Currently many different perspectives on emotions are emerging. For example, biologists and evolutionary psychologists have been examining how human emotions were ‘hard wired’ into the evolution of our bodies over millions of years of adaptation to our natural and social environment. Neurologists have explored the relations between the functioning of the brain, emotions, and cognitive processes. By contrast, social constructionists have focused on the subtle ways that different national and organizational cultures shape the ways emotions are experienced and expressed. Psychoanalysts and psychodynamic scholars, for their parts, have examined how early life experiences influence our later emotional experiences. Many experimental and other psychologists have pursued the long tradition of seeking to measure emotions and economists have, more recently, sought to link emotions (like happiness and depression) to economic indicators like income per capita and unemployment rates.
Something on which all of these approaches agree is that most emotions are not fully willed; we do not choose freely whether and when to have them (although many actors become very skilled at experiencing emotions commensurable with their parts). Emotions often seem to overpower us and to influence our judgments in profound ways. Our decisions and our actions when we feel angry or frightened or enthusiastic appear not to agree with the dictates of reason and prudence. Emotion is often experienced as something standing in opposition to rationality—a theme that has been pursued by philosophers since Plato and Descartes. Yet, one of the most consistent and interesting findings of contemporary emotion research is that emotion and cognition cannot be separated. Research by Damasio (1994, 1999), Sacks (1995), and others suggests that both thought and emotion reside in the body rather than in an entity called ‘the mind’; also, that emotion is an indispensable ingredient of rational action and rational decisions (though not a guarantee that a decision or an action will be rational). An emotional response to a situation always precedes a rational appreciation and almost invariably guides it. For example, being in a classroom may produce in us responses of anxiety and panic which inform how we experience what subsequently takes place in that space.
Theories of organizational learning draw on several of these approaches, most especially the social construction and psychodynamic traditions. The fundamental contributions of the former have been in highlighting the extent to which emotions are acquired, learnt, and socially constructed. Following Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) pioneering early studies, emotional labor came to be seen as part of the work expected by many people, especially in service occupations; the emotions displayed by individuals in their workplace came to be accepted as much a part of the work they do as intellectual or manual work; and like intellectual and manual work, people can be trained to do emotional labor. This opened up the possibility that emotions are resources at the disposal of management, and that organizations that are able to deploy them effectively, in transactions with customers or among employees, can gain some advantage over their competitors. Social constructionist approaches to emotion, therefore, see emotions themselves as experiences, whose meanings emerge through culture, communicated through culture and even generated by culture. Specific cultural events call for appropriate emotional performances of those participating. Inspired by the work of Goffman (1959), different theorists have argued that emotions can be socially constructed just like other social phenomena. Far from being natural states that take possession of us, theorists like Heller (1979), Fineman (1993, 1996), Mangham (1998), and Flam (1990a, 1990b) argue that emotions are learned, just as theatrical roles are learned. And just as theatrical actors learn to experience anger, sorrow, joy, or fear when their roles call for them, so too social actors learn to experience feelings appropriate to specific social settings.
Psychodynamic approaches to emotion, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the involuntary character of emotions, their plasticity and mobility, not in response to external factors but as a consequence of psychological work. Thus, envy can easily be transformed into anger, which in turn may give way to guilt, which may manifest itself in attempts to console and repair. From a psychoanalytic perspective, emotions are not just ‘movers’ (from emovere) but also in motion; it is rare to capture an emotion in a steady state (as when we talk of ‘consuming emotions’); frequently, the act of capturing the emotion instantly leads to its transformation (Antonacopoulou and Gabriel, 2001). In contrast to social constructionist approaches, psychoanalytic approaches insist that there is a primitive, pre-linguistic, pre-cognitive, and pre-social level of emotions, an inner world of passion, ambivalence, and contradiction which may be experienced or repressed, expressed or controlled, diffused or diluted, but never actually obliterated (Gabriel, 1998; Höpfl and Linstead, 1997). As Craib (1998: 110) has eloquently argued
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.
The distinguishing feature of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches is the assumption of an unconscious dimension to social and individual life, one in which both ideas and emotions may operate (Freud, 1923/1984, 1940/1986). The unconscious is not merely part of a psychic reality which happens to be concealed from consciousness, but functions both as a space in which dangerous and painful ideas are consigned through repression and other defensive mechanisms, and also as a source of resistance to specific ideas and emotions which present threats to mental functioning. Unconscious emotions, ideas, and desires often reach consciousness in highly distorted, camouflaged, or abstruse ways. The unconscious is not a marginal or pathological terrain into which we occasionally drift but a space that accounts for a substantial part of human emotion, motivation, and action; even where plausible conscious reasons and explanations are given for a particular emotional landscape, psychodynamic approaches will examine the possibility that unconscious factors are at play, factors that individuals, groups, or entire societies systematically repress or deny. Thus, at the cost of some simplification, while social constructionist approaches view emotion as derivative of social scripts, signs, and scenarios in which we become linguistically enmeshed, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches view emotions and especially unconscious emotions as generating scripts, signs, and scenarios. Where, for instance, the former may identify anger as consequent of a scenario experienced as insult, the latter may view the experience of being insulted as derivative of a deeper anger and resentment (Gabriel, 1998).