Emotion management: dabbling in mystery - white witchcraft or black art?

摘要

The emergence of the construct 'Emotional Intelligence' offers prospects for the management of that hitherto intangible asset, emotion. There is an interest in emotion to the extent that this can lead to increased productivity and manageability. Organizations require a degree of human commitment and identification which are seen to give rise to improved performance and aspects of emotional intelligence such as trust and interpersonal relations link to ideas of attachment and identification. The purpose of this paper is, initially, to suggest that managerial aspiration in this regard might fall somewhat short of employee response. First, the psychoanalytic argument is used to make the case that individual capacity for emotion management might be limited. Furthermore, individual motivation or willingness to engage with organizational goals should not be presumed. The possibility that many individuals will have goals of their own, leading to a more instrumental orientation to organizationally mandated norms for feeling displays, is largely ignored in the emotional intelligence discourse. This affords the opportunity to explore the phenomenon at a more critical level. The question of whose identities predominate over others' deserves attention. The final argument is that attempts such as these to shape the ways individuals experience, understand, judge and conduct themselves (Foucault 1986a, 1988, in Hall and du Gay 1996) fit neatly with the desire to commodify emotion, to turn emotion into something that can be manipulated and exchanged in the same way as other, more tangible, assets.