Beyond Scripts and Rules: Emotion, Fantasy and Care in Contemporary Service Work

Abstract

The rise of contemporary consumerism has forced a radical revaluation of a wide range of organizational phenomena. In the field of organizational studies there has been a broad recognition of the emergence of a triangle (Leidner 1991) involving the worker, the manager and the customer, whose endlessly mutating dynamics form the basis of a wide range of organizational processes. Politics, identity, structure, culture and so forth can no longer be viewed from a perspective of the old-fashioned tug-of-war between workers and bosses. Instead they must be viewed through a ‘lens’ that acknowledges the triadic nature of contemporary work and organization. Triads, as Simmel (1950) recognized, are more unstable than dyads, involving shifting alliances and conflicts in which the third party can be the stakes or the beneficiary. The entry of the consumer as an important figure into the world of organizations has therefore radically reshaped the nature of contemporary work, the more so as different parties of the triad are frequently found to swap masks and adopt each other’s positions. Just like the worker, the manager is an employee of the organization. The manager becomes a worker in her dealings with her superiors and she becomes a customer in her relations with different departments within the same organization.

What if emotions were honoured? That is, if people regularly attended to and engaged others’ feelings? … What if this type of interaction — where human beings engage a fuller and deeper range of their own and others’ feelings — was the norm rather than the exception?

(Meyerson 2000: 168)

If we think of emotions as having a life of their own, which might be in contradiction to, or expressed fully or partially through our cognition to different degrees in different times, we can think through all sorts of situations with which most people must be familiar: experiencing feelings we cannot express to our satisfaction; having feelings that we can express but that others find difficult to understand; and most important perhaps, the regular experience of contradictions between our thoughts and our feelings

(Craib 1998: 110)