Sociological Sites/Sights, TASA 2000 Conference. Adelaide: Flinders University, December 6-8.

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional p r o c e s s work

____________________________________
Maree V Boyle

School of Management University of Queensland Business School University of Queensland

Abstract
This paper demonstrates how emotional regions within an organisation influence the practice and quality of emotional process work. An ethnographic study of an emergency service organisation over an eighteen-month period found that the performance of emotional process work is a vital stage in the overall performance of emotional labour. Interviews with emergency service workers also indicated that a substantial amount of emotional process work occurs within one of three emotional regions within the organisation the off stage or non-work region. The organisation in question, known here as the Department of Paramedical Services (DPS), relies heavily on informal off-stage emotional support, or emotional support provided by significant others as quasi-employees. Peggy Thoits work on emotional process work and Goffmans work on regions are used to demonstrate how the individual management of emotion and the organisational ordering of emotional regions are closely intertwined. Organisational implications for the over reliance on off-stage forms of support are briefly discussed.

Introduction
The principal aim of this paper is to explain and discuss how the concepts of emotional regions within organisations and the individual practise of emotional process work, which is part of emotional labour, are closely intertwined. This discussion is based on qualitative field data collected over an eighteen-month period within an emergency services organisation specialising in pre-hospital emergency care. The organisation in question, the Department of Paramedical Services (known hereafter as the DPS), could best be described as an emotion driven organisation, where the performance of emotional labour, during and as a consequence of the highly emotion charged events, are central to the raison dtre of the organisation. The linkage between emotional regions within organisations and emotional process work will be illustrated through a closer examination of the off-stage or non-work region within the organisation in question. Thoits work on emotional process work and Goffmans work on regions will also help illustrate how, in this instance, emotional process work can be privatised and moved out of the realm of organisational responsibility.

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

Emotional

Labour

and Emotional

Process

Work

Recent research on the links between the performance of emotional labour and emotional dissonance indicates that a complex array of factors have both positive and negative effects on the individuals emotional well-being in the workplace. These factors include the quality of the immediate workplace emotional climate in which the service encounter occurs (Ashforth and Humphrey 1995), the influence of gendered cultural norms (Wharton 1993), degree of job control and routinisation (Leidner 1993), and the quality of organisational responses to stress induced by emotional labour (Kunda and Van Maanen 1999). Early work on the conceptualisation and operationalisation of emotional labour created a clear distinction between emotion work and emotional labour (Hochschild 1979, 1983). Hochschild defined emotional labour as the appropriate public level of display, feeling and exchange that occurred between service provider and service recipient. Hochschild also argued that emotive dissonance was an inevitable consequence of emotional labour because it resulted in a transmutation of the private emotional sphere into the public commercial sphere. However, emotion as a process involves the appraisal of a series of affect-related events, which may involve the experience of discrete or private emotions (Weiss and Cropanzano 1996). Although the context in which the appraisal and subsequent emotional regulation may change from a public to private one, the process of appraisal, attribution and regulation of emotion is essentially the same. Therefore, I propose that emotional process work is an integral part of emotional labour, and is actually an extension of the service provider-client interaction. In addition, I also propose that the organisational response to this aspect of an employees work significantly influences both the quality of the service outcome, but also levels of individual employee stress, fitness and emotional health. Emotional process work occurs before, during and after a service encounter, and involves a number of strategies that enable the employee to maintain a normative emotional state. Thoits (1984; 1985) explains that when emotional management techniques fail and employees are unable to satisfactorily deal with deviant or outlaw emotions, they then have to process this failure as a violation of feeling or expression norms. Thoits cited two conditions that she saw as central to the prediction of emotion work failure the persistence of deviant or outlaw emotions, and absence of social support. Thoits explains that when individuals are committed to competent identity enhancement and are aware of a discrepancy between situational feelings and emotional norms, attempts at emotional process work follow, and self-attributions of deviance occur as a result of persistent failure to create an individual normative state. Thoits work has implications for how emergency service organisations confront the reality of work stress and the maintenance of appropriate emotional climates within the organisation. Within an emergency service context, emotional process work occurs after a case has been completed and involves a variety of strategies that are designed to assist the officer to return to a normal emotional state. Emotional process work may be as simple as one officer acknowledging to another officer that the previous patient was rude or obnoxious, or it may involve many weeks of coping with a major traumatic event such as a plane crash. All officers do emotional process work, and the degree to which they successfully accomplish emotional normality varies according to level of experience, degree of social support and ability to cope with the demands that the emotional norms and feeling rules that the organisation place upon them.

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

Emotional

cultures,

regions

and

dramaturgy

Emotional culture within organisations consists of three components: emotional vocabularies (Gerth and Mills 1953; Gordon 1981); emotional norms (Hochschild 1979, 1983; Scheff 1979, 1990; Gordon 1989); and meanings of power and status (Kemper 1978). Gordon (1990) also differentiates between institutional and impulsive orientations within emotional cultures. Institutional meanings of emotions are those given by organisational members when they are in full control of their emotions. Members affect achievement and maintenance of institutional norms, and in doing so continue to uphold and reproduce emotional culture. In many formal organisations, the application of impulsive modes of emotional expression is often considered as either forms of deviance or indicative of faulty socialisation (Gordon 1981; Thoits 1990). However, permission to express impulsive emotion is granted to those with power and status, typically middle and upper class men of anglo-celtic origin (Hochschild 1983; Pierce 1999). These differentiations also apply to relationships between clients and organisational members. Those with greater professional status are less likely to witness impulsive orientations to emotion than those with lower status (Hochschild 1983). The concept of emotional region is derived from Goffmans dramaturgical perspective. Performance, which is a central component of an organisational region, is defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion that serves to influence in any way any of the other participants (Goffman 1959: 26). Performances are only successful when individuals can show that their actions are genuine or reality, while simultaneously sustaining a front that is considered authentic (Goffman 1959: 28). Successful performance is also staged by teams who share both the risk and discreditable information in a manner comparable to a secret society (Goffman 1959: 108 cited in Manning 1992). Teams are organised by directors who manage disputes and decide whom will take on which part. Teams act in front regions, which are defined as spaces in which they perform for their publics (Goffman 1959: 102-114). Teams rehearse, relax and retreat to back regions, spaces hidden from publics view when front region performances are knowingly contradicted as a matter of course (Goffman 1959: 110-114). Goffmans conceptualisation of front and back regions are used here heuristically to further develop Finemans (1993) notion of the emotional architecture of organisational culture, in which he suggests there exists physical spaces within organisations in which different kinds of feeling rules apply. The concept of emotional culture builds upon Gordons original conceptualisation, joining both Goffmans description of regional behaviour and audience segregation and the differentiation perspective of organisational culture, which recognises the importance of sub-cultures. Therefore, emotional culture can be observed within three regions - front or onstage, backstage and offstage. The front stage sector is where emotional labour is performed. The backstage sector is where interaction with organisational members occurs and where emotional process work is likely to occur. Offstage spheres are found outside the physical realm of the organisation itself, such as family or household. Hosking and Finemans (1990) differentiation between frontstage and backstage organisational emotionality helps to illustrate how a full understanding

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

of the nature and consequence of emotional labour can only occur if it is considered within the context of emotional culture.

Off-stage support: process work

The

privatising

of

emotional

Although we dont get enough training in how to cope, the expectation is that you have to cope...So you can do your job, you can let the tears flow but you still have to be efficient at what you are doing. At least until you get back to the station. But that doesnt usually happen. You usually wait until you get home... (Nick, AO Rural No.14)

This quote illustrates nicely the connections between frontstage expectations and back and offstage realities. The frontstage emotional culture deems that officers cope under all circumstances, regardless of the amount of emotional pressure placed upon officers. As representatives of the DPS, the community expects officers to perform at their emotional peak with patients - yet from an organisational perspective, maintaining emotional health is an individual responsibility. That officers have to usually wait until (they) get home is a telling comment that indicates the lack of recognition afforded emotional process work as work. To state that spouses provide a significant amount of emotional support to DPS officers is something of an understatement. The expectation that the family, particularly the spouse, will provide off-stage emotional support is one based upon the assumption that a certain kind of emotional gender asymmetry exists within heterosexual relationships. As Duncombe and Marsden (1993, 1995) explain, this gender asymmetry is an indicator of a form of emotional power, which is situated with the wider context of continuing gender inequalities of societal resources and power. While the central feature of mens lives may be the rational, affectively neutral workplace, women carry the emotional responsibility for the private sphere (1995: 150). This includes the performance of emotion work that sustains the relationship itself. During earlier DPS administrations, spouses not only provided emotional support, but were also intensely involved in providing ancillary labour to help run the organisation. Not only did spouses assist with raising funds, they also provided secretarial assistance, and sometimes acted as surrogate counsellors, especially in rural and remote areas. Thus, there was an expectation that wives would be as wedded to the organisation as well as their husbands (Finch 1983). While this reliance on womens ancillary labour may have been exploitative in principle and often in practice, the benefit of co-opting women into the service meant that the whole family enjoyed considerable status within the community. Conversely, the local DPS officer was owned by the community, which meant that officers and their families were expected to adhere to strict moral and behavioural codes. This applied particularly to senior ambulance officers, whose role was to care for the ambulance family, as well as the whole community. As community role models and representatives, officers stationed in rural and remote areas often found themselves with no emotional support outside their family. Several rural officers interviewed believed that community members viewed them as above feelings or emotion. This hero status meant that officers were expected to perform in a superhuman fashion. Emotional support was either something officers only received from their immediate families, or something that ambulance officers as men did not need. Thus, officers were only ever the givers of public emotional support, never the receivers. This situation was even more difficult for young officers who had no significant other or spouse living in the community.

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

While most officers who work in urban and provincial centres do not experience this constant merging of work and home, there is still an implicit assumption by the DPS that officers will receive most of their emotional support off-stage. In this study the majority of officers interviewed and/or observed were male and married with children. With the exception of one officer, all officers admitted that they would find it difficult to do their job without the support of their spouse. They also admitted that the emotional stress of ambulance work often placed significant pressure upon their relationships. In some cases, they cite this as the main reason for marital breakdown and subsequent divorce. In terms of how spouses assist in emotional process work, officers believe difficulties often arise when there is a tension between balancing how much he or she discloses to family members about work, and the amount of process work an officer chooses to engage in individually. As one officer illustrated, protecting family members from the unpleasant and gruesome parts of the job is, in itself, an extension of the workday. Therefore, emotional labour continues after hours in the form of shielding the family from the extreme aspects of ambulance work. Frank, an officer-in-charge, explains that shielding his wife and children from the more unpleasant aspects of his job was important:
I think my wife has to be fairly unique to be able to put up with some of the stuff I bring home. But I dont bring everything home to her. There are certain things that I wont discuss with her. I told her not to look at my textbooks. The pictures that are in them are just too graphic. I find it distressful to look at them myself, particularly if youve got kids the same age as the kids in the pictures in these books. (Frank, OIC Metro No.21)

Officers also reported that spouses become frustrated when an officer chooses to be selective about how much disclosure occurs after a shift. As Drew, an officer of over twenty years standing explained, there is a fine balance between deciding what the officer thinks is distressing for the spouse, and guessing what the spouse will want to hear:
She can say, I can understand the nature of your job, but she cant identify with the job. If I go home and tell her what Ive seen, shes got to now deal with that problem. And there are very few women in that context who can deal with that situation. No matter how much they say, I want you to tell me. Youve got to deal with a lot yourself and talk to people you can trust but still not totally keep your family out of it. Thats a mistake. Youre going to fall down in a big way if you do that. Youve got to do a balancing act, you have to say, I can tell you this much. I can tell you this happened, but I cant tell you that happened. (Drew, AO Rural No.1)

Several officers reported that they negotiated routines with their spouses for dealing with difficult shifts. It is not surprising then, that the longest serving officers were the ones who were willing to discuss these routines and their relative successes or failures. The success of these routines in defusing anger or frustration depended upon the spouse being committed to doing this kind of emotional process work. For instance, an ambulance couple who have been married for over twenty years have developed a routine whereby the officer signals to his spouse if he needs emotional space when he comes home:
Over time my wife had learnt that if I walk in and my mannerisms are such, then shell just walk out the other door. Shell just go away and leave me alone for an hour or two. Until Ive processed it and dealt with it and put it where its supposed to go. Then Ill walk out and well start from there. (Alan, AO Remote No.1)

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

Learning when to go away is an expectation with which many spouses have extreme difficulty coping, particularly younger couples with children. One young officer stated that his spouse hounded him at the end of every shift to tell her everything that had happened during the day. When he refused to comply, she became frustrated and this often led to marital conflict. The officers main problem with this situation was that he had little private space in which he could process the days events and emotions. By their own admission, many officers became intolerant and irritable at what they perceive as the triviality of life outside the DPS. Requests from spouses to behave like average men outside of work and within the family environment, together with shiftwork and the ensuing irregular sleeping and eating patterns, led to conflict about issues of support. One officer, who had recently divorced after fifteen years of marriage, admitted that his inability to cope with the emotional switch from work to home was one of the major contributing factors to the breakdown of his marriage:
Why am I the Mr. Fixit for everyone? Ive fixed up fifteen patients problems today, and then I come home and youve got a migraine and you want me to cook dinner, and I think, no! Ive knocked off. You cook dinner. You get very intolerant. (Rod, AO Metro No.9)

In addition to providing direct emotional support, spouses often have to deal with frequent absences of the officer from family gatherings, sporting events and social functions. This sometimes leads to tension within the extended family, as the spouse has to do the emotion work of allaying fears as to why the officer is not in attendance. While the absent father is not all that unusual at school functions, for an officer involved in a traditional heterosexual relationship, continual absences from family events may cause problems for the spouse in that the family may view the relationship as dysfunctional or abnormal. While there is no evidence to suggest that ambulance officers have a higher than average divorce rate, there is some validity in suggesting that younger officers who have young children are under considerable off-stage pressure compared with officers who have served for longer periods and whose families are older and more established. It is argued here that younger, married officers and rural officers have the greatest need to develop sound emotional process skills, for it is these groups that may be at greatest risk of emotional burnout if their off-stage support is inadequate or deficient. Emotional process work may involve something as simple as a short amount of time and space away from family and friends, or it may be as complex as a close relationship with a religious minister or health professional such as a psychologist.

Conclusion
Although the DPS is an organisation literally saturated with emotion, emotional support is mainly viewed by the organisation as something that needs to primarily occur off site. While emotional process work does occur during organisational time, particularly in backstage regions, a closer inspection of the structure and culture of the organisation indicate a serious level denial of emotion. Anecdotal evidence suggests that employees appear more likely to engage in acts of resistance if an organisation fails to either recognise or legitimate the consequences of emotional labour for front-line employees. In turn, this has implications for the overall level of individual as well as organisational well-being.

Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

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Emotional regions, off-stage support and the privatising of emotional process work

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Contact Details: Dr Maree V Boyle School of Management University of Queensland Business School University of Queensland St. Lucia Qld 4072 Tel: 07-33656751 Fax: 07-33656988 Email: m.boyle@gsm.uq.edu.au