When a new wave of immigrants arrives in a country, they often settle in particular parts of cities and towns, where they discover ways of starting their new lives and supporting each other. Such pockets or ghettoes provide relative security as well as ways of maintaining traditions and links with the old country. It is tempting to view the study of emotion in organizations as a wave of immigration that started some thirty years ago and initially settled in specific pockets of organizational discourses, such as leadership, service interactions, and learning. When Fineman (2003) wrote his contribution to the earlier edition of this Handbook, he rightly complained that learning literature had long disregarded emotion or viewed it as an obstacle to cognition and rationality. He also noted that much of the politics of organizations had been stripped of its emotional content and expressed ambivalence towards the concept of emotional intelligence. Here was a concept that promised to put emotion back into learning and organizational agendas, but at a considerable price—that of turning emotion into an organizational resource to be managed and exploited.
Since the publication of the first edition of The Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, emotion has started to diffuse across learning and organizational discourses. A count of article abstracts containing the word ‘emotion’ in business and management journals revealed twenty-five such articles in 2003, the year of the Handbook’s first publication, and sixty-two and seventy such articles in 2008 and 2009 respectively. In the same period, the number of article abstracts with ‘knowledge management’ or ‘knowledge transfer’ in the same journals rose from eighty-three to 166 and 178 respectively. It would seem then that emotion continues to be a minority interest but it is becoming increasingly embedded in discourses of management and business—maybe, like the second generation of some immigrants, it is becoming increasingly accepted and assimilated in the wider picture.
In this chapter, we shall identify some of the main domains in which emotion has established a foothold and indicate some of the core insights that it has provided, mainly linked to the theories of emotional labor and socially constructed emotions. We will then explore in greater detail the emotional dimension of learning, both in classroom settings and in organizations more generally, developing some of Fineman’s earlier arguments regarding the politics of learning. While acknowledging the significance of the socially constructed aspect of emotions, we will emphasize that not all emotions can be easily accommodated, contained, or managed in organizations and not all learning can be safely guided towards enhancing organizational objectives. We will suggest that learning evokes powerful emotional responses, positive and negative, from excited curiosity to fear of failure and humiliation, and that many of these emotions may be traced to childhood experiences. In this connection, we will examine transference as a powerful psychological process through which such experiences can resurface in later life, especially when we encounter intense authority relations individually or in groups. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the emotional dynamics we encounter in two indispensable aspects of learning, criticism, and caring. We argue that criticism is a vital feature of feedback without which learning is impossible, but emphasize that criticism must be balanced by an ethic of care which supports learning and acts as a container for those emotions that may inhibit or incapacitate the learning process.