Imagining the `iron cage': The rhetoric of hidden emotions in critical Depending upon the narrative aims of the author, texts vary in the degree to which they invite the reader to identify and sympathize with the focal characters in their stories. Consider an excerpt from Erving Goffman’s ethnography of life in a 1950s mental institution:
Imagining the ‘iron cage’The rhetoric of hidden emotions in criticalethnography
■ Paul D. NugentRensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
■ Mitchel Y. AbolafiaUniversity at Albany, SUNY, USA
A B S T R A C T ■ In this article we argue that the rhetorical power ofcritical ethnography cannot be fully explained by current concepts inrhetorical studies. Although rhetorical studies acknowledge the roleplayed by sympathy and imagination, they have not recognized the extentto which organizational ethnographers elicit the identification of readerswith characters through the depiction of ‘hidden emotions.’ Hiddenemotions are those that are subjectively experienced but not publiclyexpressed. They tend to be depicted in situations in which characters arefaced with evaluative judgment or the potential for such judgment.Rhetorical data from four widely-read critical ethnographies wereanalyzed using this framework. The analysis revealed strong patterns inthe ways the ethnographers portray characters experiencing hiddenemotions in controlling institutional contexts. It is through this strategythat the authors are able to succeed in their narrative aims to elaborateMax Weber’s ‘iron cage.’
K E Y W O R D S ■ emotions, rhetoric, social control, critical ethnography
The embrace of rhetorical analysis under many different guises (e.g.‘discourse analysis,’ ‘narrative analysis,’ ‘deconstruction,’ etc.), has led to ahealthy understanding of ethnographic writings as ‘texts’ that share rhetori-cal elements with other forms of discourse. Ironically, in so doing, organiz-ational ethnographers have missed the opportunity to return the favor andoffer a sociological interpretation of rhetoric in texts. Scientific texts, weargue, can be read as deliberate attempts by authors to form imagined socialrelationships in the reader’s mind. While the rhetorical linkages between theauthor and the reader have been fully acknowledged by both rhetorical andscientific scholars, much less attention has been paid to rhetorical strategiesaimed at involving the reader’s imagination in the social life of the charac-ters. Critical ethnography, in particular, is a form of scientific writing inwhich the authors carefully present characters within a narrative compellingsympathetic feelings in the reader. We argue that this strategy, accomplishedthrough patterned representations of subjective experience (hiddenemotions) in highly controlling institutional contexts, characterizes therhetoric of this scientific genre.
The contexts in which hidden emotions are depicted are of particularinterest. Organizational ethnographers have been skilled at capturing theways that organizations struggle to maintain the illusion of rationality andcontrol. When emotions leak out, they threaten that illusion. Our studyseeks to understand these contexts. Given the rhetorical aims of criticalethnography, authors may have sought out these contexts in an effort tochallenge the imagery of organizations as impersonal machines thatreinforces expectations of universal rationality and control.
Identification and sympathy for focal characters
Depending upon the narrative aims of the author, texts vary in the degreeto which they invite the reader to identify and sympathize with the focalcharacters in their stories. Consider an excerpt from Erving Goffman’sethnography of life in a 1950s mental institution:
On the outside, the adult in our society is typically under the authority of asingle immediate superior in connection with his work, or the authority ofone spouse in connection with domestic duties; the only echelon authorityhe must face – the police – is typically not constantly or relevantly present,except perhaps in the case of traffic-law enforcement.
Given echelon authority and regulations that are diffuse, novel, andstrictly enforced, we may expect inmates, especially new ones, to live withchronic anxiety about breaking the rules and the consequence of breakingthem . . . In total institutions staying out of trouble is likely to require
persistent conscious effort. The inmate may forego certain levels ofsociability with his fellows to avoid possible incidents. (Goffman, 1961:42, 43)
Goffman presents the reader with a set of characters experiencing anxietyand directly links this experience to the institutional context. The readerhas probably never been in an asylum; however, the reader likely has experi-enced anxiety in controlling situations. The reader imagines what the‘inmates’ are going through and by reading these accounts is invited toexperience sympathetic feelings toward these characters. This focus differsfrom most treatments of rhetoric in literature or sociology which centertheir analyses on the intersubjective relationship between the author andthe reader (Fowler, 1981; Edmondson, 1984; Hunter, 1990). Our analysiscovers the relation between the reader and the characters.
A focus on the characters rather than on the author is important becausemuch of the rhetorical power of texts derives from the subjective involve-ment of the reader in the experiences of these characters. The authors crafttheir stories with this potential in mind. Yet while some texts strive toencourage a sympathetic involvement in the characters, others are designedto create emotional distancing or buffering. The sympathetic framing of thesubject of study, as we saw in the Goffman passage above, is de-empha-sized in other forms of social scientific writing. For example, in an analysisof rhetoric in drinking driver research, Gusfield shows how the authorsconsistently buffer the reader, emotionally, from their objects – the drunkdrivers:
It is the muting of feeling that is itself the characteristic mood, emotion orfeeling of the paper, viewed as a literary document. In this is its author’sstance toward the object of study – the drinking driver – and whatever feelinghe might otherwise arouse in the reader. The drinking driver stands as anobject outside the emotional ambit of the writer and the reader. In this sense,pathos is to be checked, limited and even obliterated as a reaction of theaudience. (Gusfield, 1976: 30)
According to Gusfield, the sympathy of the reader is deflected from thedrunken driver and directed toward society in general:
The avoidance or limitation of feeling provides the writer, and thereforeattempts to persuade the reader, with the necessary accompaniment to hisidentification with the ‘society’ as victim. To see the ‘problem drinker’ inhighly differentiated or individual terms or to view him as an object ofemotional concern would make the problem of drinking driving less clearand the objective of social control more problematic . . . The drinking driveris neither villain nor hero. He must be helped because he creates ‘trouble’for other folks, such as his readers. (Gusfield, 1976: 30)
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Goffman wants the reader to develop a sympathetic or even empathicrelationship with the focal characters in his story. Gusfield tells us that indrunken driving research, the authors do as much as they can to minimizesuch relationship formation with the focal characters.
Relationship building with the reader is a fundamental aspect of rhetoric.For example, according to Booth (1961), texts invite the reader’s interestor distance in three basic ways. First, they may present intellectual or cogni-tive arguments intended to be viewed as logical or truthful by the reader.Second, elements of literature may appeal to qualitative aspects of the world– especially those regarding aesthetic qualities and form. Third, and ofinterest to us here, texts may appeal to the practical interests in which wethe readers develop a ‘desire for success/failure of those we love or hate,admire or detest; or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in thequality of the character’ (p. 125). Further, Booth explains:
If we look closely at our reactions to most great novels, we discover that wefeel a strong concern for the characters as people; we care about their goodand bad fortune. In most works of significance, we are made to admire ordetest, to love or hate, or simply to approve or disapprove of at least onecentral character, and our interest in reading from page to page, like ourjudgment upon the book after reconsideration, is inseparable from thisemotional involvement. (Booth, 1961: 129, 130)
Booth and other authors who laid the foundation for rhetorical analysis(e.g. Burke, 1950) fully acknowledge the social interactions between thereader and the characters in the text. It is indeed ironic, as we shall see later,that sociologists and ethnographers have ignored this central facet ofrhetoric in analyzing their own texts in favor of other modes of persuasion(i.e. cognitive/intellectual and qualitative types identified by Booth). It ishere that sociology has the most to contribute. Rather than embracing thepopular notion that all social processes should be viewed as texts, we shouldflip this viewpoint on its head and instead approach texts (writings) asimagined social interaction. Some texts, then, may be structured to involvethe reader in a manner that achieves specific narrative aims.
Critical ethnography
Ethnography is a broad and diverse branch of scientific discourse. To tryto link the potential for reader imagination/sympathy to the narrative aimsof all ethnography would yield results that are too diffuse and general tobe of interest. Therefore we would like to separate ethnography into twobroad categories and focus our attention on one of them. First, ethnographywas borne out of the recognition by researchers such as Malinowski thatinteresting aspects of another culture can be rendered in text and can bringthe reader to an appreciation of and familiarity with another social world.
In this traditional form of ethnography, the ‘natives’ tend to be generalizedand abstracted. A scholar of ethnographic writing, James Clifford, explainsthat this mode of ethnography shies away from representing the subjectiveexperience of the natives:
. . . the ethnography and the novel have recourse to indirect style at differentlevels of abstraction. We need not ask how Flaubert knows what EmmaBovary is thinking, but the ability of the fieldworker to inhabit indigenousminds is always in doubt: indeed this is a permanent, unresolved problemof ethnographic method. Ethnographers have generally refrained fromascribing beliefs, feelings, and thoughts to individuals. (Clifford, 1983: 137)
Sociologists, however, have been more apt to represent the subjectiveexperience of their subjects. In particular, critical ethnography has differentintentions for the reader and generally does not refrain from ascribinginternal states. These are ethnographies that take a critical perspective onparticular institutions or structures of society. According to Jermier:
The critical theorist’s initial agenda is to capture and portray the insider’sperspective. For this reason, most critical theorists employ methods thatallow them to ground their research in the accounts of individuals andgroups whose perspectives are ordinarily devalued or neglected. To evince acritical perspective typically requires that researchers give voice to the wordsand interpretations of the people they study and be open to giving themcredence in some serious way . . .
The critical theorist’s agenda is not identical to that of a conventionalethnographer, however, for, in addition to portraying their informants’ worldview, critical theorists also aim to reveal socioeconomic conditions thatproduce and reinforce asymmetrical structures of control. (Jermier, 1998: 240)
It is in this class of ethnography that we find the experiences of individualmembers and groups who are subjects of formalized institutional controlsystems. It is in this form of ethnography that we would like to exploremore deeply the way in which ethnographers build social and sympatheticrelationships between the reader and the characters in their stories and,more importantly, how this rhetorical move supports their narrative/criticalaims. In particular, we shall see how in four organizational ethnographieshidden emotions tied to contexts of potential and actual judgment are wide-spread and rhetorically effective.
Method
In designing this study we wanted to explore how critical ethnographerscompel the reader to imagine a sympathetic relationship with the charac-ters in their stories and how this relationship secures their critical narrative
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aims. Therefore we needed to focus on evidence of character portrayal(especially subjective experience) coupled with specific institutionalcontexts.
Melville Dalton’s Men Who Manage (1959), Robert Jackall’s MoralMazes (1988), Gideon Kunda’s Engineering Culture (1992), and ErvingGoffman’s Asylums (1961) were chosen as texts for this analysis. Thesetexts were selected based upon their reputations for being penetratingcritical ethnographies of life within organizations and institutions. Theyrepresent a sampling of different kinds of bureaucratic institutions acrossseveral decades. These four ethnographies share a critical common groundin that they are attempting to reveal how modern institutions are indeed‘iron cages’ able to control members’ thoughts, actions, and subjectiveexperiences through subtle, and not so subtle, cultural and structural means.In these works, the ethnographers show that the familiar control methodsof monitoring and coercion are augmented by less obtrusive but highlyeffective structural and cultural elements designed to redefine the members’sense of self and morality. These powerful controls are difficult to observeat a surface level. The four ethnographers endeavor to convince the readerthat much more is going on than meets the eye.
Sociology would suggest that the most powerful invitations for readeridentification and sympathy for the characters would coincide with descrip-tions of the subjective experience of the focal characters (institutionalmembers/inmates) in social contexts (i.e. the set of observers/evaluatorsmost likely to be linked to that subjective experience). To capture these data,it was necessary to carefully lift from each of the four texts all referencesto subjective experience (primarily emotions) and the social contexts inwhich they appeared. For each subjective reference, the paragraph in whichit appeared or several sentences preceding the reference were also tran-scribed verbatim into a database to capture the context. A database wascompiled which facilitated sorting and comparison along multiple codesand criteria. A total of 2750 initial emotion-related references and contextswere identified from the four texts (Goffman: 555, Dalton: 839, Kunda:636, Jackall: 720). Grounded theory and ethnographic coding methods(Lofland and Lofland, 1984; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) were employed toanalyze the data.
Analysis: portraying hidden emotion
The analysis developed categories and codes for both the emotion refer-ences and the associated contexts. We will first address the different typesof emotions identified independent of context, and then turn our attentionto the social contexts that correlated with these types.
Whether or not the referenced emotion was actually experienced orexpressed by the characters emerged as an analytically important distinc-tion. We considered whether each reflected an emotion that was experi-enced versus not experienced (e.g. ‘the member was angered by’ versus ‘themember was not angered by’) and also whether each reflected an emotionthat was expressed versus not expressed. Together these two dichotomouscodes form four ‘types’ into which each entry in the database could beseparated (see Figure 1).
Figure 2 presents these four categories as percentages across the texts.Percentages were used because the four codes presented in Figure 1 forman exhaustive set and a frequency plot would obscure comparison. The firstconclusion to draw from Figure 2 is the dominant presence of ‘hidden’emotions in the texts. ‘Hidden’ emotions are those emotion references thatindicate that an emotion is actually experienced by a member but is notexpressed publicly. At this point in the analysis this was a surprise becausewe had little theoretical precedent with which to explain this. A reading ofthe literature on organizational emotions would leave one with the distinctimpression that emotional life in organizations is dominated by stagedperformances to influence others or to conform to formal and informal roleexpectations (Hochschild, 1979, 1983; Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987, 1989,1991; Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989; Mumby and Putnam, 1992;Fineman, 1993). What we found instead were ethnographers describingmembers as genuinely experiencing emotions but hiding this internal statefrom the public (i.e. not expressing what they were feeling). We cannotconclude that this represents some ‘true’ proportion of subjective experi-ence in organizations nor is such a claim our goal. Rather we conclude fromthese findings that the widespread representation of hidden feelings inthese texts was a primary or characteristic means by which these critical
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ethnographies project human experience in bureaucracy. Therefore in theearly stages of the analysis we reduced our focus exclusively to ‘hidden’emotions. Let us now turn our attention to a more intensive analysis of therhetorical role played by these emotion references.
Social contexts in which hidden emotions occur
The data captured for this study include both the emotion reference as wellas the context in which it appeared. Therefore the surprising finding thathidden emotions are so widespread in these texts encouraged us to explorethe social contexts associated with their suppression.
A fundamental assumption of critical theory (e.g. Jermier, 1998) is thatbecause purely economic or casual observations of a setting are unable toexpose social injustices, and that the natives themselves often lack theanalytical tools with which to communicate them, the responsibility fallson the critical observer to identify them and to persuade others of theirexistence. Therefore one of the tasks for the critical ethnographer is toexplain not simply what is hidden (the emotional experiences of members),but why it is hidden. In the case of organizational ethnography, criticalethnographers use these portrayals of subjective experience as evidence ofthe dark side of the ‘iron cage’ – their ultimate narrative aim.
According to the data, the ethnographers repeatedly tell us that there isa side of the member’s emotional life that is characterized by its personalprivacy – by the very notion that much of emotional experience is nevercommunicated to others verbally or expressively. The authors provide an
Ethnography 8(2)212
Experienced, not expressed (hidden)
Not experienced, expressed (staged)
Not experienced, not expressed (absent)
JackallKunda
DaltonGoffman
Experienced, expressed (genuine)
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Figure 2 Distribution of experienced/expressed codes.
explanation in their texts. Norms discouraging unsanctioned emotionalexpression are endemic to controlling institutions and are well-described inthe texts. According to Jackall, special informal rules apply to managers:
The price of bureaucratic power is a relentlessly methodical subjection ofone’s impulses, at least in public. To yield to one’s desires in a public settingin a way that others can use against one . . . submitting to the temptation toshow one’s anger, is seen as irrational, unbefitting men or women whoseprincipal claim to social legitimacy is dispassionate rational calculation.(Jackall, 1988: 49)
An engineer from Kunda’s study discovers the utility of compliance to suchrules:
Before I had a one-on-one with my boss, I read some advice in Things TheyNever Taught Me at the Harvard Business School. It says: ‘Never show themthat you’re feeling anything; keep a straight face; confuse them.’ It’s exactlywhat I did. Worked too. (Kunda, 1992: 186)
Goffman offers another example identifying a device mental institutions useto banish public expression that was permissible on the outside:
Deference patterns in total institutions provide one illustration of the loopingeffect. In civil society, when an individual must accept circumstances andcommands that affront his conception of self, he is allowed a margin of face-saving reactive expression – sullenness, failure to offer usual signs of defer-ence, sotto voce profaning asides, or fugitive expressions of contempt, irony,and derision. Compliance, then, is likely to be associated with an expressedattitude to it that is not itself subject to the same degree of pressure forcompliance. Although such self-protective expressive response to humiliatingdemands does occur in total institutions, the staff may directly penalizeinmates for such activity, citing sullenness or insolence explicitly as groundsfor further punishment. (Goffman, 1961: 36)
Strong norms and sanctions inhibit these actors from publicly revealingtheir innermost feelings. To express these kinds of feelings would be toengage in behavior deemed unsuccessful or inappropriate by a prevailingauthority. According to Hochschild (1983), ‘feeling rules’ are those rulesthat direct how one should feel in a specific situation according to culturalnorms and are characterized, especially in the service industry, by their posi-tiveness (e.g. cheerfulness, friendliness, enthusiasm). Therefore the authorsof these texts focus on another kind of feeling rule that deals not with howone should feel but, rather, with how one should not reveal feelings thatare incongruent with the context. The four ethnographers want the readerto see that the member’s experience is not the product of personality, ethnic-ity, or gender, but rather the product of the bureaucratic structure/culture
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itself. If we the readers are to believe that these institutions are indeed ‘ironcages’ controlling individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the authorsmust include evidence of these controls in their texts.
Leaks are moments when authentic negative emotions are not success-fully hidden. By examining what is done with this information when it ismade public, ethnographers show us how these controls are related to theorganization and further invite sympathy for the member characters. Theycite examples of leaks to make visible the otherwise invisible control. There-fore, although not part of the primary dataset now under consideration,some of the data in the ‘genuine’ emotions category were revisited to clarifythe sources of these controls. Goffman presents a situation where the insti-tution is able to penetrate into the inmate’s private world and use infor-mation about his private feelings against him:
In total institutions spheres of life are segregated, so that an inmate’s conductin one scene of activity is thrown up to him by staff as a comment and checkupon his conduct in another context. A mental patient’s effort to presenthimself in a well-oriented, unantagonistic manner during a diagnostic ortreatment conference may be directly embarrassed by evidence introducedconcerning his apathy during recreation or the bitter comments he made ina letter to a sibling . . . (Goffman, 1961: 37)
Kunda elaborates on the concept of ‘depersonalization’ where ‘the emotionsexperienced as part of the organizational self are presented as distinct fromother aspects of emotional life and at some remove from one’s “authentic”sense of self’ (Kunda, 1992: 183):
Depersonalization, then, requires that one control and even suppresspersonal and spontaneous reactions to the work environment, thus purgingthem from the organizational self and leaving only appropriate ‘emotions.’Failure to do this is noticed by others. (Kunda, 1992: 184)
A specific example from a memo between managers is illustrative:
To: Frank
From: Bob G.
I’m frankly unhappy with this memo. You obviously are more concernedwith covering your own ass than being part of the team. It was not necess-ary to laboriously reveal your personal feelings on this. This certainly doesnot promote feelings of trust with the people you need to work with. I willnot show it to anyone else on the design team since I believe its contentwould doom your effort to work with them. Dealing with the meetings wasmy problem to work. Please try in the future to deal in diplomacy ratherthan negativism and defensiveness. Come and talk with me if you desire.(Kunda, 1992: 191)
The ethnographers show us that organizations and total institutions possessformal and informal controls designed specifically to erase from publiccurrency evidence of subjective realities that run counter to feeling rules.The privatization of real feelings is imperative to membership – a task tobe vigilantly managed in parallel with one’s public emotional performances.The ethnographers consistently draw upon this bureaucratic stifling innarrating their tales of control.
Fear, embarrassment, and their institutional contexts
The ethnographers consistently invoked two distinct institutional contextsin which negative hidden emotions were experienced by members: poten-tial judgment and judgment. Potential judgment refers to those contexts inwhich the member believes he or she may be evaluated negatively byauthorities and disciplined. Fear, worry, and anxiety are common subjec-tive responses to these contexts. Judgment is the social context in whichdiscipline actually comes to pass. Embarrassment and humiliation aretypical emotions associated with judgment. These contexts are widespreadin organizations and, as such, are occasions for ethnographers to illustratecontrol by compelling reader sympathy. The four ethnographers draw onthe subjective experience of organizational control to convey to the readerthe subtle yet powerful ways in which control is achieved within organiz-ations. We, as readers, probably would not ‘buy’ their argument withoutthis evidence.
In the texts, fear, anxiety, worry, and nervousness are emotionscommonly associated with contexts of potential judgment. The data showthe development of characters embedded in formal and normative ‘systemsof control’. According to Edwards (1978), systems of social control require,at a minimum, direction (i.e. rules, definitions, and scripts of expectedbehavior), evaluation (i.e. the judgment by those issuing the rules of one’scompliance), and discipline (i.e. the actions taken by authorities if the evalu-ation is negative). If any one of the moments in this circuit is missing,control is lost. Potential judgment captures the subjective side of thesecontrol systems in which the member is aware that he or she is embeddedin an environment structured to observe his or her actions, evaluate themfor compliance, and discipline deviance. The ethnographies center on thedepiction of the members’ embeddedness in and emotional experience offormal and normative control systems. Representing the subjective point ofview of the members, the ethnographers also convey to the reader that thesesystems of control are rarely harmonious and coherent with one anotherbut, rather, are characterized by strongly felt contradictions. Let us turn ourattention to a more detailed analysis of the ethnographers’ portrayal ofcharacters experiencing these formal and normative control systems.
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Ethnographers paint a picture of organizational life in which members findthemselves in and accept, for the most part, a formal authority structure.Inmates are subject to staff authority while workers and managersencounter a structure of bureaucratic superiors. In all cases, the four authorsconstruct characters that experience strong emotions in response to thepossibility of being singled out and disciplined by these authorities. Thereader comes to ‘see’ the social controls from their point-of-view.
Kunda illustrates how nervousness and worry accompany a presenterabout to take front stage:
Toward three o’clock the seminar room starts filling up. Alan, the trainer,paces the corridor nervously. He is worried about his career now thattraining budgets are being cut. ‘Overhead’ people are always nervous aroundthis time of year. ‘My wife told me this morning to start applying some ofthis stuff to myself,’ he tells me. (Kunda, 1992: 122)
Dalton shows how emotional orientations to the judgment of superiors isnot restricted to formal role-prescribed behaviors but includes a properstance toward their ideology as well:
The fear of seeming not to meet this expectation [supporting the views ofsuperiors] was illustrated by Haupt’s reaction (Chapter 4) to his subordi-nates who put the badge of a Democratic presidential candidate on his car.However this fear was no greater than that any of the middle or lower levelmanagers would have felt in this situation. (Dalton, 1959: 186)
Jackall illustrates the ubiquity of this relationship to the accepted author-ity of superiors:
. . . I looked at this display and instantly hated them. I was asked what Ithought but before I could open my mouth, people were jumping up anddown clapping the designer on the back and so on. They had already decidedto do it because the president had loved it. Of course, the whole affair wasa total failure. The point is that in making decisions, people look up andlook around. They rely on others, not because of inexperience, but becauseof fear of failure. They look up and look to others before they take anyplunges. (Jackall, 1988: 77)
But according to the ethnographers, what is actually being feared, worriedabout, or causing anxiety? It was in this area that accounts of totalinstitutions (Asylums) and of organizations differed. According to Goffman,formal authorities in total institutions are closely associated withdisciplinary action:
It seems characteristic of every establishment, and especially of total insti-tutions, that some forms of deference will be specific to it, with inmates asgivers and staff as recipients. For this to occur, those who are to receive spon-taneous expressions of regard must be the very ones to teach the forms andenforce them. It follows that in total institutions one crucial difference fromcivil life is that deference is placed on a formal footing, with specific demandsbeing made and specific negative sanctions accorded for infractions; not onlywill acts be required, but also the outward show of inward feelings.Expressed attitudes such as insolence will be explicitly penalized. (Goffman,1961: 115)
Conversely, in organizations Jackall, Dalton, and Kunda are careful to tellus that the evaluation-discipline circuit is not carried out entirely by thoseembodying formal authority. While formal authorities are able to initiateevaluations of success and failure along some bureaucratic performancecriteria, it is the publicity of such information throughout the organizationthat appears to carry the greater weight of the discipline. According toJackall:
There is no more feared hour in the corporate world than ‘blame-time’ . . .Blame is quite different from responsibility. To blame someone is to injurehim verbally in public; in large organizations where one’s image is crucial toone’s ‘credibility’ and therefore one’s influence, this poses the most serioussort of threat. For managers, blame-like failure has little to do with the actualmerits of a case; it is a matter of social definition, that is, of public percep-tion of having failed or, more usually, of being associated with a failure, aperception backed or at least tacitly countenanced by authority. (Jackall,1988: 85)
In this manner superiors depicted in these texts retain the power to evaluate,to ‘blame,’ but manage to distance themselves to some extent from theexercise of discipline. Publicizing a formal and presumably objective evalu-ation, with or without formal sanctions, sets into motion informal disci-plines – loss of ‘credibility,’ tainted ‘reputation’ – that are decoupled fromthe evaluating agent. A passage from Men Who Manage also illustrates thissensitivity of bureaucrats to the appearance of their disciplines:
Where all members of a deviant clique are considered indispensable andabove the humiliation of what cannot be concealed as obvious disciplinaryaction, all may be dispersed to different parts of the firm, or incorporatedinto some kind of rotating system to limit expression of excessive clique skillsor to use them where they are needed. (Dalton, 1959: 66)
Therefore ethnographers are sensitive to the idea that these specific others,the carriers of the bureaucratic form, are conscious that the direct exercise
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of their power is under public scrutiny and is therefore highly constrained.To maintain both control and power over members, those in power, then,separate potential judgment into its constituent parts, reserving theevaluative aspect for the formal structure while farming out much of itsdisciplinary aspect to the informal.
Therefore ethnographers are interested in telling the reader that despiteits impersonal and neutral front, the formal is extremely powerful andembeds the members in social contexts characterized by the concomitantexperience of strong negative emotions. According to the authors, inmates,workers, and managers are acutely aware that formal authorities possessthe power to direct, evaluate, and discipline and the potential that one maybe evaluated negatively and punished consistently induces fear, worry,nervousness, and anxiety.
The four ethnographers also tell us that normative systems of control areimportant in the day-to-day emotional life of members and that judges inorganizational contexts are not restricted to those imbued with formalauthority. General others in these contexts also enact their own systems ofcontrol via informal norms and rituals. According to Goffman’s (1967)Interaction Ritual, our daily interactions are governed by the rules definedin ‘mini-rituals’:
If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to belooked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the fact thatsocieties everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their membersas self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilizingthe individual for this purpose is through ritual; he is taught to be percep-tive, to have feelings attached to self and a self expressed through face, tohave pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and acertain amount of poise. (Goffman, 1967: 44)
At one extreme we would expect many encounters in organizations toconform to these society level rules or directions and be wholly indepen-dent of the structures and cultures of the organization. However, at somepoint they do begin to overlap. The ethnographers claim that such face-to-face encounters with general others are rich in language, gestures, andsubtle expressions that indicate one’s orientation to the overall socialcontext and are therefore related to the organization’s interests and goals.While at one level this context is grounded in society’s rituals as Goffmandescribes and allows general others to judge one qua ‘citizen,’ at anotherlevel they enable others to judge one qua ‘member’ and thus enter therealm of organization-unique normative control. The reader comes to seethat these characters are not simply role occupants but instead are wholehuman beings embedded in a complex social world of observers and eval-uators. The emotional well-being of these characters is intimately tied to
how they are being judged by their fellow characters. By imagining thesesymbolic interactions, the reader is invited to perceive the full power ofthe iron cage.
According to this analysis, the ethnographers are particularly sensitiveto normative forms of control. Dalton’s work, which is often rememberedfor its identification of informal structure and cliques, provides an illus-tration of the power of the formal to constrain the informal (normative) aswell as the emotional ‘concern’ that it engenders:
But however irregularly the informal operates to make changes, to checkextremes of official – or other informal – action; or however purely evasiveor organizationally superfluous the informal may be, the formal restrains itin at least three ways. First, the formal largely orders the direction theinformal takes. Second, it consequently shapes the character of defensescreated by the informal. And third, whether the formal is brightly or dimlyexistent in the blur of contradictions, it requires overt conformity to itsprecepts. Any concern about the state of operations or the trend of organiz-ational events is directly or indirectly concern for the formal, whether it isonly understood or is officially explicit. (Dalton, 1959: 237)
According to the texts, rules and norms backed by the authority embodiedin general others create a pervasive context of potential judgment. Failingto uphold the organization’s norms of membership is to have one’s member-ship status questioned. Again, according to Dalton:
Staff members were particularly concerned about their dress, a daily shaveand a weekly haircut. The staffs ostracized the rare member who did notmeasure up. One competent and cooperative individual who shaved onlyevery other day, rarely got a haircut, suspended the knot of his tie far belowhis unbottoned collar, and wore the required white shirt beyond the one daylimit was shunned and heckled till he quit his job. (Dalton, 1959: 93)
These normative pressures are particularly well captured by Kunda:
The central image for the member role is that of the self-starter, the entre-preneur. Behavioral rules are vague: be creative, take initiative, take risks,‘push at the system,’ and, ultimately, ‘do what’s right.’ Much more attentionis paid to developing what Mills (1940) calls a ‘vocabulary of motives’ – aspecification of the emotional dimensions of membership that supposedlyexplains behavior: loyalty and commitment, caring, identification, fun,excitement, enthusiasm, the joy of hard work, a ‘high’ from achievement,‘rigidly adhered to’ fetishes, a feeling of ownership, pride in organizationalaffiliation. Moreover, one is well advised to make these aspects of oneselfpublic and – the final touch – to appear to be authentic in so doing. (Kunda,1992: 90–91)
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mechanisms through which certain organizational members influence howother members are to think and feel – what they want, what they fear, whatthey should regard as proper and possible, and, ultimately, perhaps, whothey are. (Kunda, 1992: 93)
The analysis revealed that all four ethnographers (especially Kunda) arehighly sensitive to this form of control and go to great lengths to representit and its emotional correlates in their tales. They do so, perhaps, becausesuch controls are more intimately tied to the member’s identity, self-concept,and relations, and therefore are disturbing when they are coerced to servethe interests of the formal. Yet more importantly, it is doubtful that thereader would be convinced of the control thesis or feel sympathy for thecharacters without this rhetorical strategy.
Contradiction
The rhetorical data in the texts tell stories of members embedded in formaland normative systems of control that direct, evaluate, and discipline theiractions. However, in these data there are also many instances in which thereis disagreement between these authorities. A Catch-22 arises in which anyaction (including inaction) is likely to be deemed a failure by some signifi-cant authority and precipitate punishment. Representation of such cases inthe texts extends the critical aims of the authors.
According to Jackall, the dynamics of normative control systems canissue contradictory directions:
The corporation stimulates the natural impulses of the erotic sphere throughits gathering together of an abundance of attractive and energetic men andwomen and through its continual symbolic celebration of vitality, power, andsuccess. At the same time, the managerial ethic of self-control imposessolemn rules for self-abnegation, at least in public. (Jackall, 1988: 48)
Contradiction between the formal and the normative is also widespread.An example from Kunda reflects the subtle contradiction between the orderpromised by the formal bureaucracy and the reality of political action:
After the first day I was high; I thought: ‘What a great place.’ I went andput all these glowing messages in the system. But this business stuff reallydepressed me. I was shocked to find out that we were just saved by Poseidon.But my boss wouldn’t cooperate with them. He told me not to answer anyquestions that Poseidon people would ask! (Kunda, 1992: 118)
Dalton extends this theme and claims that such contradictions arestructurally inherent facts of life to managers:
To belabor the point for our situation, his sharpest moral pains grew out ofthe clash between administrative logic and social demands. The individualdecision-maker in line or staff who tries, as he usually must, to match hisofficial and unofficial moralities often finds himself without anchor orguiding precept. However he bears the blame of compromised issues thatare never settled to anyone’s complete satisfaction and that reverberateendlessly. (Dalton, 1959: 243)
As these examples suggest, even though the contradictions depicted in therhetoric involve disparate definitions of reality between the official and theunofficial, the locus of conflict is nevertheless within the member and isexperienced emotionally.
Consistent with the rhetorical presentation of potential judgment alreadydiscussed, total institutions differ from other organizations in that theircontradictions are more likely to involve a direct contest between themember’s personal codes of conduct and formal rules. According toGoffman, the staff employs routine methods to ferret out and correct anypersonal attachments that may run counter to formal definitions:
I would like now to consider a source of mortification that is less direct inits effect, with a significance for the individual that is less easy to assess: adisruption of the usual relationship between the individual actor and his acts.The first disruption to consider here is ‘looping’: an agency that creates adefensive response on the part of the inmate takes this very response as thetarget of its next attack. The individual finds that his protective response toan assault upon self is collapsed into the situation; he cannot defend himselfin the usual way by establishing distance between the mortifying situationand himself. (Goffman, 1961: 35–6)
According to Goffman, such exercise of formal power is commonplace intotal institutions. The inmate’s personal authority, when observed to deviatefrom formal direction, is directly penalized. In contrast, the rhetorical datafrom Jackall, Kunda, and Dalton present very few direct contests betweenthe self and the formal. In these tales, ethics, morals, and codes of conductare instead issues to be settled between the normative authorities and theself. Perhaps the authors want us to know that the formal authorities inbureaucracies are largely exempt from such institutional labor becauseformal rules, procedures, and policies are presumably impersonal and areframed as deriving from the needs of a logical and efficient production. Theethnographers are eager to tell us through their rhetoric that althoughmanagerialist scholars such as Taylor, Fayol, and Simon frame organiz-ations metaphorically as impersonal or value-neutral machines, this is anillusion of the formal. Instead they portray a world in which the surfaceorder is accomplished via institutional systems of control undergirded by
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strong, negative, and hidden emotions. The reader comes to see thesecontrols as vivid and real because the authors have constructed characterssubject to these controls and suffering from them. The ethnographersground their institutional analyses with evidence of subjective experiencesin rich social contexts.
Judgment
Until now we have only considered those contexts in which the gavel hasnot yet fallen and judgment is taking its emotional toll only through itspotentiality. However, according to the data, the ethnographers are alsointerested in telling us that some judgments do come to pass and result inprivate and negative emotions of a different stripe. Although less commonin frequency than the rhetoric depicting potential judgment, descriptions ofactual disciplines are still widespread in the texts and reinforce the author’snarrative aims. Jackall provides an example of the feelings that are evokedwhen judgment is publicly enacted:
Although Patterson’s personal catastrophe was considered ‘a fall from graceof the highest order,’ the really remarkable aspect of it to managers who acceptsuch contingency as commonplace was Patterson’s decision to take thedemotion and the public humiliation that accompanied it. (Jackall, 1988: 67)
Jackall provides another example where the failure involves loss in apolitical battle:
At the top of the organization, the loss of prestige occasioned by a majorpolicy defeat leaves the loser with the hard choice between resignation orthe daily humiliation of cheerfully doing something someone else’s way.(Jackall, 1988: 196)
According to Goffman, embarrassment and its disciplinary function is directand consciously used by authorities to control inmates:
Less ceremonialized, but just as extreme, is the embarrassment to one’sautonomy that comes from being locked in a ward, placed in a tight wetpack, or tied in a camisole, and thereby denied the liberty of making smalladjustive movements. (Goffman, 1961: 44)
The ethnographers consistently tell us that humiliation and embarrassmentare common private responses to visible and shared public knowledge thatone has failed in some way according to some recognized authority. Thetexts are telling a tale in which the power of authority is most obvious asthe enactment of public judgment reinforces the notion that the potentialfor judgment is real and not simply a hollow threat. And, while the analysisof potential judgment suggested that the greater sting of discipline would
emanate from the informal, it is confirmed here in the actual act of disci-pline. The authors paint a picture in which the formal authorities evaluatethe member according to presumably rational criteria, but it is the public-ity of the failure in the social community that exercises the brunt of thediscipline.
Remedy
According to the rhetoric of the ethnographers, members adjust and ‘adapt’to such controls through strategies aimed at complying with the statedorders or obfuscating past actions that are vulnerable to negative evalu-ation. However, the ethnographers are also interested in conveying to thereader that this does not imply that members are comfortable with theirexperience or that they have regained emotional neutrality. Rather, theseresearchers are disturbed by the high levels of control they observe andshare a common interest in telling the reader that institutions are bestthought of as instruments of control and, as such, that there is a dark sideto the institutional experience that needs to be remedied. Jackall offers thefollowing conclusion about managers:
. . . over a period of time, psychic asceticism creates a curious sense of guilt,heightened as it happens by narcissistic self-preoccupation. Such guilt, aregret at sustained self-abnegation and deprivation, finds expression princi-pally in one’s private emotional life. One drinks too much; one is subject topencil-snapping fits of alternating anxiety, depression, rage, and self-disgustfor willingly submitting oneself to the knowing and not knowing, to theconstant containment of anger, to the keeping quiet, to the knuckling underthat are inevitable in bureaucratic life. (Jackall, 1988: 204)
A specific case from Men Who Manage tells how, for some, these effectsmay become so pronounced that they can no longer be hidden from othersand become professionally harmful:
Schwann was eased out because he couldn’t do the job. He’d complain ofhis stomach hurting him. Right in the middle of a meeting with a dozenpeople sitting around a table, he’d jump up in pain and run out into the hallto get a drink of water and come back with tears running down his cheeks.He knew of the relation between nervous strain and stomach ulcers so he’dpretend he had indigestion. Hell, we all know he had ulcers. His nervoussystem just couldn’t stand up under that sort of strain. (Dalton, 1959: 171)
According to Kunda, high-tech companies have no choice but to acknowl-edge this as a fact of life; a taken-for-granted part of organizational life thatneeds to be avoided to preserve both personal and organizational well-being. An observation of a training workshop illustrates this:
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Ellen flips the viewgraphs, puts down the marker, and gives a short talk thatsounds off-the-record, very personal, almost motherly: ‘There is a downsideto all of this! There can be a lot of pain in the system! Be careful; keep abalance; don’t overdo it, don’t live off vending machines for a year.[Laughter.] You’ll burn out. I’ve been there; I lived underground for a year,doing code. Balance your life. Don’t say: “I’ll work like crazy for four years,then I’ll get married.” I heard this from a kid. But who will he marry? Don’tlet the company suck you dry; after nine or ten hours your work isn’t worthmuch anyway.’ (Kunda, 1992: 112–13)
Common to these examples is a concern on the part of the authors inrelating an emotional toll that is suffered by prolonged exposure to ‘forcefields’ of potential judgment; to social contexts of chronic probation createdand recreated daily by others and by oneself. Not only is the reader invitedto imagine the symbolic interactions leading to negative emotional experi-ences, but he/she is also invited to imagine that these experiences aresystemic and are reproduced by the institutional culture and structure.
Discussion
The analysis demonstrated how critical ethnography accomplishes its narra-tive aims through the widespread and consistent invitation of readersympathy for its characters. To understand the rhetorical effectiveness ofthis genre of scientific discourse, we must take more seriously the notionthat authors of these texts craft stories that compel social and emotionalparticipation by the reader. The reader imagines the interactions takingplace in these institutional contexts and is invited to identify with and havesympathy for the central characters. It seems unlikely that we the readersof these texts would be convinced that these institutions are in need ofreform had we not gained this point of view. The power of the iron cageover the individual, they tell us, is not obvious from a surface inspection ofactions and expressed attitudes, but rather from an intimate understandingof the structural and cultural contexts that shape the members’ subjectiveexperience.
It seems that all four of the texts studied share the narrative aim of reveal-ing this dark side of bureaucracy. For at least the three decades spanned bythese ethnographies, organizational ethnographers used the presentation ofhidden emotion to exemplify the de-humanizing contexts and costs of lifein modern organizations. In contrast to the extant management literature,these authors characterized occupants of bureaucracy as subjective beingsprone to socially proscribed emotions. The success of these ethnographiesmay be explained, at least in part, by their ability to generate a familiar
sense of social constraint in their readers. The rhetoric of hidden emotionsallows the reader to imagine the difficulty of living in these organizationalsettings, and to sympathize, if not empathize and identify with, the charac-ters portrayed.
Sympathy and identification, however, are not the only rhetorical strat-egies capable of compelling symbolic interactions in the reader’s imagin-ation. For example, virtually all dynamics that occur in face-to-faceinteraction can be rendered in text. Text also has the distinct advantageover face-to-face encounters in that it can unambiguously describe internalstates. Social-psychological feelings such as obligation and reciprocity mayalso be compelled by texts. This offers us a means to more fully explorethe ‘practical,’ as opposed to purely ‘cognitive’ or ‘aesthetic’ facets oftextual rhetoric, by framing reading as an imaginative social activity.
In closing, we believe that it is fruitful both to approach the social worldas a text and also to approach texts as social worlds – as we have done inthis article. We encourage rhetorical scholars to include this perspective infuture studies of scientific texts.
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■ PAUL NUGENT teaches as an adjunct faculty member at theLally School, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is a Lead SystemsEngineer at General Dynamics. He received his PhD inorganizational studies from the University at Albany, SUNY, USA.Address: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Lally School ofManagement, 62 New Lenox Road, Lenox, MA 01240, USA.[email: [email protected]] ■
■ MITCHEL ABOLAFIA teaches organizational theory atRockefeller College, University at Albany, SUNY. He received hisPhD in sociology from the State University of New York at StonyBrook, USA. Address: Department of Public Administration andPolicy, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY 12222, USA. ■
