Guia de Tramite Conclusion de Remediacion

Emotional convocation is the management of feeling in order to produce a feeling state in oneself or another that involves intangible benefits for a system or abstract ideal. Emotional convocation helps to explain parliamentarians’ accounts of the emotional dimensions of their workplace experience in a way that neither emotion work nor emotional labour are able to. Emotional convocation is the management of emotion in accordance with vocational rules and is work that has both use and exchange value for the worker as well as their workplace organisation.

The contribution emotional convocation makes can be better understood by re- examining emotion work and emotional labour and their definitional differences with emotional convocation. Table 8.1 (below) illustrates the similarities and differences between the concepts. In the table, I use the terms emotion work and emotion management differently from Hochschild’s early work (1983). I reserve the term emotion management as a general category to refer to the various different ways that people have of acting upon emotion in both private and public settings. In Hochschild’s own work, the terms emotion work, emotion management and deep acting are used synonymously (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). Rather, I identify emotion work as one type of emotion management that is a taxing and productive activity carried out disproportionately, but not only, by women in their homes and communities. Reserving the term emotion management as a generic category is important as it acknowledges the similarities between the various kinds of efforts undertaken.

Table 8.1 Types of emotion management and their characteristics Emotion Work Emotional Labour Emotional Convocation

Feeling rules Social Commercial

Organisational Institutional Vocational Identity acquisition Through private socialisation process

Through job specific training

Through the process of a moral career within an institution Conditions of delivery Face to face Voice to voice Face to face Voice to voice Face to face Voice to voice Institution to public Provided to Self Social others Client/ customer Self Institution Co-workers Public

Value Use Exchange Use and exchange

Vocational identity Intangible institutional benefits Monitored by Self Social others Workplace superiors Customers/ clients Self Workplace superiors Co-workers Public Media Consequences of failure Emotional

discomfort: own and others Social censure Reprimand Loss of job Loss of position Loss of future opportunities Loss of authenticity

Table 8.1 highlights the divergent audiences for whom the parliamentarian performs emotional convocation, with the media an important addition. These same groups monitor the parliamentarian’s performance. Differences between the groups’ interests make the parliamentarian’s provision of emotional convocation complex and require familiarity with an elaborate web of expectations and rules. These differences call for the parliamentarian’s ability to flexibly deploy meaning-making through the cultural resources of the interpretative repertoires.

Emotional convocation involves a more complex process, as vocational workers may provide their emotion management for the benefit of people and groups, in support of abstract values or to contribute to the social standing of the institution they belong to. The result is that their activities have both use and exchange value. Use value lies in the benefits that accrue to the individual, just as is the case with emotion work. Parliamentarians carry out this work in order to earn a wage and to continue to have access to the occupational identity that enables them to earn financial recompense. In addition, however, the benefit of their emotional convocation accrues to the institution, yet does not have a commercial ‘value’. Rather, these performances have a bearing on matters of institutional credibility and legitimacy. In the parliamentarian’s case, the institution can be conceptualised in a variety of ways; it might be the broader institution of democracy as a particular value system, or the specific institution of the parliament to which they belong or even to their party as an historic and ongoing institution.

The worker that performs emotional convocation understands their workplace experiences through two sets of feeling rules. These two sets of norms are the rules of the organisational or institutional culture and the rules for work that is vocational in character. Through the process of a moral career that follows their entry to the workplace institution of parliament, parliamentarians ‘become’ a different self that ‘feels’ differently. This process of transformation of self includes acquiring an understanding of the part they are expected to perform and of the ‘ideal’ worker for the parliamentary workplace. In contrast to the management of emotion of front-line service staff, emotional convocation calls for the communication of emotion through public performances. In the parliamentarian’s case, these performances are often represented widely through the media. This feature of their work emphasises the importance of managing their public performances of emotional convocation and of attending to the scripts from which these performances are produced.

When the question of who monitors the provision of emotional convocation is raised, once again the answer is a more divergent group than is the case for emotion workers and labourers. In addition to the self and co-workers, the media and the public attend to parliamentarians’ emotional convocation performance efforts and make decisions about their worth. This leads to a complex set of potential consequences, particularly when one’s efforts are assessed as a failure. An individual labourer may personally reprimand themselves and endeavour to do a ‘better’ job in the future or they may be reprimanded by workplace seniors or co-workers. In the latter case, there is the potential for loss of future opportunity, which includes the loss of the opportunity for promotion as well as the loss of ongoing access to the job. In addition, the vocational character of the work and the use value of their efforts mean that failure produces a loss of a sense of ‘authentic’ identity, signalling the symbolic value of vocational identity. Other research has shown that workers involved in parliamentary work account for the experience of losing their job and their occupational identity as a devastating one that can affect their ability to successfully move on into other satisfying work (Shaffir & Kleinknecht, 2005).

Emotional convocation explains the type of emotion management employed through the interpretative repertoires of The Game and The Performance and The Crusade. Emotional convocation calls for parliamentarians to both contain and display emotion, according to the situation. Emotional convocation allows parliamentarians to understand the game-playing and performative aspects of their vocational identities as necessary for the maintenance of confidence in themselves as well as the system they work within.

The competitive nature of the workplace understood through The Game repertoire constitutes competition in a positive light. It is the means through which actors are vetted and the ‘best’ ones for the job are found. The repertoire provides a means for parliamentarians to understand competition with friends and colleagues in their party as an acceptable activity. The understanding it creates is that competition amongst parliamentarians is in the best interests of the nation and democracy. Through this repertoire, individual experiences of emotion are best avoided, or at least contained, thus creating a boundary that separates emotion from productive workplace activity.

In drawing on the imagery of a staged performance and the parliamentarian as a Star Performer, The Performance repertoire similarly allows workers to understand the ‘genuine’ nature of workplace performances of emotion as a sideline issue. This repertoire enables parliamentarians to produce their emotional displays through emotional convocation without experiencing themselves as disingenuous. It is the performative aspect of emotion that is understood as important through this repertoire. Emotion is a communication resource that is put to use in a way that conveys the ‘right’ message. Through The Performance repertoire, the parliamentary workplace is divided into ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions and so emotional convocation allows workers to produce a performance that suits the region.

Through emotional convocation, the parliamentarian understands workplace experience as something that involves the ‘feelings’ of a vocationally authentic self. The Crusade repertoire employs tropes and terms of war and battle and introduces a moral aspect to the performance of parliamentary work. In the case of emotional convocation, the benefit of vocational authenticity accrues not only to the self nor to a commercial enterprise, but to a non-commercial, value-based system or institution. The flexible deployment of the repertoires calls for the ability to deploy The Crusade repertoire in order to meet the needs of the institution and system. By demonstrating that the institution is occupied by workers who are ‘genuine’ in their work, parliamentarians produce a benefit that accrues to the system. Parliamentarians’ production of emotional convocation therefore has value for themselves as vocational workers by generating confidence in the authenticity of their occupational and vocational identities, and the experiences of feeling they involve. This allows parliamentarians to ‘feel’ and ‘act’ self-confidently. A self-confident performance meets the occupational expectations of their parliamentary work identity. The parliamentarian’s production of emotional convocation has another intangible benefit. It shores support for and confidence in the abstract ideals of the institution.

By comparing the parliamentarian’s workplace activities with the activities of those already conceptualised as emotional labourers, it is apparent that the parliamentarian’s work is carried out in different conditions than other emotional labourers. Parliamentarians take part in workplace activity that, instead of following commercial feeling rules, employs vocational and institutional feeling rules. The excess value that is produced does not have use or commercial exchange value alone but has both a

monetary and non-monetary exchange value, with corresponding tangible and intangible benefits. The monetary exchange results from the parliamentarian’s receipt of a salary for the work that they do. The non-monetary aspect of emotional convocation’s exchange value is its ability to shore confidence in an abstract value or system.