Managing Organizational Emotions: Framing Feelings of Illegitimacy in the Radical Women's Prison Movement

Abstract

This article examines how activists manage the potentially deleterious emotions that arise in social movement organizations. Using data from a case study of an organization in the contemporary radical women's prison movement in California, I explore how feelings of illegitimacy are managed and sublimated by activists, during the course of organizational life, to sustain participation in the movement. Drawing on framing theory, I find that organizational frames serve as mechanisms that manage and focus activists' feelings, delimit movement strategies, and inspire and legitimate collective action.     

Walking an Emotional Tightrope: Managing Emotions in a Women's Prison

Until recently, the emotional experiences of women in prison have been overlooked by symbolic interactionists and social scientists. Similarly, research relevant to the sociology of emotions has not been explored in the social context of a correctional institution for women. The purpose of this study is to investigate emotional experiences from the unique perspective of incarcerated women. This research examines how women in prison perceive and manage their emotional lives while confined and asks whether their chosen strategies have an impact on their interactions and thus affect the institutional environment. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with thirty‐five women incarcerated in a correctional institution located in the midwestern United States. Using a semistructured interview schedule, respondents were asked about a range of topics, one of which involved their emotional lives while incarcerated. Findings indicate these women define their emotional experiences as being simultaneously provocative and constrained. Respondents suggest that their emotional resources are individually, contextually, and culturally grounded. They discuss employing various strategies to manage their emotional lives while incarcerated, including diversions, spiritual pursuits, blocking exercises, self‐reflection, and humor. The majority of the techniques employed to control emotions are intrapersonal. Respondents describe personal efforts designed to manage their emotional experiences rather than share their feelings with others.     

The Flayed and Exquisite Self of Travelers: Managing Face and Emotions in Strange Places

Travelers who cross cultural and linguistic borders encounter recurrent failures of social competence. People routinely violate the linguistic and nonlinguistic normative order, and have few means at their disposal for repair work. These episodes lead to the experience of a flayed self: a temporary, painful identity born of one's inability to display competence, combined with heightened, exquisite self‐consciousness. Using interactionist scaffolding and travelers' accounts, I examine this self, its commitments, and resources. I examine four techniques used to avoid flayed and exquisite selfhood: denying negative experience, externalizing the causes of that experience, engaging in the mind cure, and doing time work.     

Regarding the Protests of Others

While much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate affect and how social movements benefit from shared emotions, these ideas rarely intersect with research examining how race constructs emotional responses in a white settler society. I bridge this theoretical divide by examining the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada to study dimensions of suffering and apathy through the construction of the racialized protest(er). Drawing upon illustrations from a critical discourse analysis of 153 mainstream news articles and interviews with activists and journalists, this paper explores how racial logic frames media and public discourse through (1) the expression of protesters’ suffering and (2) the construction of racial apathy by the Canadian public. The paper theorizes why and how race frames the production of suffering and apathy, and offers considerations for social movement theory.     

Roma as the Others

While it is common to speak about ‘Roma culture’ as a single entity, the questions posed by Roma culture are more complex. We are speaking about the general issues pertaining to various manifestations of this culture in the context of the Czech Republic. It must be stressed that under ‘Roma,’ we understand a family resemblance social category that consists of overlapping smaller groups and that is not based on features that are universally shared across the whole category; there are similarities and some kind of prototype that keeps the category together. Also, this culture is in no way completely separated from the majority (Czech) culture and it shares many features with it and vice versa. Because of the particular history, there are no language barriers, there are no religious differences and also community values and aims are broadly similar. So when we speak about minority/majority, we must try to avoid thinking in terms of distinctive and separate entities.     

Sociology's Emotions*

Cette étude porte sur la place qu'occupe l'émotion dans l'élaboration du savoir et examine la contribution qu'elle apporte dans la compréhension des pratiques du savoir “incorporé”. Toute pratique du savoir, qu'elle soit reconnue ou non, comporte un élément d'émotion. L'auteure se penche sur la valorisation de l'émotion entre autres en phénoménologie, en portant une attention toute particulière à la signification des sentiments, qui englobent l'affectif et le sensuel. Grâce aux sentiments, nous pouvons prendre conscience de la relationalité du savoir et entreprendre de tisser des liens libres et créatifs opérant entre le moi et autrui dans la pratique du savoir. This paper is concerned with the place of emotion in knowledge and the ways in which a consideration of emotion contributes to an understanding of embodied knowledge practices. Whether acknowledged or not, all knowledge practices are emotional. The positive valuation of emotion is considered in traditions such as phenomenology, paying particular attention to the significance of feeling combining, as it does, the affective and the sensual. Feeling makes us aware of the relationality of knowledge, and it opens up the possibility of creative and open forms of relations between self and other in knowledge practices.     

Emotions in the Practice of Systemic Therapy

Emotions are connected to meaning making in human interactions. This can be seen not just in terms of the immediate participants and their developmental history but also through broader cultural, social, and gender lenses. In times of relational tension, which require system flexibility, some emotional interaction can constrain alternative actions or meanings being constructed. Therapists can hypothesize about these emotional dances (including those that are taking place in the therapist/client system) and such hypotheses can inform interventions aimed at generating different emotional sequences. If participants in therapy experience alternative emotional responses as a result of therapeutic intervention, then change can occur (e.g., a greater sense of agency or hope, or a different perception of the situation).     

Social Control and Emotions

This is the first article in Symbolic Interaction's symposium in tribute to Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani (1920–2004). The author, a student in Shibutani's graduate course on social control, discusses his teacher's ideas and their evolution into his own. The article provides ample basis for the author's observation: a scholar's contribution can be measured not only by the cumulative corpus of his or her published work, but also by the influence that this individual has had on the work of others.     

Normlessness,Anomie, and the Emotions

In Suicide, Durkheim described two qualitatively different experiences of normative anomie, each with a distinct affective basis: an intentional, if not ruthless, disdain for society's normative order; and an unintentional disregard for, or confusion about, norms or rules of conduct. We generalize Durkheim's classification of the socioaffective aspects of anomic suicide, and present two theoretical models of normlessness‐anomie and the emotions. These models posit that intentional anomie involves the primary emotions anger, disgust, and joy‐happiness; these emotions can combine to form the secondary emotions contempt, pride, and derisiveness. Unintentional, passive anomie rather involves the emotions surprise, fear, and sadness; these can combine to form the secondary emotions disappointment, shame, and alarm. We additionally hypothesize that each kind of anomie has distinct potential behavioral consequences: intentional anomie can result in immorality, shamelessness, acquisitiveness, and premeditated homicidality; unintentional anomie, in depression, confusion, uncertainty, unpremeditated homicidality, and suicidality.     

Emotions, embodiment and the sensation of society

The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core questions facing this subject can be interrogated productively by engaging critically with the work of one of the most important ‘founding figures’ of the discipline, Emile Durkheim. What Collins (1988) refers to as the ‘underground wing’ of Durkheim's work has yet to be fully utilised or developed by sociologists concerned with emotions, yet it provides us with a suggestive and provocative means of reconceptualising the gulf that often exists within contemporary work on emotions as malleable and controllable, on the one hand, and that concerned with emotions as intransigent ‘somatic states of being’, on the other. As such, Durkheim's writings constitute an important resource for sociologists concerned with the ongoing project of ‘embodying’ the discipline.     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.     

Development of the Movements Impressions Emotions Model: Evaluation of Movements and Impressions Related to the Perception of Emotions in Dance

The purpose of this study is to specify the characteristics that contribute to the perception of emotions expressed through dance movements and to develop an emotional model to show the relationships between impressions and the characteristics of expressive body movements. Six dancers expressed three different emotions through dance: joy, sadness, and anger. Observers (N = 192) rated both their impressions (33 dimensions) and the dance movements (26 characteristics) of 18 dance performances. The results showed that the observers could accurately perceive the emotional meanings expressed in the dances. The impressions of Dynamics, Expansion, and Stability—and the evaluated movements of Frequency and Velocity of Upward Extension, Frequency and Velocity of Downward Movements, Turning or Jumping, and Body Closing—were extracted via factor analysis as determinants of observers’ impressions of emotional expressions in dance. Additionally, covariance structure analysis and discriminant function analysis indicated that the emotional expressions of the dances expressing joy, sadness, and anger are each associated with particular factors. Through these analyses, we developed the Movements Impressions Emotions Model for dance.     

What Others Are Saying...

＂Jingle Ma＇s war epic is a touching portrait of love in the time of war. ＇Mulan＇ is anchored by a strong performance by Vicki Zhao Wei, the wide-eyed expressive star vividly portraying her character＇s sorrow, anguish, fear and terror. One can＇t say the same about her physicality though, judging from the number of cutaway shots in the film during the battle scenes. This too is not director Jingle Ma＇s forte, and audiences who have seen Red Cliff will likely be unimpressed.