posted on 2017-11-28, 14:06authored byRichard Godfrey, Joanna Brewis
Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of
scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total
institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given
that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of lethal violence for
combat operations. It is, moreover, a total institution, and the disculturation new recruits must
endure creates fertile ground for the inculcation of a specific emotional regime. Further,
unlike most other service occupations, the military is both male-dominated and highly
masculine. The paper also makes a case for using memoirs in the study of emotional labour.
Being examples of what we call identity writing, they offer different insights to those we
might attain through other methods. Indeed we argue that memoirs provide a fruitful source
for future organization studies research into the emotional regime of the military especially.
Third, our discussion expands the concept of emotional labour in that the emotional regime
the memoirists index: is not undertaken for a specific group of customers; entails a distinctive
range of emotions; and involves the conscious cultivation of gendered communities of coping
among soldiers.
History
Citation
Gender, Work and Organization, 2018
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/School of Management
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