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This chapter seeks to make the case that emotions are central in organising in schools and that the way members of staff oversee their emotion processes is crucial to the legitimacy of the institution. The logic of the case is simple, as follows. There are three forms of affect: feelings, moods and emotions. Feelings and moods are affective states, the description of which depicts our inner world. Emotions are very different. They entail a process in which an event of some kind is experienced and appraised. This appraisal results in physiological responses, psychological changes and social responses, which entail actions. The emotion process creates a state of action readiness and a motivation to act. The actions are manifestations of power and they may influence those who experience them. Because actions influence, they are leadership actions and are therefore central to organising processes. Actions may have a high affective content and may be experienced as an individual ‘emoting’, which typically increases the significance of the action experienced by others. Emoting can therefore change the influencing effect of an action. We may seek to defend ourselves from actions with a high affective content by means of social defences, which can take various forms. The social actions resulting from the emotion process and emoting are subject to a whole range of ‘rules’: personal, interpersonal, institutional and cultural. How well members of the school staff understand and oversee – manage – that emotion process in relation to these rules is crucial to the legitimacy of schools as institutions.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, identities, meanings, social actions, social worlds, and societies through interactions. Charmaz argues that symbolic interactionism is an open-ended theoretical perspective that fosters studying action, process, and meanings, with a focus on how people co-construct and negotiate meanings, orders, and actions in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I argue that constructivist GTM, including its theory-method package built upon symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School tradition, can be further combined with the new sociology of childhood to study children's social worlds and negotiated meanings, orders, and actions.

This chapter reports on findings from a study that explored the experiences of African American young men who graduated from Du Bois Academy, an all-boys public charter secondary school in the Midwestern region of the United States. The chapter considers issues of African American male persistence and achievement and how they are impacted by school culture. Specifically, the author discusses how school culture can help shape these students’ educational experiences and aspirations. Using student narratives as the guide, a description of how Du Bois Academy successfully engaged these African American male students is provided. The students articulated three critical components of school culture that positively shaped their high achievement and engagement: (a) sense of self, (b) promotion of excellence, and (c) community building. The student narratives provided a frame for promoting positive school culture that enhances the educational experiences and academic aspirations of African American male students.