Work and Emotions

Abstract

Sociological interest in work and emotions is flourishing. This enthusiasm has been shared by organizational researchers, whose field has experienced an “affective revolution” over the past few decades. Sociological and organizational approaches to emotion differ in scope and focus, but also have points of convergence. This chapter explores these issues by engaging both the sociological and organizational literatures on work and emotion. Two broad research areas are examined. One is the study of emotional expression, which encompasses efforts to understand more spontaneous and “extra-organizational” aspects of emotionality at work. The second focuses on emotional regulation, which includes emotional labor, as well as research on the regulation, structuring, and management of emotion. This review demonstrates that emotion has made its way into virtually every aspect of the study of work and helped reframe understanding of fundamental workplace processes, such as inequality, and outcomes like performance that are of particular concern in organizational research. The United States is now on the verge of a “new economy,” whose features diverge from the service economy of the past. Identifying what lines of emotion research are most critical to understanding the twenty-first century workplace is an important task.