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This study examines emotionologies (Stearns & Stearns, 1985), that is, attitudes that members of an inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) project hold toward emotions and their appropriate expression and regulation in this project. In order to understand attitudes toward emotions and emotion regulation, we suggest the adoption of the concept of emotion structure, consisting of emotion rules and resources (Callahan, 2004).

To investigate the kinds of emotionologies present in this IOIS development project, we have chosen a qualitative case study approach. Our data consists of 41 qualitative interviews, collected in two phases.

We trace how emotion rules and corresponding emotion regulation strategies change among the sub-groups working in the project throughout their first year of collaborating. We show that organizational actors are skilled emotion managers, whose behavior is guided not only by many collective emotion rules (professional, organizational, social) but also by personal emotion rules. Our findings also suggest the need to critically reflect on certain emotion rules, such as those pertaining to the expression of fear and anger, and their potential positive and negative implications on project work.

We argue that group emotionologies with their professional, organizational, and social emotion rules interact with personal emotion rules, resulting in interesting emotion regulation strategies that often try to minimize emotional dissonance, sometimes at the expense of risking open conflict among project members. With this in mind, one theoretical and practical suggestion is to further explore the potential constructive implications of experiencing and expressing fear in projects.

Purpose: In this chapter we examine the emotional experience and identity of sustainability change agents and advance understanding of their emotion management strategies. We explore how sustainability change agents experience, manage, and respond to the negative emotions that arise in the course of their jobs. Study Design: We took a mixed-method and multimodal approach to answer our research questions. Using a narrative approach, we collected data using in-depth narrative interviews and supplemented this with quantitative measurement of participants' heart rate and sweat response during the interviews. Findings: Our results confirm that sustainability change agency is an emotionally laden profession. Furthermore, we found that sustainability change agents use three different coping mechanisms including emotion-focused coping (EFC) (“rational avoiders”), problem-focused coping (PFC) (“committed go-getters”), and meaning-focused coping (MFC) (“green philosophers”). Originality: Our research shows that sustainability change agents experienced strong negative emotions in relation to their jobs and they employed one of the three coping styles: EFC, PFC, or MFC. We found that MFC was an isolated cognitive appraisal style, rather than a form of EFC. These findings provide a starting point for further work to help sustainability change agents avoid potential burnout and continue to contribute to the future health of the planet while at the same time maintain their personal well-being.

The aim of this Guest Editorial is to position the special issue.

The Guest Editors reflect on critical perspectives on the relationship between emotion and learning in the workplace, and also present the four papers that constitute the special issue.

Emotion and learning are deeply intertwined in the workplace. To understand this inter‐relationship, it is essential to examine the cultural and political context of particular organisations and the countries in which they are located. Class, gender and race are also highly influential factors that need to be taken into account in such studies.

The special issue gives space and consideration to under‐explored and under‐developed areas in the literature on emotion and learning in the workplace: how emotional suffering can block workplace learning, race, emotion and learning in the workplace, and emotion in relation to ICT support for learning.

This paper seeks to discuss the impact of UK government austerity policies on learning in public service work, specifically youth support work. It also aims to argue that austerity policies intensify “ethics work”, create emotional suffering, and obstruct workplace learning in a variety of ways.

The research adopts narrative methods and a critical interpretive paradigm to investigate practitioner perceptions within a broader analysis of neo‐liberal change. It draws on Bourdieu's sociology as an interpretive framework.

Austerity is shifting the “stakes” of the youth support field from a client‐centred ethos to the meeting of economically driven targets. This shatters the illusio of practitioners committed to client‐centred ethics, resulting in emotional suffering, difficulty in learning to cope with new demands, and an erosion of professional capacity.

A particular limitation is the lack of longitudinal data. There is a pressing need for more research on ethics work, emotional suffering and (not) learning in public service workplaces facing austerity, and to continue theorising this nexus more thoroughly.

There is a need to promote a feminist ethics of care in such workplaces. There is also a need to stimulate public debate about the ethical impact of austerity on public service work as a whole. These might allow workplaces to encourage learning more effectively.

This paper departs from traditional discussions of workplace learning to consider instances of “not learning”. It introduces the innovative concept of “ethics work”, discusses ethics as a form of work, through a sociological rather than philosophical lens, and utilises Bourdieu's key concept of illusio, not previously addressed in workplace learning research.

This paper aims to explore the construction of social imaginaries of fear by the Chilean press regarding student violence during the 1968 university reforming process. Using an approach inspired by the history of emotions, the primary purpose is to analyze the discourse of two relevant conservative newspapers with national circulation about students' mobilization.

The research rests on the analysis of content in the discourse of the two more representative right-wing Chilean newspapers (El Mercurio and El Diario Ilustrado). Founded in the early years of the 20th century, both had national circulations and were a part of a tradition in the history of the Chilean 20th-century national press. Through the analysis of a selection of editorials and news regarding students' mobilization during 1968, with a focus on the experience of the most prominent institution (Universidad de Chile), this research highlights similarities and differences in the ways that both media endeavoured to elaborate social imaginaries of menace and fear regarding student movements.

Through the study of the discourse of traditional newspapers, it is possible to identify critical issues concerning the university student movements' purposes to implement breaking (and occasionally violent) methods to carry out the reforms that they promoted, according to the right-wing press. Against this backdrop, the different importance of an anti-communist component is discernible, typical of the Cold War period, in the (political and emotional) arguments of the newspapers under analysis.

This article proposes an interpretation that intertwines a local phenomenon (the reformist movement of the University of Chile) with a global one (the May student revolution of 1968). It also establishes a novel approach by linking, through its approach, yet traditional concepts of social and cultural analysis (the idea of social imaginaries) with a new emphasis on social science and humanities (emotional dimensions).

The social ritual of apology is highly nuanced in Western cultures. At its profoundest, it represents felt and displayed feelings of remorse for injuring another party and transgressing a central moral code. The felt regret is accompanied by a strong impulse to right the wrongs caused. The absence of such apology is taken as denial or devaluation of the moral worth of the harmed party, hence the restorative significance of a sincere apology. The restoration, however, is likely to be more symbolic than literal for a deep hurt, as the injury itself cannot be reversed. What is restored by the apology is the dignity of the victim; recognition that they should not have been treated in the way they have been. The moral and relational value of such apologies is nicely captured by Kathleen Gill:The apology is not a thing; it is an act that displays a certain set of beliefs, attitudes, etc. experienced by the offender. More importantly, an apology is not a mechanism for offsetting losses. The apology does not compensate for loss; it is instead a way to acknowledge the value of what was lost. ( Gill, 2000, p. 16 )It follows that this kind of apology implicates emotions beyond feelings of remorse and regret. It involves the expression of feelings of empathy and shame, the former placing the perpetrator in the victim's shoes, the latter signaling ownership and responsibility for having crossed a moral line — and wishing to do something about it. Yet what is felt has also to be performed, and convincingly so if the apology is to provide what Goffman terms a “remedial exchange” (Goffman, 1971). Acts of apologizing are in part cultural and in part institutionalized. In the traditional Catholic Church, for example, the apology ritual contains a confession of sins, plus an act of prayer or restoration to the wronged party. It once also involved penances, such as fasts, sexual continence, pilgrimages, or floggings.

My project is to develop a phenomenological, constructionist, symbolic interactionist theory of the narrative productions of meaning in the public realm. Situated within our globalized, technologically mediated world characterized by extraordinary social, political, economic, and moral fragmentation, my basic question is quite practical: How can public communication be understandable and persuasive to audiences whose experiences, world views, and moral sensibilities are so different? Here I explore how the more-or-less widely shared systems of meaning in symbolic codes and emotion codes are incorporated into narratives that circulate in the public sphere. I conclude with arguing that more attention by symbolic interactionists to these productions of meaning would be good for the study of culture and good for symbolic interactionism.

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.