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This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

This chapter advances understandings of emotion work by examining how “doing gender” and “doing health” are implicated in the pursuit of emotional tranquility. The study examines the role of hair loss in women’s illness narratives of cancer using in-depth interviews with 16 white women in the US Northwest who vary in age, marital status, diagnoses, and treatments. The absence of women’s hair presents an appearance of illness that prevents them from doing femininity, which calls into question their health status because of Western beauty standards. To overcome this barrier, the women use emotion work to manage the effects of their appearance through necessarily co-occurring bodily, cognitive, and expressive strategies (Hochschild, 1979). The required emotion work during women’s hair loss makes explicit the symbolic linking of the healthy body with the feminine body through women’s head hair. Pursuing treatment for cancer is often seen as a “fight” or a “battle” against the disease and the bodily assaults of such treatments, including unwanted visible bodily changes. A substantial body of empirical work has established the complex web of social psychological problems associated with breasts and breast cancer, but less attention has been given to the side effect of hair loss that is common across cancer types and treatments.

This chapter presents a study of ‘floral ethics’, defined as a set of standardized practices for handling flowers shared among members of the florist occupation. Drawing on 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork in flower shops in Switzerland and Chicago, it contributes to the sociology of work and professions by providing a nuanced understanding of the tensions that can arise between the professional expertise of florists and the aesthetic preferences of customers. The findings on the micro-level reveal that adherence to floral ethics serves as a strategy for protecting and maintaining occupational legitimacy. By uncovering divergent conceptions of what constitutes ‘work well done’ among florists, this chapter offers a broader argument on the power asymmetry inherent in service relationships.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the contributions of Smiths legacy in Indigenous methodologies and to show how her interventions encourage and facilitate meaningful research relationships with Indigenous communities. It is also a practical guide for future Indigenous researchers who aim to work with their communities.

This article outlines the legacy and interventions from Linda Smith that have influenced my research and pedagogy work with my community—the Navajo Nation. I weave together a Kejnrj story and theory to show how Smith’s predominant legacy has taught me how to create, maintain and safeguard relationships with horses, humans and knowledge while working within a Western institution.

I discuss the navigation of research relationships before, during and after official research and the implications this has for increasing indigenous sovereignty in partnership with research. It also describes the process of researcher reflexivity required for Indigenous methodological work.

This paper outlines one Navajo researcher’s individual story with research on community. This adds value to researchers who intend to do research/pedagogy work with Native communities.

In this chapter, we introduce the topic of essentiality of work, exploring its implications for workers, labour markets, and public policy. The essentiality of work often corresponds in a dialectical way with the precarity of work, raising pressing questions about how societies value and, more pertinently, devalue various types of labour, thereby influencing life chances and societal integration. What we see in the contributions to this volume and the wider evidence is that essential work is typically performed by workers who are treated as expendable, or inessential. We proceed to outline the various contributions from the studies compiled in this volume. These present diverse perspectives on ‘essentiality’ and the experiences of essential workers. Offering a range of new empirical insights, the volume underlines the vitality and lasting relevance of essentiality – both as a concept and in the experience of workers – beyond the pandemic.

After completing this case study, students will be able to understand the issues firms, brands and influencers face due to sponsorship disclosure regulation and the impact of self-regulation on firms engaging in influencer marketing, explain the challenges regulators face in ensuring compliance in an emerging market, explain Advertising Standard Council of India (ASCI)’s challenges in adopting influencer guidelines from emerged markets and recommend ethical theory (or theories) and strategies to firms engaged in influencer marketing.

This case study centers on Mr Manish Chowdhary, co-founder of WOW Skin Science, who started the beauty and personal care business with his brother Karan Chowdhary in 2015 in Bangalore, India. The company successfully built its brand through influencer marketing but faced challenges after the ASCI implemented new influencer guidelines. On May 31, 2021, he expressed disagreement with ASCI guidelines during an interview with Akansha Nagar from Buzz in Content, particularly the requirement to label every product or service received by influencers as an advertisement. He expressed concern about certain rules, fearing they might harm organic content and reduce viewership and followers. Subsequently, ASCI registered noncompliance cases against the company and communicated with them about complaints regarding influencer guideline violations. In this situation, Manish needed to evaluate his decision on noncompliance with regulation and required an action plan to strategically manage its influencer marketing campaign by incorporating ASCI’s guidelines. Overall, this case study highlights the journey of WOW Skin Science and its challenges with self-regulatory authorities over its influencer marketing strategy in an emerging market. Additionally, students can gain insight into the marketing communication ethics of a startup operating in an emerging market by embodying the protagonist’s role.

This case study is suitable for postgraduate level students pursuing a Master of Business Administration program. The difficulty level ranges from moderate to complex. It fits well into integrated marketing communication and marketing strategy courses. This case study discusses marketing ethics, advertising and promotion regulation.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.