Abstract
This is a passionate book which has grown out of the author’s different experiences of organizational injustices and oppressions in which emotions play a major part. As we have been aware since the publication of Hochschild’s (1983) pioneering book, the commercialization of human feeling has become a major organizational instrument for the generation of value and profits. Emotional labour now stands on par with intellectual and manual labour as an arena of workplace politics, a politics that frequently leaves workers exploited, oppressed and depressed. This book takes the discourse a stage further. Lindebaum not only seeks to redeem emotions from the stifling controls to which they are put, but he also argues that emotional regulation by the workers themselves can act as a defence against organizational injustice and, more ambitiously, as an emancipatory force. To this end, he enlists not only the currently burgeoning psychological theory of emotion but also the resources of critical theory and, to a lesser extent, critical management studies. Emotion, argues Lindebaum, can itself bolster resistance to unreasonable controls and pressures, provided the workers themselves understand their emotional lives and take the initiative in regulating their emotions.
It is immediately apparent that Lindebaum’s ambition is both extensive and risky, raising numerous alarms. Can such an emancipation be accomplished by individuals trapped in the iron cage of today’s global capitalist system? Can emancipation from workplace oppression be accomplished without regard for the consumerist seductions offered by the same system? Can it be accomplished without acts of collective organizational and social resistance? It is a measure of Lindebaum’s success that, having read his book, the reader emerges with a feeling that great deal can be accomplished at the level of emotional regulation and that this may lead to a considerable alleviation of what Marcuse (1955) called surplus repression, that is, unnecessary suffering inflicted by controls aimed at bolstering a particular social order.
Lindebaum analyses closely two pathways through which organizations turn emotions against themselves, using four illustrative emotions to make his point. Shame, guilt and happiness are emotions regularly deployed by organizations to control their employees. Consider shame, for example. Many organizations will use ritual humiliations, like placing a cabbage on the desks of ‘under-performing’ workers or will publish rankings and lists with the aim of embarrassing them. Fear of social exclusion which has been the social function of shame is thus turned into vicious degradation endured by those who fail to meet organizational targets. Or take happiness, an emotion one of whose primary expressions, the smile, is appropriated by many organizations becoming an ‘emotional rule’. The onus of smiling becomes as oppressive as the obligation to perform an alienating job for a fixed number of hours.
The second pathway through which emotions are deflected from their social functions and turned against employees themselves is what Lindebaum calls emotion talk. This has emerged as a major means used to manage anger. Talk about anger, its destructiveness and toxicity, is used to override the social function of anger, or at least certain kinds of anger, which is to restore justice. Lindebaum reserves some of his fiercest criticism against organizations that seek to muffle the anger of their employees and their customers by retargeting it against the subjects themselves. Instead of utilizing the information contained in anger to restore a wrong or fix a mistake, the subject of anger is vilified, excluded or forced to humiliate themselves through a false apology. The arguments whereby a perfectly justifiable emotion is made to work against the subject and in doing so entraps him or her are illustrated with a number of thought-provoking vignettes which are told with enough emotion to make the reader suspect that they were witnessed or experienced by the author himself. Thus, the justifiable anger of a daughter who sees her mother in unendurable pain because of a faulty placing of a catheter during a routine procedure is viewed as potentially threatening the hospital’s peace rather than as a call to fix the problem.
Self-regulation of emotion is offered by Lindebaum as the way out of these toxic forms of organizational efforts to control them and appropriate them. Lindebaum argues that regulation strategies can be deployed before an emotion is experienced (antecedent-focused strategies) or following an emotional experience (response-focused strategies). In brief, choosing the situations to which we expose ourselves, modifying or changing our appraisals of these situations as well as modulating our responses to situations that set off our emotions are all strategies through emotions themselves can be deployed to regulate toxic emotions. Thus, the motivation for emotional regulation is itself emotional. Lindebaum advocates that guilt and shame can be usefully regulated through reappraisal and distancing, whereas happiness and anger may be regulated by removing the organizational injunctions to suppress them. Emancipation through self-regulation means that workers recognize their shame and guilt as false consciousness, in as much as they act to conceal power relations at the workplace, turning organizational failings into individual failures. Anger, by contrast, far from signifying false consciousness signifies a genuine recognition of injustice and oppression which is blocked. Happiness too is not false consciousness, even though its genuine expression is deflected and blocked. Hence, ‘genuine’ is a term used by Lindebaum to describe an emotion that has been digested and reflected upon to stop it from being misdirected or misappropriated.
In the concluding part of the book, Lindebaum offers an emotional plea for the emancipation of workplace emotions through regulation. In doing so, he is also making a plea for the emancipation of ‘regulation’, a term that to non-specialists is rather tarnished with its association with control, suppression and choking of feeling. It is also a term whose meaning is hard to differentiate from ‘self-regulation’, a prominent element in discussions of emotional intelligence, a concept that is entirely absent from this book. Lindebaum believes that neither unchecked expression and indulgence of emotion nor its rigid self-regulation or suppression provides the answer to emotional repression at the workplace. Instead, he advocates regulation, our ability to ‘influence which emotions [we] have, when [we] have them, and how [we] experience and express these emotions’ (p. 3) as the means of turning emotions into creative forces in our lives, opening up choices and opportunities that we regarded as closed or non-existent.
In defending his own stand as a passionate scholar, a quality about which his book leaves no doubt, Lindebaum seeks to engage a wider audience than those he has addressed in earlier publications (i.e. mostly ‘emotion scholars’). He has written a book which genuinely looks outwards from the world of academic research and seeks to gain a wider relevance and meaning. In this sense, the book is as much the product of its author’s long engagement and reflection with his own emotions as it is an engagement with academic literature. The burning quality of the vignettes but also of much of the analysis reveals Lindebaum to be an intellectual worker but also an emotional worker in his own right. This makes the distance he creates between workers and theorists, including critical theorists, seem somewhat artificial. In what ways are theorists, including critical theorists, not workers? It seems to me that the position of a detached critical theorist who takes an aloof view of the sufferings of the workers is not consistent with the ethos of the book. I would argue that academic researchers today exist in a world of very intense emotions, including their own, and would benefit from the kind of plea for regulation made by this book. Anxiety, envy, anger, disappointment, pride, depression and many other emotions are part of the daily diet to which university workers expose themselves and experience willingly and unwillingly. To use the terminology of this book, it would seem to me that today’s academy entails an emotionology all of its own which merits an analysis as much as any other workplace.
One aspect of the book about which I feel some unease is the now conventional lumping of emotions together. To his credit, Lindebaum singles out four emotions, shame, guilt, happiness and anger, and demonstrates well that they are not only susceptible to different types of appropriation but also liable to different kinds of regulation. But what of emotions other than these four? Envy seems to call for a rather different analysis than what Lindebaum offers here; the same can be said for depression and especially for anxiety, a sovereign among workplace emotions, at least in psychoanalytic accounts. Compassion, disdain, fear, love, nostalgia, hope, pride and numerous other emotions would seem to each call for their own discussion instead of being amalgamated into a single category.
Lindebaum does a good pre-emptive job in defending himself against charges of psychological reductionism and essentialism. He is too subtle a thinker to expose himself to such charges. All the same, I find that the overlap between collective emotionologies, that is, shared ways of talking about, displaying and even experiencing emotions, and an individual’s ability to regulate his or her own feelings calls for a clearer articulation. In an organization when the prevailing mood is cynicism, anger or resignation, such emotions become embedded in what Korczynski (2003) appropriately calls ‘communities of coping’. These can be both defensive emotions and collective means of coping with other, still more toxic emotions. In such communities, it is difficult for individuals to go off on their own emotional journeys departing from the collective emotionologies. Collective emotions like the above can also be resisting emotions, emotions that in a collective way seek to stand up to oppression and injustice. This is maybe my only disappointment with this book – Lindebaum’s unwillingness to connect his argument to discussions of worker resistance at the individual and collective levels. Discussions of worker resistance which are now legion regularly approach it either as a rationally driven stand against oppression and in defence of collective interests or, conversely, as spasmodic, emotionally driven, acts of rebelliousness and defiance. Lindebaum’s analysis would point to a third and more sophisticated way of addressing emotions as part of resistance, one that recognizes that it is regulated emotions rather than raw and unregulated ones that fuel certain types of resistance, whether at the individual or collective levels. This is maybe the task for a future book.
Footnotes
Authors Note
Author Yiannis Gabriel is also affiliated to Lund University.