Learning to kill: Professional socialization and rational emotionality in biomedical research groups

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 12: Working in Higher Education

Abstract

Professional socialization research explains how newcomers acquire the values, skills, attitudes, norms, and worldviews that confer membership in a professional community. In academic science, where an apprenticeship model remains prevalent, research groups are the primary organizational unit for professional socialization. While prior research has considered value incongruence and its emotional implications in professional–client or member–manager/administrator relations, less is known about how newcomers are socialized into managing ethically charged aspects of their professional practice. This paper thus shifts the focus to the internal dynamics of a profession by asking, how are newcomers socialized into dealing with ethical burden within their professional practice? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with biomedical researchers at different career stages, I analyze how newcomers are socialized into dealing with ethical burden in conducting experiments with and euthanizing laboratory animals. Existing research suggests that scientists navigate public controversies on animal experimentation by cultivating rational emotionality, which means presenting themselves as appropriately rational and authentically contained while construing outsiders (the public) as inappropriately emotional. Yet we know little about how this internal norm governs what can be felt, expressed, and discussed within scientific communities. The analysis reveals a paradox at the heart of the apprenticeship model: research groups train newcomers in the technical procedures of ethically sensitive work while failing to socialize them into its emotional dimensions. Senior scientists promote rational emotionality as a professional ideal, prescribing emotional restraint and closing off opportunities to acknowledge or work through difficult emotions. This organizational silence present in research groups shapes newcomers’ socialization experiences, wellbeing, and career trajectories.

Author

• Elina I. Mäkinen, Tampere University