This is an extended version of the review of Dirk Lindebaum's (2017). Emancipation through emotion regulation at work. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, originally published in Organization.
This is a passionate book which
has grown out of the author’s experience of organizational
injustice and oppression 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. “Reclaiming control of our
emotional lives at the workplace” may thus have been a more accurate title for
the book.
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| Don't judge a book by its cover, but a good cover helps |
In talking about emancipation,
Lindebaum goes back to Habermas’s (1972)
core idea of an emancipatory human interest served by certain types of knowledge,
yet, his idea is that this is not purely a cognitive interest but an interest
that grows out of an emotional awareness of the burdens that contemporary
organizations impose on their employees. These are to a substantial extent
emotional burdens. Lindebaum aligns himself with the concept of
micro-emancipation put forward by Alvesson and Willmott’s (1992) seminal article, in which emancipation
is decoupled from large-scale Marxist projects of social transformation that
very frequently end up in totalitarian nightmares (see, e.g. Gray, 2003). It is also decoupled from the
pseudo-emancipatory promises of humanistic management approaches dating back to
the Human Relations School that sought to ‘liberate’ the worker from alienating
controls as a means of bolstering productivity and profits. Instead,
Lindebaum’s aim is to "advocate the idea of emancipating
emotion at work by enabling workers to regulate their emotions differently
toward that end vis-à-vis the emotional repression they experience at work." (15)
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 manifold seductions offered by the
self-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, i.e. unnecessary suffering inflicted by controls aimed at bolstering
a particular social order.
Lindebaum distances himself from
any account that approaches emotions as something passive, to be endured or
lived through. Whether emotions result from cognition (Lazarus, 1984) or whether emotion can precede cognition (Frijda, 1988), Lindebaum aligns himself with
Solomon’s (1993; 2003) view that “emotions are judgements” over which we can exercise choices. Solomon (2003:
17) argument that “to come to believe that one has this power [over
one’s emotional responses] is to have
this power” is a view (and a feeling) that Lindebaum shares deeply. What are
experienced as tyrannical or oppressive passions, he argues, are emotions which
we have failed to notice, reflect on and regulate. In the workplace, such
emotions are emotions that have typically been appropriated by an organization
and diverted from their original functions, serving instead coercive
organizational controls.
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/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. In line with Gross (1998), 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 (Frijda, 2013). 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 a synthesis of his argument and makes 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 (e.g.Goleman, 2001), 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 provide 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” (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. He writes:
it seems imperative that we create space for workers to interpret the consequences of an initiated or ongoing emancipation through their own sense-making and life histories. … This has important consequences for critical theorists, for it illustrates the limits of their involvement in initiating, accompanying and concluding the emancipatory journey of workers. In the context of this book, I shall claim that the involvement of a critical theorist must be limited to the initial phase or, more exactly, to provide the catalyst inducing the kind of critical insights from which emancipation can then blossom. (14)
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 (Menzies, 1960; Stein, 2000). 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,
i.e. shared ways of talking about, displaying and even experiencing emotions,
and an individual’s ability to regulate his/her own feelings calls for a
clearer articulation. In an organization when the prevailing mood is cynicism,
anger or resignation, such emotions becoming 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.
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