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Once More, with Feeling! Working with Emotional Taint

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Stigmas, Work and Organizations

Part of the book series: Palgrave Explorations in Workplace Stigma ((PAEWS))

Abstract

Working with emotion—performing emotion as part of your job, interacting with emotional people, managing the emotions of others, or dealing with issues that arouse emotion—is a challenge for many workers every day. However, we rarely actually talk about emotion in the every-day interactions at our jobs. Similarly, scholarly research has often marginalized, silenced, or simply overlooked the important role emotion plays in our organizational lives. When it is discussed, emotion is often characterized as disruptive or out of place, particularly in the workplace. In this chapter, I discuss the challenges of negotiating emotion at work when that emotion is stigmatized. Utilizing short stories that illustrate how emotionally stigmatized workers respond to emotional stigma, this chapter probes the concept of emotional stigma and how it relates to theoretical frameworks of dirty work and emotional labor. Emotional taint helps us understand the complex ways in which power is intricately involved in how emotional stigma is constructed, performed, and resisted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, CA, USA

    Kendra Rivera

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  1. Kendra Rivera
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    S. Bruce Thomson

  2. University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Gina Grandy

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Rivera, K. (2018). Once More, with Feeling! Working with Emotional Taint. In: Thomson, S., Grandy, G. (eds) Stigmas, Work and Organizations . Palgrave Explorations in Workplace Stigma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56476-4_8

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