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While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.

Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.

Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.

This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.

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.

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.

This study examines the relationship between emotional labour and burnout and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence on this relationship. The survey was conducted at several tourism and hospitality organizations in Florida, USA. The results show that both acting strategies of emotional labour relate positively to burnout. Tests of moderation show that emotional intelligence reduces employee burnout. These findings contribute to the literature on emotional labour by incorporating emotional intelligence as a moderator, and provide some guidance for human resource practitioners about potentially beneficial training and recruitment activities. They also have implications for customer relationship management.

In this chapter, I suggest that Connecticut’s and other states’ recent discontinuation of civil unions in the name of marriage “equality” marginalizes and demeans marriage – rejecting people who may nonetheless wish to codify their intimate partnerships – for purposes of legal “incidents,” including rights and privileges, like hospital visitation rights, testimonial privilege, inheritance rights, etc. In doing so, I also call for a rejuvenation of the practice of granting civil union licenses in these states.

Purpose – We build a theoretical lens that draws on an emerging theory of positive work relationships to examine whether constructive emotional expressions in work relationships influence changes in individuals' affective commitment to their organization.

Design/methodology/approach – Using longitudinal data collected from full-time employees, we employed a latent-difference-score (LDS) approach to examine whether changes in emotional carrying capacity could account for changes in organizational commitment.

Findings – The findings support this hypothesis and suggest a new perspective on the ways in which a change in relationship capacity may create changes in people's commitment to an organization.

Research limitations – The main limitation concerns the use of self-report, albeit time-lagged, data.

Practical implications – Developing higher levels of employee affective commitment is a key challenge for many organizations. Our study can help managers in recognizing the importance of building a relational space in which employees are able to express emotions frequently and openly, as well as engaging with other employees in listening to their emotional experiences and responding in a constructive manner.

Originality/value – This study contributes to an emergent body of literature that adopts a positive psychology lens to the study of employee experiences at work, by investigating the capacity to express emotions in general and its influence on people's affective commitment to the organization.

As institutional theory increasingly looks to the micro-level for explanations of macro-level institutional processes, institutional scholars need to pay closer attention to the role of emotions in invigorating institutional processes. I argue that attending to emotions is most likely to enrich institutional analysis, if scholars take inspiration from theories that conceptualize emotions as relational and inter-subjective, rather than intra-personal, because the former would be more compatible with institutional theory’s relational roots. I review such promising theories that include symbolic interactionism, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, moral psychology, and social movements. I conclude by outlining several possible research questions that might be inspired by attending to the role of emotions in institutional processes. I argue that such research can enrich the understanding of embedded agency, power, and the use of theorization by institutional change agents, as well as introduce a hereto neglected affective facet into the study of institutional logics.

Emotions are part of everyday life and how we feel influences our behavior as a parent, child, partner, friend, employee, employer, consumer, and service provider. While there is extensive knowledge of decision-making in consumer behavior, little is known about consumer emotional responses (Bagozzi, Gopinath & Nyer, 1999) and the impact this has on organizations. Complaints that are not handled effectively can result in substantial damage to a company, both materially and to its reputation and relationships, in particular third party complaints which have a significant impact on organizations. This chapter provides a taxonomy of emotions expressed in complaint behavior to third parties based on analyses of transcripts of four focus groups' discussion of service failures and the events and feelings leading to complaint behavior to a third party. Our research demonstrates that consumers will pursue a service encounter gone wrong for days or months, feeling intense emotions that create severe physical consequences, even when the money at stake is trivial. We propose that the emotional motivations for complaints may be more powerful in driving behavior than previously recognized and that organizations need to address emotional concerns in a more-informed manner to achieve more effective complaint handling.