Narrating the Disjunctions Produced by the Sociological Concept of Emotional Reflexivity in Organization Studies
Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
ISBN: 978-1-83549-591-9, eISBN: 978-1-83549-588-9
ISSN: 0733-558X
Publication date: 23 September 2024
Abstract
Despite being conjointly stronger in their synergies in the past, there is still a significant gap between management and organization studies and sociology. The temporal lag is also, on occasion, a substantive lag. The emergent sociological concept of emotional reflexivity has recently been used in organizational studies. The question that animates this contribution concerns the nature of this translation, reception, and extension; thus, we ask how organization studies have been using the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity? We will examine recent seminal sociological studies on emotional reflexivity to answer this inquiry and consider some organizational studies citing these. We describe the reception of sociological ideas of emotional reflexivity in management and organization studies literature. By analyzing the differences and disconnections produced within this discourse, it will be possible to understand that emotional reflexivity is rarely addressed in emotional encounters between people and other modes of being in modern organizations. We introduce narrative fiction as a method; the narrative focuses on the relationships between humans and other beings in the workplace dynamics of a vocational school. The story tells how Charlie, a deaf student, changed his life after entering the vocational school and becoming involved with different pedagogical teaching-learning strategies. Adopting two deaf dogs, which had both suffered from past unsuccessful adoption experiences, produced life-enhancing emotional reflexivity. We conclude with a research agenda scoping further directions.
Keywords
Citation
Americo, B.L., Clegg, S. and Carniel, F. (2024), "Narrating the Disjunctions Produced by the Sociological Concept of Emotional Reflexivity in Organization Studies", Clegg, S., Grothe-Hammer, M. and Velarde, K.S. (Ed.) Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 90), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 229-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20240000090009
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Bruno Luiz Americo, Stewart Clegg and Fagner Carniel
License
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.
Introduction
Reflections on social transformations in affective dynamics have always been present in the texts constituting the Western sociological tradition. For instance, Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim present classic examples. In 1903, Simmel wrote an essay titled “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in which he defended the idea that the blasé attitude, a mixture of reserve, coldness, and indifference, one that could potentially lead to hatred, would result from the psychic demands imposed by the intense flow of urban life with its heterogeneous sensory overload. Durkheim, in turn, elaborated a sophisticated theory of solidarity in The Division of Labor in Society, initially published in 1893, from which he sought to answer how social cohesion could be maintained in the face of a lack of affective intensity produced by social differentiation in modern societies.
The boundedness of sociology as a discipline is loose. It relates easily to and spills over into related fields such as anthropology and organization studies. Indeed, Durkheim was as much an anthropologist as a sociologist theorist, while Simmel was as much an urban theorist or social psychologist as a sociologist. The lines were not sharply drawn. That this was the case is hardly surprising; at the dawn of disciplines, before the institutionalization of professionalizing missions, borders yet to be constructed were easily crossed. Their contributions, along with many other reflections on emotions in the social sciences, remained marginal to explanations of the practices and processes of rationalizing social life during much of the 20th century. For instance, that living a work life of legal-rational order might indeed be a strongly emotional vocation for public servants, a message articulated clearly in Weber’s (1946) “Politics as a Vocation,” was a message that seemed to be lost in translating his ideas into dimensions of bureaucracy (see Clegg, 1990). Indeed, rationality won out over emotionality in the discussion of organizations until the tide turned as a result of the work of sociologists such as Hochschild (1979, 1983) and Albrow (1997). With these contributions, how organizations both induce emotional work and are themselves emotional vessels filtered into the lexicon of management and organization studies. As the work of Werner Schirmer published in this issue demonstrates, emotional aspects are increasingly relevant to organizational life nowadays.
Organization studies, in many ways the orphaned offspring of the sociology of organizations, has recently begun to explore emotional reflexivity. How organization studies use and might use the emergent sociological concept of emotional reflexivity is the research question that we address. We examine recent seminal sociological studies on emotional reflexivity and consider some organizational studies citing these. Then, we describe the disjunctions – the transformations and disconnections produced through the incorporation of emotional reflexivity in organization studies leading to theoretical advances (Hibbert et al., 2014; Strathern, 1987) – produced in management and organization studies’ use of emotional reflexivity and elaborate on remaining lacunae. One of these is a residual humanism that marginalizes the consideration of other beings (as well as non-beings) as objects of emotional attachment. To contribute to organizational discussions about organizational reflexivity, we introduce narrative fiction about emotional reflexivity as part of the relationships between humans and other beings in the workplace dynamics of a bilingual vocational school (Portuguese and Libras) and conclude with a research agenda.
Literature Review
Recently, organizational research has extended sociological concepts of emotional reflexivity by decentering the idea of authorial rationality (e.g., Hibbert et al., 2019; Koning & Ooi, 2013) to overcome individualistic and cognitive conceptions of reflexivity (e.g., Cunliffe, 2003; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Hibbert et al., 2014; Weick, 2002). We will consider recent seminal sociological research on emotional reflexivity (e.g., Blackman, 2007; Burkitt, 1997, 2012; Holmes, 2015; Holmes et al., 2021; King, 2006) and citations of them by organization studies. The sociology of emotions is a vast field, and our interest herein lies in its intersection with classic debates on reflexivity. We will consider the shifts produced through the incorporation of emotional reflexivity as a trope from social theory used in organization studies and anthropological scholarship (Hibbert et al., 2014; Strathern, 1987).
In recent years, there has been an increasing consideration of the emotions engaged by relationships between researchers and their subjects, especially regarding research practices, methods, and theories (cf. Cassell et al., 2020; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Hibbert et al., 2014; Munkejord, 2009). Reflexive practice increasingly accommodates the consideration of both researchers’ and subjects’ agendas and emotions (Cassell et al., 2020; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). Emotions influence social interactions (e.g., Blakely, 2007; Campbell, 2001; Gilbert, 2001; Harris & Huntington, 2001; Whiteman, 2010). Practices of field-based data collection and analysis of the materials collected are social interactions (Cassell et al., 2020; Munkejord, 2009; Whiteman et al., 2009). Reflection on emotions involved in social interactions is an analytical tool enabling the production of “emotional reflexivity” (Cassell et al., 2020; Munkejord, 2009; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018; Whiteman et al., 2009). Investigations interpreting how reflexivity is facilitated by emotions (Hibbert et al., 2021) within productive, transformative, and enabling relationships and interactions are increasingly common (Hibbert et al., 2021; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). Consideration of emotions is an analytical foci for change through learning (Hibbert et al., 2019); emotions illuminate hidden aspects of research practice (Koning & Ooi, 2013), and reflexivity is required if they are to be apprehended as intersubjective processes (Duncan & Elias, 2021). The sociological concept of emotional reflexivity can address emotions at and in work, using emotional reflexivity to take them seriously. Doing so combats the often emotionless protocols of academia (Campbell, 2001; Ellis, 2007; Mohrman, 2010; Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Whiteman et al., 2009, p. 49, 2010). Researchers recognizing the emotionality of their research subjects become emotionally reflexive in making these connections.
In conceptualizing emotional reflexivity as an intersubjective process (e.g., Burkitt, 2012; Cunliffe, 2003; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Hibbert et al., 2014; Holmes, 2015), sociologically influenced scholarship largely addresses relationships between researchers and research subjects through conversational means (cf. Hibbert et al., 2014). Conversation, as an ongoing form of sensemaking and repairing of breaches in the process of achieving understanding, generates confrontation of the performatively projected and looking-glass selves (Cooley, 1902). When it does so, it facilitates reflexive practice (Hibbert et al., 2019, 2021; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018).
Sociologically inclined studies of organizations primarily admit emotional reflexivity as a part of the interactive human condition without considering that other modes of being can enact intersubjective emotions. Multiple realities are continuously being constructed, linking the different worlds of human beings and other modes of being in the world (Kohn, 2015). Human beings enjoy intense emotional relationships with diverse actants that often enter the workplace in emotional discursivity. These can be as diverse as their nation, sovereign, football team, possessions, houses, and devices. As topics and as actants, these can be extremely strong objects of emotional attachment, often leading to interesting and sometimes emotionally charged conversations.
Peoples’ emotional attachment can also be with their animals, some of whom enter workplaces not only discursively but also physically, guide dogs, for instance, or as pets. Hence, emotional reflexivity concerning other forms of being than the human should be admitted as part of all the embodied heterogeneous relationships that might occur while working in organizations (Burkitt, 1997, 2012; Castro, 2014; Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Holmes, 2010, 2015; Kohn, 2013; Latour, 2005). As far as relationships between people and animals are concerned, recent work on the topic problematizes many taken-for-granted assumptions (Jammaers, 2023). Agonistic and symbiotic relationships between human beings and other animal beings (cf. Cunha et al., 2019; Dashper, 2019; Hamilton & McCabe, 2016; Knights & Clarke, 2018) may or may not be part of the core business of the organizations researched by sociological inquiries (cf. O’Doherty, 2017; Wilkin et al., 2016). Sociological thinking about animals is gaining importance (Kruse, 2002) even as it remains somewhat under-utilized by applied sociology in business and management schools. Hence, the organizational significance of investigation into what Donna Haraway terms human and more-than-human companion species’ emotional relationships (Cunha et al., 2019; Labatut et al., 2016).
Problematizing the Emotionalization of Reflexivity in Contemporary Sociology
Illouz (1997) observed that a focus on objective regularities, patterns of behavior, and institutionalization processes may well be related to a particular fear that the study of subjective, invisible, and personal phenomena (e.g., affections) might undermine the sociological vocation. Fortunately, this scenario has changed (McCarthy, 1994). Emotions are not considered merely as psychological entities but also as cultural and social facts that are historically and hierarchically organized in terms of embodied and socio-cultural moral qualities within relationships (Burkitt, 1997). As a perspective on the importance of emotions in studying embodied relationships, this has become routinized in several fields of social theory, including those dedicated to theorizing reflexivity.
Over the last decade, King (2006) provided a foundational theoretical framework for studies interested in the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity. The concept has developed in critical dialogue with Touraine’s (1995, p. 207) theory of subjectivation. King (2006) recognizes the central role that social movements play in producing social changes in late modernity but warns of the need to investigate affective dynamics in the formation of what Touraine called the will to act and be recognized as an actor. King (2006, p. 876) mobilizes the concept of emotional reflexivity to signify a set of “practices of co-counselling” by social activists that would “enable them to both sustain their activism and act creatively in producing society.” Holmes (2010), building on this antecedent, developed an approach that was more comprehensive than King’s (2006), suggesting that emotions are vital for understanding all forms of sociability. He challenges the lack of attention to emotions in contemporary theories of reflexivity centered on “detraditionalization” (Giddens, 1990) and “risk” (Beck, 1992).
Holmes (2010) was influenced by Mead’s (1962) symbolic interactionism. According to Holmes (2010, p. 140), reflexivity should be considered “an emotional, embodied and cognitive process” through which anyone can experience their presence in a world that depends on heterogeneous others. The idea that social theories need to emotionalize reflexivity to build relational and socially embedded models of explanation of human relationships was further advanced by Burkitt (2012). Using Mayrhofer’s (2011) study on non-suicidal self-injury, Burkitt (2012, p. 467) argues that “the ‘I’ that thinks and reflects on itself and the world is based on feelings about its own self that are connected to the relational social world of interaction, in which it is always situated.” From this point of view, the debate should focus on how emotions as modes of communication within relationships are monitored or controlled by social habitus and power relations as well as how they inform and motivate reflective thinking (Burkitt, 1997).
There is a lack of emotional reflexivity (Holmes, 2015) in notions that only individualize and objectify affective dynamics in terms of inner processes and practices (Burkitt, 1997), such as emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1996) and emotional work (Hochschild, 1983). There is an analytical distinction between feelings (vague and nebulous) and emotions (articulated and nameable). When we ponder our feelings, they can become categorically assigned among the range of emotions within relationships occurring in social contexts. The categorical device that names the emotion is attached to patterns of interaction in specific situational social contexts (Sacks, 1972). Emotions stem from members’ categorization devices in use in relationships, rather than from some individual ability to identify and regulate one’s emotions and understand the emotions of others. These categorization devices, as they are experienced, become embrained and embodied (Castells, 2010). By the latter, we mean that the identification of emotions within relationships becomes fused into our ways of thinking, neurologically, as well as our ways of reacting in “emotional” situations, as they are enacted by embodied techniques learned in complex and heterogeneous social contexts (Burkitt, 1997; Holmes, 2015; Latour, 2005). These techniques can range, for instance, from the coldest kind of cool to the most heated form of hot in the emotional register.
Holmes (2015) problematized two research strategies commonly used in the sociology of emotions to investigate intersubjective practices of interpreting feelings: textual analysis and interviewing. After reporting her exploratory study on the profusion of tips on good manners in the use of the social network, Facebook, Holmes (2015, p. 64) concluded that the textual analysis of what people “say” offers essential information about emotional norms but is limited because they cannot convey bodily cues about how they “feel.” Holmes (2015, p. 65) further reflects on interviews she conducted with couples in long-distance relationships in the United Kingdom to demonstrate that when multiple interactions occur in a joint interview, we can perceive that “emotional reflexivity is a capacity not just of researchers, but of participants.” Emotional reflexivity is relational.
The construction of a sociological concept of emotional reflexivity positions emotions within heterogeneous relationships as central to understanding reflexivity rather than something that can be avoided in reflexive practice (Mills & Kleinman, 1988) or a barrier to doing good research (cf. Blackman, 2007; Burkitt, 2012). Understanding how emotional reflexivity is constituted within relationships sheds sociological light on affective life’s intersubjectively embodied and embrained character. It helps to consider “hidden” aspects of social investigations by addressing how emotions are accomplished and theory about these subsequently enacted (Blackman, 2007). As Holmes (2015) wrote, interviewing the members of social relations individually rather than as couples misses the emotional reflexivity that creates the construction of emotional affect.
Becoming Emotionally Reflexive in Research
Different sociological approaches to the concept of emotional reflexivity (cf. Blackman, 2007; Burkitt, 2012; Holmes, 2010; 2015; Holmes et al., 2021; King, 2006) have been translated into the field of organizations in different ways (cf. Duncan & Elias, 2021; Hibbert et al., 2019, 2021; Koning & Ooi, 2013; Munkejord, 2009; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). A dialogue began in the 2000s when Munkejord (2009) researched a department of a Fortune 500 company and outlined the idea of “methodological emotional reflexivity,” inspired by the concept of “emotional reflexivity” proposed by King (2006). Researchers could be seen to be as emotional as any other craftspeople.
The implications of researchers’ emotional involvement when doing fieldwork are multifaceted. They range from a concern with being faithful to those theoretical traditions to which one defers (Clegg & Hardy, 2006). They can include somewhat solipsistic renderings of self-reflection (Shalin, 1986) as well as intersubjective understanding (Tomkins & Eatough, 2010). Munkejord (2009) included the emotions, values, and political agendas of researchers and subjects in academic research, using terms also suggested by Mohrman (2010). Methodological innovations were produced that addressed complex and ambiguous organizational issues (e.g., the changing nature of organizations and ecological crises). Munkejord (2009, p. 151) explored his emotions, using grounded theory to reflect on “emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), emotional intelligence, moods in organizations, and affective events.” The focus was not only on how emotion registers in the daily life of organizations but also on how emotions impact research practices. The idea of “methodological emotional reflexivity,” suggested by Munkejord (2009), includes emotional awareness, empathic understanding, and emotions in decision-making. Recording these can be part of memoing in grounded theory.
Blee (1998) notes that once emotions are addressed as “relational expressions” beyond “individual emotional experiences,” they can be seen to play a more significant part in the research process. What is required is attention to the researcher’s emotions and the emotional relationship that is built between the researcher and researched (cf. Blackman, 2007). Researchers are often encouraged to be detached, objective, impartial, and disinterested in their subjects (Bird, 2020). Whiteman et al. (2009, p. 49), considering what they called the “emotion-less culture of academia” (cf. Campbell, 2001; Ellis, 2007; Mohrman, 2010; Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Whiteman, 2010), examined how emotional experiences from qualitative research add to management studies. The authors re-wrote past research as reflexive examples, contributing to scholarship integrating the emotions of fieldwork in research practice (cf. Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Weick, 2002).
Using emotional experiences is different from identifying and labeling emotions through “cognitive reflexivity” and deciding how to show emotions through “reflexive agency” in the research process. Whiteman et al. (2009) concentrate on emotions as analytic tools to develop new questions, concepts, and analytical insights (cf. Blakely, 2007; Campbell, 2001; Gilbert, 2001; Harris & Huntington, 2001; Whiteman, 2010). They warn that emotions and their attributed meanings should not be separated from cognition, feelings, and interpretations carried out in fieldwork (cf. Campbell, 2001; Gilbert, 2001; Lofland et al., 2006). Whiteman et al. (2009) indicate that it is necessary to understand the disjunctions produced in the process of the emotional culture of researching, creating methodologies, and modeling relations, stressing the importance of mapping the extent to which emotions lead to new questions, concepts, and theories (cf. Blakely, 2007; Weick, 2002). The sociological concept of emotional reflexivity has become a central analytic tool influencing social interaction and how data are collected and analyzed (Munkejord, 2009; Whiteman et al., 2009).
Koning and Ooi (2013) also address the concept of emotional reflexivity (cf. Blackman, 2007; Burkitt, 2012) to present “awkward” ethnographic encounters in the field. The researcher’s rationality is usually privileged in the practice of research at the expense of emotions produced between the researcher and researched in the field (cf. Burkitt, 2012). Koning and Ooi (2013, p. 17) favor an “inclusive reflexivity” that allows researchers to highlight hidden aspects of organizational ethnography to improve our understanding of organizational reality. From this perspective, research reports should be “inclusive of the dimensions we all hesitate to explicitly reveal (e.g., fear, heartbreak, alienation, embarrassment), and inclusive of the research participants and their anxieties and agendas.”
Ruebottom and Auster (2018) explored the emotional landscape of reflexivity (cf. Burkitt, 2012; King, 2006) from the vantage afforded by institutional theory, demonstrating how reflexivity is produced through emotional dynamics that (dis)embed actors. The authors show that institutional work demands reflexivity, exploring how it can enact an understanding of the social world. For Ruebottom and Auster (2018, p. 4), interactions such as dialogue (cf. Cunliffe, 2002) and storytelling (Gorli et al., 2015) between people of different social positions are central to reflective practice and thinking. In line with Burkitt (2012) and Holmes (2010), they argue that reflexivity demands cognitive and emotional disembedding of entangling emotions. These are “defined as the fleeting sensations and reactions to experience, moods, and the longer-term affective attachments that bond people to each other (p. 3). Reflexivity should be used for “understanding the recursive influence between social structure and emotions, whereby emotions can also alter understandings and facilitate new structural arrangements” (p. 2). To this end, they investigated We Day stadium-hosted youth days as an interstitial event bringing together different perspectives (cf. Cunliffe, 2002) to produce a community of “change-makers.” The research findings suggest that such events reflexively disembed actors from given attachments and embed them within new social bonds through (1) personal narratives of injustice/action and (2) individual–collective empowering, challenging actors’ conceptions of self/others and changing their way of thinking (also see Biggart, 1989, on the affective relations produced by the embedding processes of “charismatic capitalism” on direct sellers of commodities, such as Avon cosmetics. The emotional reflexivity induced was life-changing).
Dealing with social change but from a different theoretical perspective, Hibbert et al. (2019) contend that while several texts recognize reflexivity as a driver for change (cf. Alvesson et al., 2008; Gorli et al., 2015), few regard it as the source of energy for change, an engine of change. Hibbert et al. (2019) address how researchers as agents within organizations (Gorli et al., 2015) use reflexive practices, deployed by emotions, rationality, and relationships (Whiteman, 2010; Whiteman et al., 2009), to avoid engaging in changing their self (self-reflexivity/inward orientation) and/or context (critical reflexivity/outward orientation) (cf. Cunliffe, 2003; Hibbert et al., 2014). Responsibility is at issue (cf. Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Paulsen, 2015). A team of researchers employ “a relationally reflexive approach” in which they “assumed the roles of both researchers and practitioners” (Hibbert et al., 2019, p. 1). Hibbert et al. (2019) map the existence of four styles of reflexive practice by individuals (resigning, relocating, resisting, and reconfiguring). The authors were able to show the extent to which these reflexive practices involve rationality and emotions (cf. Burkitt, 2012; Davies, 2012; Holmes, 2010), noting that emotions, together with reflexive practices, act as motors of change (cf. Burkitt, 2012).
Cassell et al. (2020) claim that emotional experiences generate reflexivity as part of a dialogic and emotional process between researchers and research interlocutors (cf. Burkitt, 2012; Hibbert et al., 2019). These emotional experiences are related to participant reflexivity. Cassell et al. (2020) consider that authorial reflexivity has been privileged to such an extent that little has been written about participant reflexivity. Hence, they recognize the importance of detailing relational and methodological issues that allow the engagement of the research interlocutor in reflexive practice. Specifically, Cassell et al. (2020) identify participant reflexivity produced from a photo-elicitation study of work-life balance and conflict. The types of internal dialogue conveyed when research interlocutors engage in self-reflexivity are outlined, detailing how it is possible to access participant reflexivity methodologically through emotions (cf. Gatrell, 2009).
Hibbert et al. (2021) consider how reflexive practices allow learning from negative emotional experiences, leading to self-change (cf. Hibbert et al., 2019). They investigate experiences in academic organizations through a relationally reflexive (cf. Hibbert et al., 2014) and autoethnographic (cf. Boncori & Smith, 2019) method. The authors address how organization members use reflexive practices of attending, dialoguing, and realigning to learn from negative emotions. For Hibbert et al. (2021), individuals’ focus on how containing the pain of traumatic experiences obstructs learning; according to the authors, overcoming such barriers requires resilience from the researchers and research interlocutors. Rather than avoiding trauma, they must seek to engage with emotional experiences that can lead to learning with others (Hibbert et al., 2019). Consequently, there can be a change of understanding about emotional experiences and beliefs (cf. Ogden & Fisher, 2014; Ramsey, 2008) and how future practice proceeds (cf. Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015). In this context, emotion can be seen as a facilitator of reflexivity (e.g., Burkitt, 2012; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Holmes, 2010; King, 2006), especially when dialoguing and interacting with the experience, vocabulary, and expressions of others is possible (e.g., Burkitt, 2012; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Holmes, 2010).
Duncan and Elias (2021) also draw insights from the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity, linking up with countertransference to inquire into the unconscious dimensions of field experiences that foster radical reflexivity. They develop a method of writing and analyzing field notes that includes observing, capturing the story, articulating countertransference, and developing interpretations that foreground unconscious dimensions of experience. In making their field notes visible, the authors show how researchers can account for intersubjective processes, uniting conscious and unconscious dimensions of experience, and producing a shared understanding of organizational dynamics. Duncan and Elias (2021) challenge earlier discourses on reflexivity (e.g., Burkitt, 2012) by defining it as an intersubjective process (e.g., Holmes, 2015) and examining how reflexivity is enacted from the (un)conscious and relational dynamics in research processes between two collaborators.
The Impact of the Concept of Emotional Reflexivity
The sociological concept of emotional reflexivity led to theoretical and methodological innovations (cf. Hibbert et al., 2014; Strathern, 1987). Overly individualistic and cognitive conceptions of reflexivity (e.g., Cunliffe, 2003; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Hibbert et al., 2014, 2019; Koning & Ooi, 2013; Weick, 2002) were overcome by addressing the emotional relationship built between researcher and researched (Munkejord, 2009). The researcher’s rationality is decentered by prioritizing the emotions of researchers and subjects in research practices involving accessing each parties’ emotional reflexivity (Cassell et al., 2020; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Hibbert et al., 2014; Munkejord, 2009). Emotions are central analytic tools with a reciprocal impact on social interaction (e.g., Blakely, 2007; Campbell, 2001; Gilbert, 2001; Harris & Huntington, 2001; Whiteman, 2010), including data collection and analysis (Munkejord, 2009; Whiteman et al., 2009). In addition, reflexive practice is now taken to include researchers’ agendas and their positive and negative emotions toward these agendas as well as those of their interlocutors (Cassell et al., 2020; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). Instead of being hidden from the final result of the research (Koning & Ooi, 2013) or exposed only in highly emotional contexts (Bennett, 2004; Holmes, 2015), emotions have started to be considered possible engines of change and learning (Hibbert et al., 2019, 2021; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018).
In conceptualizing emotional reflexivity as an intersubjective process, investigations primarily address relationships between human subjects in organizations. For instance, sociologically influenced scholarship recognizes the constitutive role of “conversations” between scholars and participants, theory and practice sparked by organizational encounters (Hibbert et al., 2014). In accounting for the role of emotions in facilitating reflexive practices, radically reflexive researchers understand interactions between people as shared and naturalized, constructing intersubjectively the realities being studied (Cunliffe, 2003; Hibbert et al., 2021). The focus has been on how interactions between people of different social classes, producing self-confrontation, can generate reflexive practice (Hibbert et al., 2019, 2021; Holmes, 2010; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). Emotional reflexivity is admitted as a part of the interactive human condition. Emotional reflexivity is necessary as “relations with others become more diverse and less well-defined, and social conditions more complex” (Holmes, 2015, p. 461). In this sense, it is important to note that social-movement studies; science and technology studies; ethnicity, gender, and class studies; as well as animal studies are examples of transdisciplinary fields of study that allow sociology to be inclusive of human–animal–more-than-human relationships (Kruse, 2002). Sociological understanding grasps the extent to which complex sociality and heterogeneous others jointly are (re)produced (cf. Holmes et al., 2021). Can emotional reflexivity be part of the conditional relationships between human beings and other forms of being? This is the question that we address next in a move to broaden the humanistic scope of the discussion thus far.
A Methodological Prolegomenon
Case and Methodology
How does one begin to investigate the emotional relationships between a discursive and non-discursive being? Cases that problematize the discursive privileges of “normal” human beings are one way to proceed. We contribute to discussions about emotional reflexivity through an exercise in theorizing that arises from our research and work experiences with disability, animal welfare, and deafness. We introduce a narrative fiction that addresses emotional reflexivity as part of the embodied relationships between humans and non-human beings in the workplace dynamics of a vocational school.
The descriptive power of narrative fiction can bring singular organizational phenomena into relief as an elaborated version of the methodology of ideal types, as pioneered by Weber (1949; also see Aspalter, 2020). Rather than create a static ideal type as an artificial representation of characteristics accentuated for analytical purposes, we use narrative fiction based on fieldwork to analytically highlight processes in their emotionality. We follow in the steps of earlier pioneers (cf. Jermier, 1985; Phillips, 1995; Whiteman & Phillips, 2008) who were able to “tell us something about the world” encountered (Hansen et al., 2007, p. 113), making valuable contributions to knowledge. Stories, written as qualitative data narratives, can create compelling accounts and raise provocative questions that see the world differently, questioning the previously tacitly taken for granted, to make social reality as it appears to be, “problematic” (Blum, 1971). Through capturing scenes from everyday lives, recording them in detail, and attending to naturally occurring conversations, encounters, and the mundane materiality of daily life, is not easily captured in a traditional ideal type; hence narrative fiction (Américo et al., 2022). Narrative fiction allows us to position the seemingly ordinary processes of emotional reflexivity within a more expansive consideration of ontological matters that can account for other modes of existence (Kohn, 2013; Latour, 2005; O’Doherty, 2017).
To contribute to organizational discussions that deal with discussions about emotional reflexivity, we have produced a narrative fiction based on data drawn from an actual case. People organizing disabled people’s education that worked with deaf students initially introduced us to the case, doing so during a lunch break at the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina, bilingual campus (Portuguese and Libras). The narrative was subsequently written after meeting and working with deaf people and consulting sociological narratives about deafness. Our methodological and authorial responsibility to the researched subjects and readers (Hansen et al., 2007, p. 123; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Strathern, 1987), as authors without the disabilities under consideration, is to move “the reader toward direct participation in knowledge building” (Hansen et al., 2007, p. 113; see also Ng & Cock, 2002). We cannot write from the position of the subjects but strive to capture some of the emotional resonances we encountered.
We produced a narrative fiction to encapsulate the case so that we could theorize about emotional reflexivity as part of the embodied relationships existing between humans and other modes of being in the workplace dynamics of a vocational school. After the narrative fiction is described, we present conclusions, proposing a research agenda to explore how emotional reflexivity can be seen within a more expansive consideration of ontological matters concerning heterogeneous workplaces and organizational relationships. We consider how theoretical sociological research can build an understanding of organizations able to address emotions within increasingly complex social relationships. Before this, we must introduce our narrative and its characters.
The narrative is based on actual people, situations, data, and experiences, as stated. We used fieldwork notes on the management learning of deaf students as well as interview transcripts of interviews and discussions. These were conducted with other educational professionals working with them, as well as with a deaf person who adopted two deaf dogs and an employee working in an Animal Welfare Board of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The protagonist of the narration is Charlie, a deaf student whose life changed when he entered the vocational school and became involved with innovative pedagogical teaching-learning strategies. The vocational school uses dogs for educational purposes. Every Wednesday, the fire department takes two rescue dogs to interact with deaf students to help in the teaching-learning process. Over time, Charlie adopted two dogs that had suffered from unsuccessful adoption experiences, largely because they were also deaf. Thus, the narrative fiction draws attention to how, in a vocational school that calls on deaf people to give meaning to their social experience through heterogeneous pedagogical actions, emotional reflexivity between humans and other modes of existence is produced.
Deafness, Dogs, and Learning
The Narrative
Time was one of the last things I had that late afternoon in December 2018. The selection process for a vacancy as a substitute professor at the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina had been long and tiring. Finally, I was in the last stage: the interview. While waiting for my turn, I walked through the institute’s internal courtyards, thinking about the heavy traffic I would face when returning from there, on the mainland, to the capital, on the island of Florianópolis, where I live. What would it be like to walk this path daily? The best thing was not to think about it too much. I just needed that job.
There was a group of young people playing football with others around the court cheering, dating, or just talking. I sat next to the students, watching the match to rest, distracting myself a little. Summer vacation had already started, yet the school seemed full. After a few moments, I realized that all the students around me were deaf; they were users of Brazilian sign language, and that is how I could tell. I knew that this was a bilingual school. I just did not think it was exclusive to deaf people. I felt butterflies in my stomach as I realized how difficult that language seemed to me at the time. Even more so when one of them, Charlie, came to talk to me. I did not understand what he was trying to tell me, and as soon as he understood the situation, he turned away and went back to his group.
Half an hour later, during the interview, the examining board explained that the bilingual campus was initially conceived as a vocational and technological education unit for primary and higher education primarily aimed at the sign language user community. However, over the years, that group, composed chiefly of hearing teachers who were sign language users, understood that there would not be enough demand to fill all the vacancies. In addition, there was also an insufficiency of teachers proficient in sign language for all curricular units. Therefore, the institute’s pedagogical project was changed to integrate deaf and hearing students into a bilingual modality. Without any previous contact with the language, teachers like me would be invited to take courses offered by the institute and would have the support of interpreters in classes with deaf students.
A few weeks later, I received the approval notice. It was a mixture of joy and grief. Despite the possibility of learning many new things when working in a bilingual school, I started to worry about the pedagogical difficulties involved in that work. How would I teach the content if I could not communicate properly with my students? Would it always depend on the mediation of interpreters? How would this affect the dynamics of my classes? Should I organize more expository classes? What type of resources would be more accessible? Should I write on the board or favor slides with images? Could I use subtitled movies? Would I have to evaluate them in Portuguese or sign language?
Learning about Oliver Sacks’ (1990) perspectives on Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, and the social history of deafness in American culture in the second half of the 20th century, did not alleviate the anxiety of not knowing what could happen in the classroom. Moreover, the online introductory course to Brazilian sign language that I took did not help much either. After all, I simply did not have any pedagogical training to deal with the tensions involved in navigating the regimes of deafness and hearing, regimes that traditionally expelled deaf people from the hearing world of education.
With the feeling of having to start from “zero,” the school year effectively started in February 2019. I would be teaching the subject of entrepreneurship in four high school technical vocational education classes, one of them very small, composed of only seven deaf students, the first class I engaged. Upon entering, Charlie greeted me with a surprised expression, followed by a warm smile. I said, “Hi,” and I went to the teacher’s desk to organize the slides to start; that was pretty much all I knew how to signal. He observed me while his classmates chatted absently and signed something. Pedro, the interpreter who had just entered the room at that moment, told me what this was, right after class, while laughing a lot. “Another teacher who cannot talk? At least he is cute!” “Excuse me,” he said. “I did not mean to be disrespectful, but it is nice to see how Charlie has matured over the last few years.” “How so?” I asked.
It is just that Charlie has been with us since elementary school, and we follow all of his personal development. However, you know, he is the only child of a rigorous Catholic family, of family farmers, without much schooling. And seeing him express his sexuality in front of the class so naturally makes us emotional.
Curious, I wanted to know more details about my new student’s story: “So, it was not just at home that Charlie struggled to come out with his sexuality but at school itself, right?” “Yes, Charlie was a very withdrawn boy,” explained Pedro,
He signalled badly because his parents never learned sign language, and his classmates made fun of him a lot. So, I think it took him a long time to make friends and expose himself a little more at school. When everyone found out he was gay, it was a general surprise.
“And didn’t people handle it well at the time?” I asked. “No, it was complicated for him,” he told me, “A year ago, he fought almost every day, his classmates did not like him, the teachers complained about his behaviour, and the parents even wanted to take Charlie out of school.”
“But how did things change?” I asked again. He answered, “It was neither one nor another particular thing. Do you know when different beings and parts come together simultaneously?” “Especially after Jessica and Flávia, who are also deaf students, started dating. Yes, I think that was decisive for Charlie and his colleagues to understand that this was a normal situation.” After a few moments, Pedro added:
It also was aided by the development of communication. Charlie got a cell phone, went on social media, and started posting intimate things about his feelings. These days, he even has a popular YouTube channel among them. Comedy, can you believe it? He posts all the work done for the technical course in Visual Communication here at the Institute; he loves posting behind-the-scenes stories. It was a way for him to express himself and his feelings to the school and rebuild his image, you know? Moreover, with boosted communication, he can express himself and experience a new world that has opened up to him.
Pedro went on to say:
When Charlie was already on the upswing, he started participating in an educational project hosted by IFSC together with the local fire department, which brings two rescue dogs on Wednesday afternoons to help with the anxiety of deaf students who enter the institution and are in the process of learning Libras. From arrival to departure of the local fire department, Charlie did not let go of these dogs.
Thoughtfully, he said:
That is when he went he looked at the animal welfare board on Instagram and decided to adopt a deaf dog. And then another. Surely, this was a central turning point in his life. The dogs he adopted suffered from chronic stress, as they had lived, discouraged, for years in the shelter, running from house to house as the tutors who adopted them ended up returning them, not accepting their deafness, which was seen as different from the normal.
The teacher responded by saying that: “Adopting a dog is, in fact, a complex experience; it involves many feelings and sensations, negative but mostly positive, that affect us. Pets have beneficial effects on us just by being in the room.”
The interpreter agreed with the teacher:
It sounds a cliché, but having a puppy helps reduce the owner’s stress, anxiety, and depression. I noticed that Charlie even started to exercise and entertain more because he likes walking the dogs in the vicinity of the school, throwing sticks in the park, and taking walks in the street for the animal’s needs.
As I stored the computer in the bag, I asked: “what made him adopt the deaf dog?”
“First, Charlie was touched by Huggies’ story.”
Charlie met Huggies and his story through Instagram and decided he would adopt that deaf dog, who had already been adopted and returned to the shelter numerous times. He told me that when he arrived at the shelter, Huggies put both paws on the chair where he was sitting and put his head on his leg. Charlie looked at that white-haired being and burst into tears. The dog also cried a lot, communicating and connecting with Charlie. Deep down, Charlie knew that, from that moment on, he could not fail him because it would depend on him forever, recalls the interpreter. “The experience was so gratifying that a few months later, he learned of the arrival of another deaf dog at the shelter and adopted the puppy.” At the door, Pedro said:
These two deaf dogs are like Charlie’s children. They play and walk together every day. He takes them to day-care too. He perfected his sign by teaching them daily new commands (signs in Libras). They learned the meanings of the signs so fast and make Charlie feel loved! His life was never the same after he adopted Huggies and Angel. For Charlie, he and the dogs feel the same since they are deaf, and one produces a change in the other’s behaviour. They are very attached since they are deaf. The most amazing thing, according to Charlie, is that they love to receive visits from deaf people “like us,” do you believe it?
He then observed:
This shows how we can constantly be relearning through different bodies, whether our own, those of colleagues, or our companion animals. This brings us back to our initial conversation; it is a pity that we do not have many people who can work with gender and sexuality in this class. Last year, they had a teacher who worked a lot with theatre and tried to bring this discussion to the classes, but I think the students were not as mature as they are now.
Listening carefully to the story, I asked, “Do you think I should try to incorporate issues of gender and sexuality into my classes more directly?” Pedro replied: “Wow, if you could do that, I am sure it would be something very significant for this group.” “I could research some cases of companies that work with the inclusion of trans people to exemplify the content that I intend to address throughout the bimester or organizations that had to deal with gender conflicts publicly,” I pondered. “I had already imagined doing this but concerning quotas for people with disabilities in the labor market. Perhaps both – I can present a more general idea of inclusion that encompasses sexual diversity. What do you think?”
Enthusiastically, Pedro retorted, “That is exactly what I feel they need.” Then, he expanded on this declaration.
You know, the teachers who arrive here are always very good-willed. They want to help deaf people by bringing the classes closer to their reality. Nevertheless, they often do not realize that deaf people are not just their deafness. You know they have ideas, dreams, desires; they have colours, pets, styles, beliefs, you know? They are as plural and contradictory as anyone else.
I must have looked surprised, judging from Pedro’s expression, a reaction that made him smile discreetly, encouraging him to launch one last provocation:
A few years ago, a business professor came by and did an amazing thing. She abandoned the test and the traditional classes, organizing and recording a theatre, which was later uploaded to Charlie’s YouTube channel. I think she called it business games: is that it, professor? Students loved this possibility to embody a character, immerse themselves in an imagined environment, and express themselves through performance. Maybe you will come up with something like that too!
Discussion: Toward a Conclusion and a Research Agenda
What can we learn from this narrative? Charlie and his dogs were not unusual; while they were all deaf, so are many animals. What was unusual was that, despite lacking the discursivity to categorize emotions, deafness did not preclude the formation of emotional reflexivity. Positioning emotions within relationships as primarily discursive omits all that precedes discourse or exists outside its domain, including emotional reflexivity that is non-discursive and that incorporates more than human beings. Charlie does not discourse conventionally any more than do his two deaf dogs. While he learns to speak by signing so that he can communicate with the dogs in this way, as well as with people who have the facility to sign, it is evident from the story that there are essential parts of his emotions within relationships that were maturing before discourse was available to him.
Charlie’s being in the world was not defined by his rural background, his largely illiterate parents, or the simple Christianity that shaped all their lives in the country. There is an emotional reflexivity to Charlie’s relationships that allows for conversations with others about the nature of his sexuality and the formation of intimate relations with his two companions. The embodied and corporeal aspects of his emotions as communication are not a phenomenon of inner discursive positioning, but one that is enacted by his body within relationships in a social context premised on power relations (cf. Burkitt, 1997). As Charlie matured, his sexuality emerged. While Charlie is objectively deaf and always has been, he is much more than the “objective features” (cf. Illouz, 1997) of his innate deafness and his recognition of his sexuality suggests.
Charlie, a poor boy of an impoverished family in rural Brazil, raised without sign language and living in a silent world riddled with Catholic orthodoxies, discovers his sexuality, despite its stigmatization in his local environment. Later, as he matures at the institute, learning to sign, he gains confidence with different pedagogical strategies, including using dogs to improve teaching-learning practices. From the example of other students, Charlie begins to communicate through social media, often through comedy. On social media, Instagram, he seeks and encounters animal welfare and discovers that they have a dog, Huggie, a dog that is deaf as he is. Another deaf dog turns up. Both had been spurned by other potential owners and keepers, who could not communicate with the dogs. Charlie can. He forges an intense emotional relationship with these dogs. Charlie’s emotional reflexivity is not bounded by intersubjective relations with human beings but is bolstered by his emotional attachment with companion species.
It is an emotionally powerful narrative. It has a purpose. To recapitulate, we used narrative fiction to position the seemingly ordinary substances of emotional reflexivity involved in managing and organizing. The story places emotional reflexivity within a more expansive and flat consideration of ontological matters in which different modes of existence can be accommodated (Kohn, 2013; Latour, 2005; O’Doherty, 2017). Dogs are an exemplar of a creature with whom emotional reflexivity is shared. Humans do not circumscribe the limits of emotional reflexivity; as Cunha et al. (2019) note, dogs in organizations are not an anomaly. Neither is emotional reflexivity in relating to them. Nor are emotions within relationships wholly discursively formed. Emotions are a privileged form of communication in themselves (Burkitt, 1997). If that were not so, how could Charlie have come to be who he came to be?
The narrative demonstrates that emotions and emotional reflexivity do not reside within people but arise within relationships. The narrative builds what Burkitt (2012) and Holmes (2010) call a relational and socially embedded explanation of relationships. If reflexivity can be considered an emotional, embodied, and cognitive practice, it is possible to experience our existence in a world that depends on heterogeneous others (Holmes, 2010, p. 140). After all, researchers think and reflect about themselves and research phenomena based on their feelings in situated relations with others, whether these others be human or not (Burkitt, 2012).
Emotional reflexivity, as an analytic tool, influences social interaction and how data are collected and analyzed (Munkejord, 2009; Whiteman et al., 2009), uniting emotions and their attributed meanings to categorizations, cognitions, feelings, and interpretations enacted in fieldwork (see Campbell, 2001; Gilbert, 2001; Lofland et al., 2006). Emotional reflexivity materializes in everyday social and organizational life interactions not only through the interiorization of discourse or cognition but also through the body. Understanding this allows emotions within relationships to become central analytic tools (Harris & Huntington, 2001) for decentering the author’s rationality and reflexivity (e.g., Cunliffe, 2003; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Hibbert et al., 2014, 2019; Koning & Ooi, 2013; Weick, 2002). The concept of emotional reflexivity offers organization studies a tool for understanding the role of emotions in producing research findings, subjects, and contexts (Whiteman et al., 2009). Being open to diverse bodily emotions within organizational work would benefit from addressing relations more encompassing and embodied than conventional discourse.
We live in an increasingly complex organizational world, with many sources of dissonance and affect, in which emotions influence how we work and express ourselves. People are constantly asked how they are feeling. It is a common media trope. Whether asked of competitors in the Olympics, Wimbledon, or at the end of any sporting event that is televised (Emmison, 1987), competitors are often asked, “how do you feel about X.” In fact, this is one of the most asked questions by interlocutors, whether professionally in the media or everyday life. Emotions are routinely called for. Social catastrophes, environmental crises, and other challenging events seem to encourage analysis of different emotional contexts and relationships. When people answer such queries, they may think that they are referring to something they feel; we would argue that they are, indeed, really feeling something emotional, but they do so not by addressing some inner state of being so much as by making use of members’ categories available in public language.
Not all emotional expressions are constituted categorically. The embrainment of a repertoire of emotions is corporeal as well as discursive. The lesson is not that the researcher (or the research subject) needs to be emotionally reflexive to register phenomena but that emotional reflexivity arises within relationships for which categories are available for use in accounts. That is, emotional reflexivity can only be produced within relationships. In the case under consideration, it was produced in relationships between researchers, research subjects, and other modes of existence. It is not that the researchers became emotionally reflexive to register emotional phenomena; it was the relationship established with former co-workers at the Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina (IFSC) and, later, with Charlie and his dogs that allowed emotional reflexivity to emerge as a topic, decentering our (the authors’) rationality and individual/cognitive conceptions of reflexivity. Charlie’s emotional reflexivity in his relations with his two deaf dogs was pre-discursive and only subsequently expressed through signing. Signing assigned categories but before there were categories, there was an emotional relationship. Organizational studies are most comfortable studying relationships between humans in the workplace. So, just as traditional sociology is being rethought considering developments in the social sciences, such as animal studies, we claim that organizational studies also need to be rethought considering current theoretical and methodological developments in sociology.
Considering the relevance of the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity for management and organization life, our theorizing has relevance for several specific kinds of theorizing, such as the sociology of management learning, reflexivity, sustainability, emotional work, emotional intelligence as well as critical management studies. The implications for theorizing are the need to acknowledge and use emotions in relationships in the workplace theoretically, including relations built by researchers to study events, beings, and subjects in question (Strathern, 2014). Realize also that emotional relations and reflexivity are not just a feature of relations between human beings; they can include more than human beings (Stengers, 2015), other beings that are non-human actants. Future research may well also extend emotional reflexivity to relations with technological and material actants, such as digital devices. As Fisogni (2023) suggests, the “onlife” world, where the real and the digital are conjoined, provides an environment that makes possible the existence of an enlarged sensitivity on the part of relationships between humans and devices.
We propose a research agenda building on sociologically inspired research into emotional reflexivity (e.g., Duncan & Elias, 2021; Hibbert et al., 2019, 2021; Koning & Ooi, 2013; Munkejord, 2009; Ruebottom & Auster, 2018). First, we question how emotional reflexivity can be seen within a more expansive consideration of ontology in which emotions are a mode of communication with embodied and social-cultural aspects that can only emerge within relationships (Burkitt, 1997). If emotions experienced within relationships are a form of communication, then the sociology of organizations can extend emotional reflexivity to relations between people and other modes of existence that nowadays permeate modern organizations (cf. O’Doherty & Neyland, 2019). The investigation of emotional reflexivity should focus on the multiple interpretive and relational situations of researchers, research subjects, other modes of existence, and the kinds of communications established in carrying out joint initiatives. What efforts are made to recognize and address emotions in complex organizational interactions and relationships? Discourse on the page cannot easily capture the essential emotionality of inflection, embodiment, glances, and shifts. Videography can but the camera should not point only at the research subjects. It needs to capture what emotions arise from the relationship between researchers, research subjects, as well as between humans and other modes of existence in the organization.
Second, Cunha et al. (2019) note that the field of sociologically oriented organization studies has been largely impermeable to the influence of the new discipline of human–animal studies (DeMello, 2012; Hosey & Melfi, 2014; Shapiro & DeMello, 2010). Even though, more recently, critical research has begun to address the relationships enacted between humans and animals in organizations (Jammaers, 2023), sociological thinking about animals has been under-utilized by applied organizational sociology (cf. Kruse, 2002). Much more can be said about the emotions within relationships between researchers, workers, and other modes of existence in organizations (Cunha et al., 2019; Labatut et al., 2016). Organizations are primarily thought of as exclusively human preserves in which other forms of life, as well as non-vital actant, events, and artifacts, have not been granted a significant role (Michel, 2014). Sociologically, they should be, if only because social interaction or the resolution of intersubjective controversies can occur through unconscious meanings attached to everyday objects, kinds of being, and events (Kohn, 2013; Latour, 1996). As science increasingly produces evidence of the catastrophic effects of human activity on Earth (Heikkurinen et al., 2021; Stengers, 2015), relationships between humans and natures are changing in different, increasingly emotional, organizational contexts. Thus, investigations of emotional reflexivity should concentrate on the emotions within relationships between employees and other modes of existence, other natures, especially in terms of the organizationally anthropocentric effects of practices on nature in general.
Third, sociologically, the primacy of researchers’ rationality is being decentered by incorporating the emotions of both researchers and research subjects through research practices, methods, and theories allowing access to their joint emotional reflexivity (Cassell et al., 2020; Duncan & Elias, 2021; Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Hibbert et al., 2014; Munkejord, 2009). However, cognitive and human-centered conceptions still largely frame the rationality of the researcher. Scholarship would benefit from sociological research embracing social contexts as complex and heterogeneous constructions (Burkitt, 1997; Holmes, 2015; Latour, 2005) to expand the emotionalization of reflexivity.
The boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, nature, and culture were blurred in Charlie’s story and are becoming hazier in sociological approaches to areas such as ecological social movements, science and technology studies, as well as animal studies (Kruse, 2002). Other beings and entities comprise significant parts of the social scene in relationships with humans in all of these arenas. Beings other than humans (Kohn, 2013; O’Doherty, 2017), as well as objects and events (Latour, 1996, 2005), enact emotions within relationships in changing times (Holmes, 2015). Other kinds of beings, even deaf dogs, see and represent us, and their relations with us matter meaningfully (cf. Castro, 2014; Kohn, 2007, 2013). Even seemingly voluntary total institutions (Sundberg, 2024, this volume), which deaf schools might be thought to be, as both institutional schools and institutional spaces of silence, contain relationships and beings that articulate and create an emotional register of the “sounds of silence.” Similarly, as Kohn (2013) maintains,
we can know something of how red might be experienced by a blind person, what it might be like to be a bat, or what those dogs might have been thinking moments before they were attacked, however mediated, provisional, fallible, and tenuous these understandings may be. (p. 89)
Sociologically, we cannot limit ourselves only to questioning people about their interpretation of the world, using what they say to explain what they do (Latour & Woolgar, 1986), limiting understanding of what is “distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans” (Kohn, 2013, p. 6). We need to consider how other modes of existence treat us as selves rather than regard their relations with us as a subsidiary, secondary, of less consequence. Developing this sociological and emotional reflexivity will be an increasingly important part of a post-humanist agenda for a truly sociological analysis of organizing and organizations, its materials, affordances, and emotionality, whether in relation to various forms of life or other phenomena.
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- Prelims
- Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
- PART 1. THE PLACE OF SOCIOLOGY IN ORGANIZATIONAL SCHOLARSHIP
- Revitalizing Organizational Theory Through a Problem-oriented Sociology
- Organizational Sociology and Organization Studies: Past, Present, and Future
- Facing Up to the Present? Cultivating Political Judgment and a Sense of Reality in Contemporary Organizational Life
- PART 2. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN AND THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS: Organizations within Society: Organizational Perspectives on Status and Distinction
- Status in Socio-Environmental Fields: Relationships, Evaluations, and Otherhood
- Organizations as Carriers of Status and Class Dynamics: A Historical Ethnography of the Emergence of Bordeaux’s Cork Aristocracy
- PART 2. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN AND THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS: Society within Organizations: Organizational Perspectives on Social Integration and Marginalization
- Organizations as Drivers of Social and Systemic Integration: Contradiction and Reconciliation Through Loose Demographic Coupling and Community Anchoring
- Why Organization Studies Should Care More about Gender Exclusion and Inclusion in Sport Organizations
- PART 3. REDISCOVERING SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS FOR ORGANIZATION STUDIES: Reflexivity and Control
- Narrating the Disjunctions Produced by the Sociological Concept of Emotional Reflexivity in Organization Studies
- The Promise of Total Institutions in the Sociology of Organizations: Implications of Regimental and Monastic Obedience for Underlife
- PART 3. REDISCOVERING SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS FOR ORGANIZATION STUDIES: Organizing and Organization
- Why Organization Sociologists Should Refer to Tarde and Simmel More Often
- Organization Systems and Their Social Environments: The Role of Functionally Differentiated Society And Face-to-Face Interaction Rituals