beyond the claimant's anger to the underlying mental health condition. By situating the anger in the individual user, the caseworker could rid herself of blame. Another caseworker described the anger of citizens suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness as unpredictable and potentially dangerous:
That [anger] is ill; there's not much one can do about it other than take care of oneself. (Bay, frontline worker, interview)

A lack of self-control thus served as an indicator of mental illness and underlined a need for the caseworker to protect herself.

The therapeutic cultural repertoire focuses on the user's mental health conditions and psychological defense mechanisms and as such represents an individualized, but often biographically situated approach to anger. This approach involves looking beyond anger to the citizen's biographical context for insights into the trauma, abuse, and neglect the user may have faced as well as their attachment patterns and neurological variations. The focus is on the user's mental health condition, life history, patterns of engaging with others, and coping. This repertoire allows for a broad array of insights into the user's biographical and psychic realities. Here, anger may be interpreted as a surface phenomenon resulting from underlying mental health conditions. Thus, what the user is angry about may not necessarily be understood as containing vital insights, but the expression of anger can signal a need for frontline workers’ in-depth engagement with the user's vulnerabilities, mental health conditions, and biography. The therapeutic repertoire would lead to efforts to identify and document mental health problems and referrals to appropriate mental health care. It would also indicate a need to reflect on how to adjust bureaucratic interactions and interventions to care for mental health conditions (e.g., avoiding stress triggers such as unpredictable situations).

Social Contextual Repertoire

The social contextual repertoire also involves looking at the underlying causes of anger. However, in contrast to the therapeutic repertoire, the causes stem from the life conditions and social situation of the user. The social contextual repertoire is an approach to reflecting on anger as something derived from the vulnerable, deprived, and underprivileged life conditions of marginalized users. Anger is seen as a response to the stressors of a life involving multiple deprivations and disadvantages. As such, this approach draws on both psychological knowledge of stress and sociological understandings of poverty, deprivation, and marginalization. When anger is seen as a sign of a vulnerable life situation, attention is directed to the citizen's social context and unmet needs for social and community support.

A caseworker described this as follows:
It is truly a person who is upset and frustrated and cannot cope with their situation, which prompts this anger. (Chance, frontline worker, interview)
Similar to the therapeutic repertoire, the object of user anger (what the angry user articulates) is not necessarily the center of attention, as the anger is interpreted as the outcome of a vulnerable or stressful social situation and as an expression of desperation. In the data, this repertoire is typically used to direct attention to the immediate social situation (rather than larger social structures), as evident in the following quote:
She scolded me a lot […], and it was simply about her being so stressed and feeling very bad at that time, and the anger gave me important insights into her situation […]. It was a way of gaining insights into her being pressured a lot in the work placement that she was in. (James, frontline worker, interview)
The user's anger was accepted as a reflection of a stressful life, and the frontline worker embraced this emotional response as a way of gaining insights into the user's social situation and current work placement. The frontline worker's emphasis on the work placement also aligns with the administrative justice repertoire, which is described below, reflecting how the demands made by social and employment services are important factors affecting user anger.

In the social contextual repertoire anger is interpreted as a reflection of burdened and vulnerable life situations. Anger is seen as stemming from adverse life circumstances, disadvantages, discrimination, powerlessness, and marginalization. As with the therapeutic repertoire, this repertoire does not direct attention towards the content of anger; instead, anger signals a need to attend to the user's social suffering. This repertoire allows one to recognize and gain knowledge of the disadvantaged social contexts in which marginalized users live. In the data, the repertoire is often used to attend to the immediate social situation, however, it could also be used to raise questions about hierarchies of power and status (e.g., gender, age, education, income, and ethnicity) in efforts to understand how anger is a response reflecting a disadvantaged position. It then becomes relevant to consider how the emotions of users in different positions are interpreted and have historically been used to discredit their voice, such as ascribing the anger of women—especially women of color—to their nature (Geddes et al., 2020) or the anger of youth to immaturity (Duffy, 2017), rather than attending to the circumstances warranting anger. This repertoire calls for building critical awareness of structural oppression and for user empowerment, community building, and advocacy.

Administrative Justice Repertoire

In the administrative justice repertoire, anger is an understandable response to problematic interactions between users and social and employment services. In contrast to the social contextual repertoire that calls attention to the social situation in which the user is living, this repertoire specifically addresses the interactions between social work and user. The frontline workers described anger as a reaction to the administrative burdens imposed on users—that is, the costs associated with interacting with the state, such as waiting times, compliance with activation demands, powerlessness, and stigma (Moynihan et al., 2015). When anger is seen as resulting from encounters between a user and the state, it often leads to shared anger between users and frontline workers, indicating reflexivity among practitioners over frontline practices and how to enact bureaucratic requirements differently to better accommodate the needs of the users. A caseworker described the anger of a user as follows:
She blocked the process that we were supposed to start because she felt that no one before had done anything, and she had just been hanging there, going through one work placement after another. I can actually understand that. (Dane, frontline worker, interview)
The administrative justice repertoire often involves articulating one's understanding of a user's anger. Anger is situated in the interaction between the welfare state and user and thus reflects an interactionist approach to anger. This makes frontline workers’ actions as well as the procedures of frontline organizations, governance and policies central to understanding user anger. This repertoire involves ambivalence about social work in the context of welfare conditionality, as social work may impose burdens on users. It reflects an understanding of social work as involving unequal power relations and frontline practices as problematic combinations of care and discipline. Another caseworker recounted her experiences as follows:
I also had a citizen who was really intense and angry, being personal in his expression of anger, and he had many caseworkers who felt really worn down by him […] But gradually, we developed a good relationship. […] he said himself that he didn't have that anger anymore because I listened to him and believed in him […]. I felt that I had to be very patient, listen a lot, and restrain myself from acting […]. But it's again that dilemma—whether you hold back too much and not do what you’re supposed to do, am I not doing what the organization expects of me? Because the progress is perhaps not sufficient in terms of what is expected. So, it's a bit of that cross-pressure that one finds oneself in, can get caught in, and can become angry about. So how much of the anger is also my own, right? (Ember, frontline worker, interview)

In contrast to the strategic repertoire, which is associated with a need to confront anger and hold one's ground, anger in the administrative justice repertoire is something one has to engage with and try to understand:
I believe the worst approach is to evade the anger […], ignoring it, glossing over it, and then there is going against the anger; that is even worse [because] then you get angry yourself, and that is conflict escalating. I believe that going with the anger is a good thing […] examining what [it is about] and acknowledging the anger—what does it derive from, and what can I do to support you? (Haven, frontline worker, interview)
The administrative justice repertoire involves taking seriously—and often sharing—the concerns that users express through their anger. This does not involve finding the underlying reasons for anger in the user's social context, psychological defense mechanisms or mental health conditions; rather, anger is seen as a relevant response to the situation in which it is expressed. This repertoire allows for critical reflections on social work practices and the contemporary conditions for performing social work with marginalized citizens. While anger is also met with sympathy in the therapeutic and social contextual repertoire, in the administrative justice repertoire anger is often shared by social workers and seen as an apt response to the injustices that users may suffer in their encounters with the welfare state.

When anger is viewed through this cultural repertoire, anger provides insights into the interactions between the state and users. Anger can result from situated sense making (Geddes et al., 2020), reflecting an appraisal of the current situation as detrimental to the user's well-being and the user's encounter with the state being responsible. Here, anger may alert frontline workers to overlooked or neglected user experiences of administrative burdens and injustice. Anger thus becomes a source of reflection and a reason to consider the injustices surrounding an encounter as well as the history of the relationship between welfare institutions and users, leading to the recognition that welfare state institutions play a role in fostering user anger. It also allows for acknowledging social work as a part of the interaction fostering anger. Anger is not only a result of a disadvantaged life situation or trauma but also a response to one's interaction with the welfare state. Anger thus paves a way to understanding how social interventions are experienced by the people subjected to them. This approach directs one's attention to what the user is trying to express through anger. It then connects user anger to participation—user anger becomes a reason to practice caution in casework and interventions, to renegotiate the working relationship, and to listen carefully to the user's concerns.

Key Differences and Implications of the Four Repertoires

The four repertoires are distinct in determining whether anger is understood as authentic, whether anger is ascribed to underlying mechanisms and in terms of the potential for user participation and voice. These are briefly discussed below.

In terms of authenticity, the strategic repertoire suggests that the display of anger is a deliberate, conscious strategy to gain advantages, whereas the other three repertoires regard anger as an authentic (or even impulsive) expression. This difference is important for understanding the lack of legitimacy ascribed to anger in the strategic repertoire, indicating a need for reflection on how emotions and action repertoires are embodied and habituated (Von Poser et al., 2019) and how strategic coping strategies may not reflect a conscious choice between a broad array of possible modes of expression. Notably, demands for authenticity may tacitly discredit users embodying subcultural modes of expression.

In terms of underlying mechanisms, the therapeutic and social contextual repertoires approach anger as something that arises from a user's biographical and social contexts. Both these repertoires involve looking into the underlying mechanisms of anger. While the therapeutic repertoire is associated with psychological or psychiatric explanations for anger, using the language of defense mechanism, trauma or diagnosis, the social contextual repertoire attends to disadvantaged social conditions, deprivation, and potentially societal hierarchies of power and status and a lack of resources available to deal with social strains. This focus on looking into the biographical, mental health, or social causes of anger allows for drawing on a broad knowledge base of psychological, psychiatric, social work, and broader social scientific insights, but it also involves a risk of overlooking the role of frontline practices, organizations, management, policy, and governance in generating anger.

In terms of potential for participation and voice, the strategic repertoire may result in confrontational approaches to anger (since it is a manipulative strategy). Anger is accepted as an authentic expression in the therapeutic and social contextual repertoires, but it is perceived as somewhat misplaced in social service encounters. In the therapeutic and social contextual repertoires, anger is connected to users’ mental health and social conditions, respectively, which are relevant to understanding users, but what the user is angry about is not directly linked to social service provision. Viewing anger as misplaced can make it easier for frontline workers to cope with its expression (e.g., “it is not about me”), but anger may be perceived as irrelevant to frontline practices, as something that needs to be avoided or removed to focus on what really matters in terms of service provision. This contrasts with the administrative justice repertoire, which approaches user anger as a reflection of social work encounters and experiences. Thus, the strategic, therapeutic, and social contextual repertoires all approach anger as something users bring with them into social work encounters, whereas the administrative justice repertoire sees anger as arising from the interaction between the system and a user. In the latter, anger stems from bureaucratic procedures, organizational frameworks, legislation, and policies, and the demands from the state push vulnerable users to engage in activities that may be considered demeaning, meaningless, or stressful. The administrative justice repertoire emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and attending to the reasons for user anger, which holds unique potential for participation and voice. While the therapeutic and social contextual repertoires may facilitate important insights, they have somewhat limiting implications for user participation: the view that the expression of anger is the result of underlying causes and, therefore, unrelated to service provision may make it difficult for the user to be heard. In contrast, the administrative justice repertoire involves considering what the user is angry about as important, which may allow for users to gain a voice through their anger.

Interestingly, the administrative justice repertoire indicates that user anger reflects a valuable resourcefulness, specifically the ability to speak up and confront injustices. The strategic repertoire would also regard anger as a sign of resourcefulness (in terms of the ability to devise strategies and manipulate others) but a problematic resource that brings the deservingness of the user into question. In contrast, the therapeutic and social contextual repertoires associate user anger with vulnerability (a sign of trauma, mental health problems or social strain). The differing interpretations of anger hold important implications for social work practices. Table 1 summarizes key differences between the cultural repertoires of anger.

Table 1.
The Four Cultural Repertoires of Anger.

Cultural repertoire What anger is What anger is caused by Implications for frontline responses to anger

Strategic repertoire A deliberate strategy Attempts to evade demands and responsibilities or gain power Focus on whether the participatory setup limits users in vulnerable positions from participating effectively.
Attend to the subculture in which the user is immersed and the cultural logics that anger use reflects.
Attend to fairness by preventing aggressive users from gaining unfair advantages or disadvantages.

Therapeutic repertoire A psychological defense or a reflection of underlying trauma or disorder Trauma, abuse, neglect, unacknowledged shame and fear.
Unaccommodated neurological variations Focus on individual biographies (traumatic life history) and on identifying undiagnosed mental health conditions.
Document mental health conditions, and make referrals for mental health care.
Adjust interventions based on mental health conditions; e.g., avoid unpredictable situations or stress triggers.

Social contextual repertoire An expression of social strain Marginalization, deprivation, disadvantages, lack of resources, social problems Focus on building local social support.
Understand anger as connected to social positioning, gender, and power.
Attend to the local social context (community) and broader hierarchies of power and status.
Build critical awareness of structural oppression among users.
Empowerment
Community building
Advocacy

Administrative justice repertoire An expression of experiences of injustice in encounters with the state Administrative burdens, discipline, lack of support, unequal power, discrimination Focus on understanding and responding to user experiences of systemic injustice. Listen carefully to users to understand the administrative burdens imposed by current service provisions.
Promote collective critical reflection among frontline workers and managers on user experiences with social services and how interactions between the system and user are structured.
Establish reforms from below: build organizational alliances between frontline workers, managers, and local politicians to enact frontline practices in novel ways.
Advocacy

Discussion: Responding to Anger in the Context of Emotional Capitalism

The demands of emotional capitalism call for linguistic competence to calmly express emotions using words, without affect. In a neoliberal context, where people are seen as individually responsible for their situation and expected to exercise emotional control, the strategic repertoire of anger is easily available, potentially casting anger as an illegitimate attempt to evade responsibility. Under the influence of emotional capitalism and the biomedical model, the therapeutic repertoire is almost a default repertoire for making sense of emotions either through notions of trauma or psychological defense mechanisms or through the language of diagnosis. Social workers sympathetic to disadvantaged users expressing anger may apply the therapeutic repertoire to ascribe the anger of users some legitimacy and meet them with understanding. However, this repertoire involves a risk of individualizing anger and ascribing essentialized and pathological identities to users expressing anger, undermining their credibility (Johnstone, 2021). In the context of neoliberalism, emotional capitalism and the biomedical model, it may take effort to direct attention to the structural conditions and bureaucratic context as relevant for user anger. This calls for the development of a structurally and historically situated understanding of the politics of emotions in social work.

For social workers it is imperative to be aware of the socially differentiated construction of emotions typically stigmatizing the anger of women, youth, people of color and people with disabilities to avoid pathologizing the anger of oppressed populations. At the same time, disempowered users may feel disentitled and shameful of their grievances (Peterie et al., 2019). If the threshold for considering anger expressions inappropriate is low and anger is met with sanctions (e.g., zero tolerance policies), users may find it difficult to express their grievances in ways considered acceptable by others and, in turn, risk having their emotional expressions labeled deviant (Geddes et al., 2020). Further, low frontline tolerance of anger is likely to cause users to suppress their anger, leaving the causes unresolved and potentially undermining continued collaboration (Geddes et al., 2020). Without an appropriate affective space to express their grievances, users may lose their voice, concerns may be silenced, and social workers may lose the potential to engage in constructive dialogue, and change practices that users consider detrimental.

Anger can serve as an important resource that allows people to recognize and share experiences involving undesirable circumstances, violations of ethical norms, inequalities, and injustice. Anger can be an apt and meaningful response to experiences of injustice, making it important for social workers to critically discuss the emotional demands placed on marginalized users in social work encounters. Requiring the repressed to show prudence constitutes an affective injustice, as people are asked to choose between “making the world as it should be and affectively appreciating the world as it is” (Srinivasan, 2017, p. 127). When anger is an apt response to injustice, calls for angry individuals to calmly and quietly describe their concerns may limit their participation. The dichotomy between emotion and reason privileges reason as the appropriate and normative mode of participation, casting users who express anger as violating social norms. Emotions are often labeled as belonging to the masses, whereas rationality is associated with the elite. This dualism has led to opposition movements being stigmatized as less rational than power elites, leading to the centrality of emotions being downplayed in formal politics and the elites’ pursuit of maintaining power (Ost, 2004). The interpretation of anger as deviating from cultural norms of appropriate behavior risks casting users who express their anger as troublesome, calling attention to their personality and mental health and drawing attention away from the anger-provoking situations and the users’ grievances (Geddes et al., 2020). This makes it important for social workers to critically engage with the situated cultural norms for appropriate emotional expressions. Social work practices that tacitly reproduce the dichotomy between reason and emotion, emphasizing contemporary demands for emotional control and leading to the stigmatization of anger, raise the risk of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) that undermines marginalized users’ voice and status as “knower”. This has dire implications for user empowerment as well as the knowledge base of social work. To counter affective injustice, the false dichotomy between reason and emotion needs to be dissolved and the epistemic potential of anger recognized.

Angry non-violent forms of participation should not be discredited, as anger can be an important source of knowledge in social work research and practice. Anger may provide important insights into issues that are hard to articulate in other ways, especially for marginalized users encountering the state in a desperate situation. It can thus provide marginalized users with a voice. Users may avoid speaking up for themselves until their anger builds up and makes them express their suffering. Anger often leads to vital information that may not have been communicated due to shame and a sense of disentitlement, were it not for the intensity of the emotion (Monrad, 2024; Peterie et al., 2019). In contemporary discourse on coproduction and cocreation, which is aimed at building collaboration between professionals, service users, and researchers, the voices of angry users who do not seek collaboration, but conflict may be excluded. Considering this, future researchers would benefit from actively seeking out and listening to people expressing their anger.

The resistance of the oppressed tends to be romanticized. But resistance can be ugly, brutal, unlimited, unsympathetic, hateful, and even seem mad. It can be full of conspiracy theories, mistrust, hostility, and the desire for revenge. Engaging with such forms of resistance can lead to a sense of epistemic dizziness (Acksel et al., 2023)—a sense of a breach in reality; of living in different worlds, where communication across the divide breaks down. In the present study, I struggled with a desire to omit such data from the analysis and leave out the messiness of users who mistrust everything and target everyone. However, there is epistemic value to this dissonance, even if it is filled with discomfort and hard to make sense of. Listening to expressed anger in social work research opens a window to the emotional trajectories that marginalized people go through, the energy that resistance requires, and the divide between different worldviews (see Hochschild, 2016). Future researchers would benefit from reflecting on how we construct the legitimate participant in social work research. Who is it easy to listen to, and who is difficult to listen to and include in research? Do we risk furthering the loss of voice among angry marginalized users? How do we engage with epistemic dizziness, rather than avoid it? Researchers need to understand the processes through which user voice is accorded legitimacy and authority in social work research and practice and when user expressions of emotions lead to a loss of status as a knower and, thus, epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). Anger enables cognizance of what it is like to live in a world of mistrust. Social work research and practice needs to include voices that are not solution-oriented or coherent. Knowledge of user anger needs to be integrated into both social work research and practice, even when the process causes epistemic dizziness. To do so would require continued reflection on the cultural repertoires that are applied in making sense of anger, their epistemic potential, and the possibilities they present for user participation.

Conclusion

Reason and emotion have historically been considered opposites, with reason seen as normatively good, while emotions are viewed as inferior, problematic, and unruly. Scholars are increasingly arguing that this dichotomy of reason and emotion is problematic, and this article calls for social work scholars and practitioners to engage with the epistemic potentials of emotions. When dealing with service user anger, it is crucial that social workers reflect on their own epistemic position as well as how they position the user. In this regard, it is particularly important to reflect on the cultural repertoires used, and how the social position of the user may affect the interpretation of user anger and the credibility ascribed to the user. Interpretations of user anger are guided by the cultural resources available for meaning making, and it is important that social workers do not tacitly reproduce epistemic injustice through their engagement with service user emotions. This study seeks to contribute to such reflexivity by identifying and discussing the cultural repertoires used to interpret anger in social work practice.

Four cultural repertoires for interpreting user anger in social work were identified: strategic, therapeutic, social contextual, and administrative justice. Each repertoire allows for gaining insights from user anger, and the kind of repertoire used to interpret anger has important implications for the epistemic potential of user anger. Anger can provide insights into experiences involving limited opportunities for voice and the contextualized rationalities of subcultures marked by hypermasculinity and trivialized violence (strategic repertoire); psychic defense mechanisms, vulnerabilities and biographies marked by trauma, abuse, and neglect (therapeutic repertoire); social disadvantages arising from societal power and status hierarchies, marginalization, and discrimination (social contextual repertoire); and the burdens and injustices experienced by users in their encounters with the state (administrative justice repertoire).

It is important for social work practitioners to reflect on how the emotions of service users are constructed as legitimate or illegitimate, what cultural repertoires are used and when, and what alternative forms of knowledge could be gained by switching from one repertoire to another. As the anger of some social groups has historically been stigmatized (e.g., women, black men), it is important for social workers to reflect on when they use each repertoire, and how the social position of the service user affects the social workers’ way of understanding and responding to service user emotions. Social workers should be careful not to tacitly reproduce the contemporary demands of emotional control, as constructions of the proper neoliberal subject (self-controlled, well-articulated) may restrict some service users from participating. Feminist scholarship has highlighting how emotions are political, and the emotions of elites are constructed as more legitimate than the emotions of subordinate groups. Further research should engage with the political role of emotions in social work.

Cultural repertoire	What anger is	What anger is caused by	Implications for frontline responses to anger
Strategic repertoire	A deliberate strategy	Attempts to evade demands and responsibilities or gain power	Focus on whether the participatory setup limits users in vulnerable positions from participating effectively. Attend to the subculture in which the user is immersed and the cultural logics that anger use reflects. Attend to fairness by preventing aggressive users from gaining unfair advantages or disadvantages.
Therapeutic repertoire	A psychological defense or a reflection of underlying trauma or disorder	Trauma, abuse, neglect, unacknowledged shame and fear. Unaccommodated neurological variations	Focus on individual biographies (traumatic life history) and on identifying undiagnosed mental health conditions. Document mental health conditions, and make referrals for mental health care. Adjust interventions based on mental health conditions; e.g., avoid unpredictable situations or stress triggers.
Social contextual repertoire	An expression of social strain	Marginalization, deprivation, disadvantages, lack of resources, social problems	Focus on building local social support. Understand anger as connected to social positioning, gender, and power. Attend to the local social context (community) and broader hierarchies of power and status. Build critical awareness of structural oppression among users. Empowerment Community building Advocacy
Administrative justice repertoire	An expression of experiences of injustice in encounters with the state	Administrative burdens, discipline, lack of support, unequal power, discrimination	Focus on understanding and responding to user experiences of systemic injustice. Listen carefully to users to understand the administrative burdens imposed by current service provisions. Promote collective critical reflection among frontline workers and managers on user experiences with social services and how interactions between the system and user are structured. Establish reforms from below: build organizational alliances between frontline workers, managers, and local politicians to enact frontline practices in novel ways. Advocacy

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions. Further,I wish to thank the WISER research group and the ANGER project group at Aalborg University for an inspiring collaboration throughout the research process. Finally,I would like to express my gratitude to the participants in this study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond,Aalborg University and the municipalities of Herning,Holstebro,Mariagerfjord,Silkeborg and Vesthimmerland,Denmark (grant number 12482) and VELUX FONDEN (grant number 34958).

ORCID iD

Merete Monrad

Author Biography

Merete Monrad is an Associate professor in Sociology and Social Work. Her area of research is emotions and temporality in social work.

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The Epistemic Value of Service User Anger: Cultural Repertoires of Anger and Their Implications for Social Work

Abstract

Keywords

Theoretical Framework

Methods and Data

Case

Methods

Data

Procedure

Findings

Strategic Repertoire

Therapeutic Repertoire

Social Contextual Repertoire

Administrative Justice Repertoire

Key Differences and Implications of the Four Repertoires

Discussion: Responding to Anger in the Context of Emotional Capitalism

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biography

References