An alternative to bureaucratic impersonality and emotional labor: bounded emotionality at The Body Shop - Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Organizational Control

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1998  by Joanne Martin,  Kathleen Knopoff,  Christine Beckman

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People constantly experience emotions, yet in organizational theory, as in organizational life, the exploration of emotions has been largely deemphasized, marginalized, or ignored. Impersonal criteria for making decisions and restraints on emotional expression at work have long been the hallmarks of bureaucracy (e.g., Weber, 1946, 1981). Recent work has broken this emotional taboo, exploring how certain organizations require the expression of particular emotions at work to maximize organizational productivity, an aspect of job performance that has been labeled emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). Van Maanen and Kunda (1989) and Turner (1986) have described the displays of enthusiasm and loyalty required in some corporate cultures. Hochschild (1983) and Sutton and his colleagues (e.g., Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988; Sutton, 1991) have explored discrepancies between outward behavior and inward feelings experienced by smiling flight attendants and nasty bill collectors. In contrast, feminist organizational theorists have taken a focus on emotions one step closer to a kind of personal authenticity, arguing that expression of a wider range of emotions at work (labeled bounded emotionality) is desirable, not to enhance productivity but to foster the psychological well-being of organizational members and their families (Mumby and Putnam, 1992; Putnam and Mumby, 1993; Meyerson, 1998).

This paper explores this last, feminist approach to emotional expression in organizations. While these ideas have emerged from the study of small, usually nonprofit organizations, we examine whether bounded emotionality is feasible in the large, for-profit firms that dominate contemporary industrialized societies. We also ask if bounded emotionality in these contexts is desirable, from employees' points of view, or if it is yet another, more intimate and powerful form of organizational control. More generally, as the bureaucratic form proliferates across the industrialized landscape (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), these organizations seek to enhance their efficiency and chances for survival through such mechanisms as hierarchy, division of labor, and impersonal, apparently unemotional, and deindividualized "rule by rules" (Weber, 1946, 1981; Ritzer, 1996). This paper focuses on one of these mechanisms, the management of emotion, and asks whether it is possible for a large organization, struggling to profit and grow in a highly competitive marketplace, to find new ways of incorporating emotional expression into organizational life. In the domain of emotions, is the isomorphism of bureaucracy an iron cage, or is it possible to find ways of doing business differently, on a large scale?

CONTROL IN THREE IDEAL TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONS

The process of organizing requires the coordination of employees' behavior. Because coordination may be imperfect (e.g., because of miscommunication or conflicts of interest), organizational members engage in various control strategies. Perrow (1986: 129-131) distinguished three types of control: (1) direct and fully obtrusive, such as giving orders, surveillance, and rules; (2) bureaucratic and somewhat less obtrusive, such as division of labor and hierarchy; and (3) fully unobtrusive control of the cognitive premises underlying action, in which the employee voluntarily restricts the range of behaviors considered appropriate. We draw on and extend this conceptualization of control to distinguish three ideal types of organizations: traditional bureaucratic, normative, and feminist. Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of each of these ideal types. As ideal types, these categories are theory-derived; actual organizations, including the organization studied in this paper, The Body Shop International, are expected to exhibit a mix of these characteristics.

The traditional bureaucracy described in table 1 is derived from a Weberian model, combining Perrow's first two, relatively obtrusive forms of control, direct and bureaucratic (e.g., Barnard, 1938; Rushing, 1966; Hall, 1968; Ouchi, 1977; Weed, 1993; Adler and Borys, 1996). Contrary to Weber's ideal type formulation, the expression of certain emotions (e.g., anger and competitiveness), is often condoned in traditional bureaucracies. The second, normative type of organization is characterized by Perrow's third, unobtrusive form of control, in which management has shifted limited powers to lower-level employees through such strategies as participative management, team-based production, less specialized division of labor, job rotation, consensual decision making, and an emphasis on cooperation (e.g., Tompkins and Cheney, 1985; Soeters, 1986; Bartunek and Moch, 1991; Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Barker and Tompkins, 1994). Normative organizations rely less on control by formal authorities and more on the internalization of values; control is achieved by employees' self-policing. Members actively take up management's or a group's decision premises and make them their own, seeing their own goals and those of the organization as coinciding (e.g., Ouchi, 1980; Perrow, 1986; Cheney and Tompkins, 1987). As table 1 shows, normative strategies preserve, in a modified fashion, many of the major dimensions of traditional bureaucracies. For example, the verticality of a hierarchy is somewhat flattened, while preserving many of the prerogatives of management's formal authority, and the division of labor between lower-level employees and top management is largely preserved, while at [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] lower levels, some forms of specialization and direct supervision are reduced or eliminated. In a study particularly relevant to a subset of the data presented in this paper, Barker (1993) traced how teams of employees created a distinctive set of norms that were eventually transformed into formal, standardized rules of behavior.