Emotional Responsibilization and Rational Emotionality as Feeling Rules: Professional Socialization 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 is critical in the context of emotionally demanding work. Without effective socialization, newcomers struggle to develop positive professional identities and commitment to work, which can affect both individual and organizational outcomes. Yet we know little about how shared emotional norms are developed and enforced through professional socialization in emotionally demanding work. Drawing on scholarship on emotional dirty work, this study examines professional socialization in biomedical research groups where junior scientists learn how to conduct scientific experiments with laboratory animals. Based on semi-structured interviews with biomedical researchers across career stages, the study analyzes emotional responsibilization and rational emotionality as feeling rules that define everyday work practice in the lab. Emotional responsibilization highlights how junior researchers are socialized into taking responsibility for demanding tasks and their emotional consequences, whereas rational emotionality normalizes the emotional taint associated with animal experiments in scientific work. Taken together, the findings show that while biomedical research groups teach newcomers the technical demands of scientific work—the procedures for conducting experiments with and often killing the animals—they develop feeling rules that obscure the emotional and moral dimensions of that work. Emotional responsibilization and rational emotionality prescribe emotional restraint and close off opportunities for working through difficult emotions caused by morally and emotionally tainted tasks.

Author

• Elina I. Mäkinen, Tampere University