EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Making invisible forces visible. Managing employees' values and attitudes through transient emotions

Helene Ratner and Justine Grønbæk Pors

International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 2013, vol. 7, issue 3/4, 208-223

Abstract: This paper investigates managerial tactics of visualisation when a need to know and manage employees' values and attitudes is expressed. Using the Danish public school as a case study, we explore how school managers use teachers' emotions to render visible presumably invisible information about their 'true' attitudes and values. The paper draws on theories of affect as well as actor-network theory to analyse three incidents where managers turn their interpretations of teachers' emotions into such information. These incidents suggest that the efforts to render employees' attitudes and values visible install a normative emotional scale where an ideal employee displays emotional investment and self-control. This has implications, not only for employees who are expected to exhibit the 'right' emotions, but also for management, which comes to depend on transient emotions and co-presence in situations that cannot be planned for.

Keywords: school management; transient emotions; visualisation; affect theories; actor-network theory; ANT; employee values; employee attitudes; public schools; Denmark; teacher emotions; emotional investment; self-control. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=56501 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijmcph:v:7:y:2013:i:3/4:p:208-223

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:ids:ijmcph:v:7:y:2013:i:3/4:p:208-223