BAM 2013 This paper is from the BAM 2013 Conference Proceedings About BAM The British Academy of Management (BAM) is a learned society dedicated to developing the community of management academics. To find out more about BAM, please visit our website at http://www.bam.ac.uk/ Ingo Winkler University of Southern Denmark How About the Emotional Element in Identity Work? The Story of an Ongoing Literature Review. The following story originates from the research diary I kept while performing a literature review of identity work research with a particular focus on how this research addresses emotions. The purpose for introducing the story is to illuminate the research process and to provide insight into the preliminary results. Hence, this paper does not present a fully developed analysis but invites the reader to share my experiences and to discuss my thoughts. How it Began It all started quite some time ago. As far as I remember it was about one and a half year ago. I was reading Sturdy et al.’s (2006) article about management ideas, education and identity work in order to include some of their ideas in the theoretical part of the text I was writing at that time. Reading the article, I – rather coincidentally – came across their argument that conceptualizing identity work in terms of Sveningsson and Alvesson’s (2003) definition (i.e. “being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising’ their personal constructions or narratives”, p. 1165) might neglect the emotional character of this process. Supporting their argument, Sturdy et al. (2006) referred to Mirchandani’ s (2003) paper about emotional work and how this calls for forming various identities. The authors emphasized that identity work and emotions are relevant “particularly in periods of life transitions where emotion-identity may be experienced more acutely as well as conditions of paradox or contradiction between self-identities” (Sturdy et al., 2006, p. 845). Reading this I thought, well an interesting insight that I should elaborate on in the future, but not now. And so I did, I continued working on my stuff, yet, also developed the assumption that emotions or the ‘emotional element’, to use my current working term here, have not been recognized much within the current research on identity work. What I did was to echo Sturdy et al.’s point of view on this and discussed the issue with colleagues. Especially at conferences and workshops I tended to emphasise that there is not much information about emotions and identity work. Receiving acknowledgements from colleagues fuelled my interest to pursue a more serious research on the topic. Well, be it as it is, some time later I managed to read Mirchandani (2003) to finally find out more about this article and the supposed connection between emotional work and identity work. The article’s theme was to study emotion work of self-employed women with particular focus on the racialist dimensions of such emotion work. Reading the text it turned out that the article was not about identity work, meaning that processes of identity formation and reformation did not constitute the main focus of analysis. Additionally, I was able to find only one tiny place in the text where Mirchandani writes about any link between emotion work and identity construction. On page 736, she explains that one of the women, while relating to the customer, engages in emotion work to shift her and the customer’s social position. I found myself being rather disappointed because I was not able to find more direct indications of any interlink between identity work and emotion. From reminding what Sturdy et al. wrote about Mirchandani’s work, I expected more. However, I learned a lot about how gender, race, and social location are related to emotion work and, thus, how the women who participated in the study, while doing emotion work, draw on existing “race, class and gender hierarchies” (Mirchandani, 2003, p. 721). It was perhaps the lacking answer of how emotion work and identity work are interconnected that fuelled my curiosity to continue on this topic as I was only left with ‘hints’ of how these aspects might be related to each other. To commit myself to this project, I submitted the idea to the BAM 2013 in the form of a developmental paper. It was a rather rushed submission as one of the reviewers noticed. Basically, it constituted a sketchy text that mainly summarized my assumptions so far and which promised to deliver some kind of (surely incomplete) overview of the existing body of research about identity work and to what extent this research emphasises or neglects emotions. The First Serious Step I began the more serious research on the topic by learning whether previous research considers any link between identity and emotions. I did so by reading a variety of literature on this topic including authors such as Stryker and Burke (2000), who hold a social psychological perspective, and Jenkins (2008), who represents a more interpretive anthropological point of view. As a result I learned that for example Stryker and Burke note that: “A further, critical challenge lies in the need to detail more explicitly how emotions fit into the framework of identity theory” (2000, p. 293). Accordingly, Jenkins claims that although identification is emotionally charged “we do not have a clear picture of the relation between emotion and identity” (2008, p. 7). However, even if the above citations indicate a certain lack of knowledge, there is a considerable body of research concerning identity and emotions. Performing searches at Google Scholar and the EBSCO Business Source Complete database, I found quite a few manuscripts on identity and emotions both within Organisation Studies (e.g. Dutton et al., 2010; Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010; Haines III & Saba, 2012; Carroll & Levy, 2008; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) and other fields (e.g. Exley & Letherby, 2001; Wolkomir, 2001, Zembylas, 2005). Thus, although it might very well be that we lack a clear picture about the relationship between identity and emotion, as Jenkins (2008) suggests, this does not mean that there is no research about this relationship. Defining the Term ‘Emotion’ During this initial search and review I came across two observations. Firstly, I sensed a need to define the term ‘emotion’ or at least to develop an understanding, which would support me through my review. Therefore, I began to develop a working definition of emotion, yet only to stumble over the related concept of feeling. Defining each of these terms and, in doing so, developing an understanding of how they are related, was not an easy task. For example, Webster’s online dictionary provided the following explanation. Emotion is a) “the affective aspect of consciousness: feeling”, b) “a state of feeling” and c) “a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body”. Well, replacing the term ‘emotion’ with the term ‘feeling’ while explaining the former was not very revealing. Thus, I looked further finding for instance Fox’s (2008) definition that emotions are an individual’s responses to significant internal or external events. Emotions seem to be more universal and general, whereas, how they are subjectively felt may vary from individual to individual. Hence, feelings are subjective representations of (and objective set of) emotions (Fox, 2008) defined in psychological terms. Seeing things a bit clearer, I looked into Watson (2012), Sociology, Work and Organization. The comprehensive list of key terms in organisation and management research this book offers proofed to be helpful during my previous work and will in this case here, I believed. He provided the following definition: “Feelings are sensations relating to a psychological state that are felt bodily and emotions are the way these sensations are culturally interpreted” (p. 330). With this definition, Watson echoed a different understanding of emotions and feelings that is not grounded in psychology and social psychology. Earlier Fineman (2003) provided a similar view. He explained: “There is the subjective element of emotions, what we feel. And there is the displayed feature of emotion, what we show” (p. 8). Hence, emotions are displayed feelings and by implication, emotions are influenced by social norms and processes of relational positioning within social interaction (Fineman, 2003). Adopting this point of view as a working definition enables me to establish a link between emotions and identity, since emotional performance, amongst others, seems to be closely related to processes of identification (Fineman & Sturdy, 1999). However, as you will experience in the remaining text, I am not always able to maintain the (more or less) clear distinction between the terms emotions and feelings. This is partly due to the circumstance that the research on identity work, which addresses emotions and feelings, is also not clear about differences between these concepts. Turning Towards Social Psychological Research on Identity and Emotion A second observation during my initial literature search was that social psychological research on identity and identification seemed to have the issue of emotions rather high on its agenda (e.g. Stryker & Burke, 2000; Stets, 2004; Stryker, 2004; Dutton et al., 2010). Hence, I did a more elaborated study of this field. Social psychological research on identity and identification