In this and the following section of the chapter I assess literature that addresses two different areas of interest for this thesis: the importance of organisational cultures to the constitution of workplace identities; and the composition and history of the New Zealand parliamentary workplace. Firstly, I draw together work that helps to establish what I mean in using the term organisational culture in relation to the parliamentary workplace and to discuss the significance of emotion to organisational culture and identities. Research on organisational culture has established that the management of workplace culture necessarily involves the management of feeling (Van Maanen & Kunda, 1989). Central to the frameworks of both Hochschild (1983) and Bolton (2005), presented in the previous section of this chapter, is the notion that feeling rules are established through interaction with others in the workplace. It has been argued that induction into an organisational culture involves taking up new occupational identities and that organisational dictates produce expectations around appropriate workplace identity (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Becker, Geer, Hughes & Strauss, 1992 [1961];
Cahill, 1989; Kleinman, 1984). I will demonstrate that although this literature has not previously been utilised to illuminate the understanding of parliamentary organisations, it does offer fruitful ways for thinking about the work that parliamentarians do.
In the following section of this chapter, I draw upon literature from the political science field to briefly sketch out aspects of parliament’s composition and history that are necessary to provide contextual background to its study as a workplace for parliamentarians. Although democratic governance in general (Rhodes & Weller, 2005; Stoker, 2006; West, 2004), and New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy in particular (McLeay, 1995; Wanna, 2005), are topics of much exposition, the central debates of that literature are only of tenuous interest here. Within the context of this thesis, what is important about parliament is that it constitutes an everyday workplace for parliamentarians and that it is within this organisational environment that parliamentarians as workers forge their occupational identities. It is an understanding of the meaning-making of parliamentarians as workers that is the central focus for this thesis and in this regard much of the political science literature is of limited utility. Indeed, Rhodes has identified a general lacuna when it comes to research that focuses on the perspectives of those who work in government (Rhodes, 2005). He rightly suggests that the methodological preferences that are dominant in the study of politics and politicians produce limitations for what can be learned from that work and he cites the need for research that takes an interpretative approach to understandings of political work life (Rhodes, 2005, p. 3-4).
Until recently, work organisations were understood as ‘rational enterprises’ and hence devoid of emotion (Becker, et al., 1992 [1961]; Fineman, 2000, p. 10). The gendered division of labour, which saw women typically responsible for the care of family and home and men the ‘breadwinner’ of the family, has been identified as a factor which influenced social attitudes to emotion, associating emotion with women and private life and rationality with men and the public workplace (Fineman, 2000, p. 10; Jaggar, 1989, p. 145). This belief has been thoroughly and convincingly challenged in the literature (Bolton, 2005; Fineman, 2000, 2008; Hochschild, 1983; Lively, 2006; Sandelands & Boudens, 2000; Waldron, 2000).
The study of organisations from a cultural viewpoint has brought to light aspects of the workplace that have been understudied but that contribute to the understanding of work
as a place where stories and jokes are told and where newcomers are initiated to meaning around how things ought to be done here (Martin, 2002, p. 3). Martin (2002) used culture as a metaphor for the organisation rather than as a variable and in this thesis I use the term in the same metaphoric sense rather than to suggest the existence of a stable entity called culture. In conceptualising parliament as a workplace culture, I draw attention to the way that meaning is negotiated within a contextual web of understanding that is particular to the ‘stories’ or accounts of experience in the parliamentary workplace.
Sociological investigation of the everyday organisational culture of parliamentarians is scant, so little is known about issues such as how these workers are introduced to workplace culture (Rhodes, 2005). When research attention has been focused on parliamentarians, it has more often been in relation to “particular circumstances … [such as] the behaviour of politicians engaged in election campaigns [rather than] … their activity once in office” (Levine & Roberts, 2004, p. 40). Although there is a long tradition of studying other workers and workplaces, there is little research on parliament as a worksite (Rhodes, 2005). The present study is one contribution to research addressing the lacuna.
Emotional culture is best understood alongside the broader concept of organisational culture. The term organisational culture refers to
a basic pattern of assumptions invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration – that has worked well enough to be considered valuable and therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems (Schein, 1985, p. 36).
As an aspect of organisational culture, emotional culture refers to the
dominant values, beliefs, assumptions and norms of the organization or a given subunit regarding affective issues, together with the symbolic vehicles for conveying these attributes (Gordon, 1989, p. 322).
The emotional culture of the workplace is therefore constituted through the accounts, the vocabularies and the metaphors used in social interaction and institutionalised through the talk and practices of workers.
Emotion is important to culture, making it impossible to ‘manage’ culture without also ‘managing’ emotion, hence organisational culture necessarily includes rules on how to express emotion in a workplace (VanMaanen & Kunda, 1989). People do not only learn to negotiate their thoughts and actions alone through cultural understanding but they learn how and what they ought to ‘feel’ in various situations (Van Mannen & Kunda, 1989, p. 46).
Emotion management is common in organisations that involve face-to-face contact with others, where workplace superiors set an expectation for the restriction of feelings, and wherever service work is a part of workplace performance (Van Maanen & Kunda, 1989, pp. 54-55). The more management required by a given position, the more feeling rules there are to learn and people who have been in the organisation for longer and know the rules ‘best’ are the most likely ones to have an investment in maintaining the rules of the job (Van Maanen & Kunda, 1989, pp. 54-55). Organisations concerned to develop company culture do so because workers’ adherence to the culture is considered important for company success so ‘culture’ becomes a discrete means of managing workers.
Socialisation to professional and occupational identities has suggested that “taking on any new ideology involves learning how to feel differently about things” (Stenross & Kleinman, 1989, p. 1020). Research into the ways that learning to do particular jobs involved learning to understand feeling and identity through new social meanings has included inquiry into transformation processes in the understanding of new identities for medical students (Stenross & Kleinman, 1989; Becker et al., 1992), mortuary science students (Cahill, 1989) and high steel ironworkers (Haas, 1977). This work has all suggested that something more than task-based learning is required in learning how to do new jobs. For example, mortuary science students who were not able to take up the new ways of understanding their feelings around dead bodies and various unpleasant tasks required of funeral directors understood this inability as a demonstration of their unsuitability to the work and left the field (Cahill, 1989). Thus, organisational cultures and the feeling rules that are a part of them are significant in workers ongoing participation in particular workplaces.