Ethnography http://eth.sagepub.com Imagining the

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Imagining the `iron cage': The rhetoric of hidden emotions in critical ethnography Paul D. Nugent and Mitchel Y. Abolafia Ethnography 2007; 8; 205 DOI: 10.1177/1466138107078633 The online version of this article can be found at: http://eth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/205

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ARTICLE

graphy Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore) http://www.sagepublications.com Vol 8(2): 205–226[DOI: 10.1177/1466138107078633]

Imagining the ‘iron cage’ The rhetoric of hidden emotions in critical ethnography ■

Paul D. Nugent Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

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Mitchel Y. Abolafia University at Albany, SUNY, USA

A B S T R A C T ■ In this article we argue that the rhetorical power of critical ethnography cannot be fully explained by current concepts in rhetorical studies. Although rhetorical studies acknowledge the role played by sympathy and imagination, they have not recognized the extent to which organizational ethnographers elicit the identification of readers with characters through the depiction of ‘hidden emotions.’ Hidden emotions are those that are subjectively experienced but not publicly expressed. They tend to be depicted in situations in which characters are faced with evaluative judgment or the potential for such judgment.

Rhetorical data from four widely-read critical ethnographies were analyzed using this framework. The analysis revealed strong patterns in the ways the ethnographers portray characters experiencing hidden emotions in controlling institutional contexts. It is through this strategy that the authors are able to succeed in their narrative aims to elaborate Max Weber’s ‘iron cage.’

KEY WORDS

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emotions, rhetoric, social control, critical ethnography

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The embrace of rhetorical analysis under many different guises (e.g. ‘discourse analysis,’ ‘narrative analysis,’ ‘deconstruction,’ etc.), has led to a healthy understanding of ethnographic writings as ‘texts’ that share rhetorical elements with other forms of discourse. Ironically, in so doing, organizational ethnographers have missed the opportunity to return the favor and offer a sociological interpretation of rhetoric in texts. Scientific texts, we argue, can be read as deliberate attempts by authors to form imagined social relationships in the reader’s mind. While the rhetorical linkages between the author and the reader have been fully acknowledged by both rhetorical and scientific scholars, much less attention has been paid to rhetorical strategies aimed at involving the reader’s imagination in the social life of the characters. Critical ethnography, in particular, is a form of scientific writing in which the authors carefully present characters within a narrative compelling sympathetic feelings in the reader. We argue that this strategy, accomplished through patterned representations of subjective experience (hidden emotions) in highly controlling institutional contexts, characterizes the rhetoric of this scientific genre.

The contexts in which hidden emotions are depicted are of particular interest. Organizational ethnographers have been skilled at capturing the ways that organizations struggle to maintain the illusion of rationality and control. When emotions leak out, they threaten that illusion. Our study seeks to understand these contexts. Given the rhetorical aims of critical ethnography, authors may have sought out these contexts in an effort to challenge the imagery of organizations as impersonal machines that reinforces expectations of universal rationality and control.

Identification and sympathy for focal characters 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: On the outside, the adult in our society is typically under the authority of a single immediate superior in connection with his work, or the authority of one spouse in connection with domestic duties; the only echelon authority he 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, and strictly enforced, we may expect inmates, especially new ones, to live with chronic anxiety about breaking the rules and the consequence of breaking them . . . In total institutions staying out of trouble is likely to require

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persistent conscious effort. The inmate may forego certain levels of sociability with his fellows to avoid possible incidents. (Goffman, 1961: 42, 43)

Goffman presents the reader with a set of characters experiencing anxiety and directly links this experience to the institutional context. The reader has probably never been in an asylum; however, the reader likely has experienced anxiety in controlling situations. The reader imagines what the ‘inmates’ are going through and by reading these accounts is invited to experience sympathetic feelings toward these characters. This focus differs from most treatments of rhetoric in literature or sociology which center their analyses on the intersubjective relationship between the author and the reader (Fowler, 1981; Edmondson, 1984; Hunter, 1990). Our analysis covers the relation between the reader and the characters.

A focus on the characters rather than on the author is important because much of the rhetorical power of texts derives from the subjective involvement of the reader in the experiences of these characters. The authors craft their stories with this potential in mind. Yet while some texts strive to encourage a sympathetic involvement in the characters, others are designed to create emotional distancing or buffering. The sympathetic framing of the subject of study, as we saw in the Goffman passage above, is de-emphasized in other forms of social scientific writing. For example, in an analysis of rhetoric in drinking driver research, Gusfield shows how the authors consistently buffer the reader, emotionally, from their objects – the drunk drivers: It is the muting of feeling that is itself the characteristic mood, emotion or feeling of the paper, viewed as a literary document. In this is its author’s stance toward the object of study – the drinking driver – and whatever feeling he might otherwise arouse in the reader. The drinking driver stands as an object 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 the audience. (Gusfield, 1976: 30)

According to Gusfield, the sympathy of the reader is deflected from the drunken driver and directed toward society in general: The avoidance or limitation of feeling provides the writer, and therefore attempts to persuade the reader, with the necessary accompaniment to his identification with the ‘society’ as victim. To see the ‘problem drinker’ in highly differentiated or individual terms or to view him as an object of emotional concern would make the problem of drinking driving less clear and the objective of social control more problematic . . . The drinking driver is 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 empathic relationship with the focal characters in his story. Gusfield tells us that in drunken driving research, the authors do as much as they can to minimize such 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 interest or distance in three basic ways. First, they may present intellectual or cognitive 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 of interest to us here, texts may appeal to the practical interests in which we the 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 the quality of the character’ (p. 125). Further, Booth explains: If we look closely at our reactions to most great novels, we discover that we feel a strong concern for the characters as people; we care about their good and bad fortune. In most works of significance, we are made to admire or detest, to love or hate, or simply to approve or disapprove of at least one central character, and our interest in reading from page to page, like our judgment upon the book after reconsideration, is inseparable from this emotional 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 the reader and the characters in the text. It is indeed ironic, as we shall see later, that sociologists and ethnographers have ignored this central facet of rhetoric in analyzing their own texts in favor of other modes of persuasion (i.e. cognitive/intellectual and qualitative types identified by Booth). It is here that sociology has the most to contribute. Rather than embracing the popular notion that all social processes should be viewed as texts, we should flip this viewpoint on its head and instead approach texts (writings) as imagined social interaction. Some texts, then, may be structured to involve the reader in a manner that achieves specific narrative aims.

Critical ethnography Ethnography is a broad and diverse branch of scientific discourse. To try to link the potential for reader imagination/sympathy to the narrative aims of all ethnography would yield results that are too diffuse and general to be of interest. Therefore we would like to separate ethnography into two broad categories and focus our attention on one of them. First, ethnography was borne out of the recognition by researchers such as Malinowski that interesting aspects of another culture can be rendered in text and can bring the reader to an appreciation of and familiarity with another social world.

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In this traditional form of ethnography, the ‘natives’ tend to be generalized and abstracted. A scholar of ethnographic writing, James Clifford, explains that this mode of ethnography shies away from representing the subjective experience of the natives: . . . the ethnography and the novel have recourse to indirect style at different levels of abstraction. We need not ask how Flaubert knows what Emma Bovary is thinking, but the ability of the fieldworker to inhabit indigenous minds is always in doubt: indeed this is a permanent, unresolved problem of ethnographic method. Ethnographers have generally refrained from ascribing beliefs, feelings, and thoughts to individuals. (Clifford, 1983: 137)

Sociologists, however, have been more apt to represent the subjective experience of their subjects. In particular, critical ethnography has different intentions for the reader and generally does not refrain from ascribing internal states. These are ethnographies that take a critical perspective on particular institutions or structures of society. According to Jermier: The critical theorist’s initial agenda is to capture and portray the insider’s perspective. For this reason, most critical theorists employ methods that allow them to ground their research in the accounts of individuals and groups whose perspectives are ordinarily devalued or neglected. To evince a critical perspective typically requires that researchers give voice to the words and interpretations of the people they study and be open to giving them credence in some serious way . . .

The critical theorist’s agenda is not identical to that of a conventional ethnographer, however, for, in addition to portraying their informants’ world view, critical theorists also aim to reveal socioeconomic conditions that produce and reinforce asymmetrical structures of control. (Jermier, 1998: 240)

It is in this class of ethnography that we find the experiences of individual members and groups who are subjects of formalized institutional control systems. It is in this form of ethnography that we would like to explore more deeply the way in which ethnographers build social and sympathetic relationships between the reader and the characters in their stories and, more importantly, how this rhetorical move supports their narrative/critical aims. In particular, we shall see how in four organizational ethnographies hidden emotions tied to contexts of potential and actual judgment are widespread and rhetorically effective.

Method In designing this study we wanted to explore how critical ethnographers compel the reader to imagine a sympathetic relationship with the characters 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 institutional contexts.

Melville Dalton’s Men Who Manage (1959), Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes (1988), Gideon Kunda’s Engineering Culture (1992), and Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961) were chosen as texts for this analysis. These texts were selected based upon their reputations for being penetrating critical ethnographies of life within organizations and institutions. They represent a sampling of different kinds of bureaucratic institutions across several decades. These four ethnographies share a critical common ground in that they are attempting to reveal how modern institutions are indeed ‘iron cages’ able to control members’ thoughts, actions, and subjective experiences through subtle, and not so subtle, cultural and structural means.

In these works, the ethnographers show that the familiar control methods of monitoring and coercion are augmented by less obtrusive but highly effective structural and cultural elements designed to redefine the members’ sense of self and morality. These powerful controls are difficult to observe at a surface level. The four ethnographers endeavor to convince the reader that much more is going on than meets the eye.

Sociology would suggest that the most powerful invitations for reader identification and sympathy for the characters would coincide with descriptions of the subjective experience of the focal characters (institutional members/inmates) in social contexts (i.e. the set of observers/evaluators most 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 references to subjective experience (primarily emotions) and the social contexts in which they appeared. For each subjective reference, the paragraph in which it appeared or several sentences preceding the reference were also transcribed verbatim into a database to capture the context. A database was compiled which facilitated sorting and comparison along multiple codes and criteria. A total of 2750 initial emotion-related references and contexts were 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 to analyze the data.

Analysis: portraying hidden emotion The analysis developed categories and codes for both the emotion references and the associated contexts. We will first address the different types of emotions identified independent of context, and then turn our attention to the social contexts that correlated with these types.

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Experience/expression of internal states Whether or not the referenced emotion was actually experienced or expressed by the characters emerged as an analytically important distinction. We considered whether each reflected an emotion that was experienced versus not experienced (e.g. ‘the member was angered by’ versus ‘the member was not angered by’) and also whether each reflected an emotion that was expressed versus not expressed. Together these two dichotomous codes form four ‘types’ into which each entry in the database could be separated (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 form an exhaustive set and a frequency plot would obscure comparison. The first conclusion to draw from Figure 2 is the dominant presence of ‘hidden’ emotions in the texts. ‘Hidden’ emotions are those emotion references that indicate that an emotion is actually experienced by a member but is not expressed publicly. At this point in the analysis this was a surprise because we had little theoretical precedent with which to explain this. A reading of the literature on organizational emotions would leave one with the distinct impression that emotional life in organizations is dominated by staged performances to influence others or to conform to formal and informal role expectations (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 describing members as genuinely experiencing emotions but hiding this internal state from the public (i.e. not expressing what they were feeling). We cannot conclude that this represents some ‘true’ proportion of subjective experience in organizations nor is such a claim our goal. Rather we conclude from these findings that the widespread representation of hidden feelings in these texts was a primary or characteristic means by which these critical

yes

I – “hidden” experienced, not expressed

II – “genuine” experienced, expressed

Experienced no

III – “absent” IV – “staged” not experienced, not experienced, not expressed expressed no

yes Expressed

Figure 1

Experienced/expressed codes.

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70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0%

Experienced, expressed (genuine)

20.0%

Experienced, not expressed (hidden)

10.0%

Not experienced, expressed (staged)

0.0% Goffman

Figure 2

Dalton

Not experienced, not expressed (absent) Kunda

Jackall

Distribution of experienced/expressed codes.

ethnographies project human experience in bureaucracy. Therefore in the early stages of the analysis we reduced our focus exclusively to ‘hidden’ emotions. Let us now turn our attention to a more intensive analysis of the rhetorical 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 well as the context in which it appeared. Therefore the surprising finding that hidden emotions are so widespread in these texts encouraged us to explore the social contexts associated with their suppression.

A fundamental assumption of critical theory (e.g. Jermier, 1998) is that because purely economic or casual observations of a setting are unable to expose social injustices, and that the natives themselves often lack the analytical tools with which to communicate them, the responsibility falls on the critical observer to identify them and to persuade others of their existence. Therefore one of the tasks for the critical ethnographer is to explain not simply what is hidden (the emotional experiences of members), but why it is hidden. In the case of organizational ethnography, critical ethnographers use these portrayals of subjective experience as evidence of the dark side of the ‘iron cage’ – their ultimate narrative aim.

According to the data, the ethnographers repeatedly tell us that there is a side of the member’s emotional life that is characterized by its personal privacy – by the very notion that much of emotional experience is never communicated to others verbally or expressively. The authors provide an

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explanation in their texts. Norms discouraging unsanctioned emotional expression are endemic to controlling institutions and are well-described in the texts. According to Jackall, special informal rules apply to managers: The price of bureaucratic power is a relentlessly methodical subjection of one’s impulses, at least in public. To yield to one’s desires in a public setting in a way that others can use against one . . . submitting to the temptation to show one’s anger, is seen as irrational, unbefitting men or women whose principal claim to social legitimacy is dispassionate rational calculation.

(Jackall, 1988: 49)

An engineer from Kunda’s study discovers the utility of compliance to such rules: Before I had a one-on-one with my boss, I read some advice in Things They Never Taught Me at the Harvard Business School. It says: ‘Never show them that you’re feeling anything; keep a straight face; confuse them.’ It’s exactly what I did. Worked too. (Kunda, 1992: 186)

Goffman offers another example identifying a device mental institutions use to banish public expression that was permissible on the outside: Deference patterns in total institutions provide one illustration of the looping effect. In civil society, when an individual must accept circumstances and commands that affront his conception of self, he is allowed a margin of facesaving reactive expression – sullenness, failure to offer usual signs of deference, sotto voce profaning asides, or fugitive expressions of contempt, irony, and derision. Compliance, then, is likely to be associated with an expressed attitude to it that is not itself subject to the same degree of pressure for compliance. Although such self-protective expressive response to humiliating demands does occur in total institutions, the staff may directly penalize inmates for such activity, citing sullenness or insolence explicitly as grounds for further punishment. (Goffman, 1961: 36)

Strong norms and sanctions inhibit these actors from publicly revealing their innermost feelings. To express these kinds of feelings would be to engage in behavior deemed unsuccessful or inappropriate by a prevailing authority. According to Hochschild (1983), ‘feeling rules’ are those rules that direct how one should feel in a specific situation according to cultural norms and are characterized, especially in the service industry, by their positiveness (e.g. cheerfulness, friendliness, enthusiasm). Therefore the authors of these texts focus on another kind of feeling rule that deals not with how one should feel but, rather, with how one should not reveal feelings that are incongruent with the context. The four ethnographers want the reader to see that the member’s experience is not the product of personality, ethnicity, 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 ‘iron cages’ controlling individual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the authors must include evidence of these controls in their texts.

Leaks are moments when authentic negative emotions are not successfully hidden. By examining what is done with this information when it is made public, ethnographers show us how these controls are related to the organization and further invite sympathy for the member characters. They cite examples of leaks to make visible the otherwise invisible control. Therefore, although not part of the primary dataset now under consideration, some of the data in the ‘genuine’ emotions category were revisited to clarify the sources of these controls. Goffman presents a situation where the institution is able to penetrate into the inmate’s private world and use information about his private feelings against him: In total institutions spheres of life are segregated, so that an inmate’s conduct in one scene of activity is thrown up to him by staff as a comment and check upon his conduct in another context. A mental patient’s effort to present himself in a well-oriented, unantagonistic manner during a diagnostic or treatment conference may be directly embarrassed by evidence introduced concerning his apathy during recreation or the bitter comments he made in a letter to a sibling . . . (Goffman, 1961: 37)

Kunda elaborates on the concept of ‘depersonalization’ where ‘the emotions experienced as part of the organizational self are presented as distinct from other 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 suppress personal and spontaneous reactions to the work environment, thus purging them 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 concerned with covering your own ass than being part of the team. It was not necessary to laboriously reveal your personal feelings on this. This certainly does not promote feelings of trust with the people you need to work with. I will not show it to anyone else on the design team since I believe its content would doom your effort to work with them. Dealing with the meetings was my problem to work. Please try in the future to deal in diplomacy rather than negativism and defensiveness. Come and talk with me if you desire.

(Kunda, 1992: 191)

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The ethnographers show us that organizations and total institutions possess formal and informal controls designed specifically to erase from public currency evidence of subjective realities that run counter to feeling rules.

The privatization of real feelings is imperative to membership – a task to be vigilantly managed in parallel with one’s public emotional performances.

The ethnographers consistently draw upon this bureaucratic stifling in narrating their tales of control.

Fear, embarrassment, and their institutional contexts The ethnographers consistently invoked two distinct institutional contexts in which negative hidden emotions were experienced by members: potential judgment and judgment. Potential judgment refers to those contexts in which the member believes he or she may be evaluated negatively by authorities and disciplined. Fear, worry, and anxiety are common subjective responses to these contexts. Judgment is the social context in which discipline actually comes to pass. Embarrassment and humiliation are typical emotions associated with judgment. These contexts are widespread in organizations and, as such, are occasions for ethnographers to illustrate control by compelling reader sympathy. The four ethnographers draw on the subjective experience of organizational control to convey to the reader the subtle yet powerful ways in which control is achieved within organizations. We, as readers, probably would not ‘buy’ their argument without this evidence.

In the texts, fear, anxiety, worry, and nervousness are emotions commonly associated with contexts of potential judgment. The data show the development of characters embedded in formal and normative ‘systems of control’. According to Edwards (1978), systems of social control require, at a minimum, direction (i.e. rules, definitions, and scripts of expected behavior), evaluation (i.e. the judgment by those issuing the rules of one’s compliance), and discipline (i.e. the actions taken by authorities if the evaluation is negative). If any one of the moments in this circuit is missing, control is lost. Potential judgment captures the subjective side of these control systems in which the member is aware that he or she is embedded in an environment structured to observe his or her actions, evaluate them for compliance, and discipline deviance. The ethnographies center on the depiction of the members’ embeddedness in and emotional experience of formal and normative control systems. Representing the subjective point of view of the members, the ethnographers also convey to the reader that these systems of control are rarely harmonious and coherent with one another but, rather, are characterized by strongly felt contradictions. Let us turn our attention to a more detailed analysis of the ethnographers’ portrayal of characters experiencing these formal and normative control systems.

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Potential judgment Ethnographers paint a picture of organizational life in which members find themselves in and accept, for the most part, a formal authority structure.

Inmates are subject to staff authority while workers and managers encounter a structure of bureaucratic superiors. In all cases, the four authors construct characters that experience strong emotions in response to the possibility of being singled out and disciplined by these authorities. The reader comes to ‘see’ the social controls from their point-of-view.

Kunda illustrates how nervousness and worry accompany a presenter about 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 that training budgets are being cut. ‘Overhead’ people are always nervous around this time of year. ‘My wife told me this morning to start applying some of this stuff to myself,’ he tells me. (Kunda, 1992: 122)

Dalton shows how emotional orientations to the judgment of superiors is not restricted to formal role-prescribed behaviors but includes a proper stance toward their ideology as well: The fear of seeming not to meet this expectation [supporting the views of superiors] was illustrated by Haupt’s reaction (Chapter 4) to his subordinates 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 level managers would have felt in this situation. (Dalton, 1959: 186)

Jackall illustrates the ubiquity of this relationship to the accepted authority of superiors: . . . I looked at this display and instantly hated them. I was asked what I thought but before I could open my mouth, people were jumping up and down clapping the designer on the back and so on. They had already decided to do it because the president had loved it. Of course, the whole affair was a total failure. The point is that in making decisions, people look up and look around. They rely on others, not because of inexperience, but because of fear of failure. They look up and look to others before they take any plunges. (Jackall, 1988: 77)

But according to the ethnographers, what is actually being feared, worried about, or causing anxiety? It was in this area that accounts of total institutions (Asylums) and of organizations differed. According to Goffman, formal authorities in total institutions are closely associated with disciplinary action:

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It seems characteristic of every establishment, and especially of total institutions, that some forms of deference will be specific to it, with inmates as givers and staff as recipients. For this to occur, those who are to receive spontaneous expressions of regard must be the very ones to teach the forms and enforce them. It follows that in total institutions one crucial difference from civil life is that deference is placed on a formal footing, with specific demands being made and specific negative sanctions accorded for infractions; not only will 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 tell us that the evaluation-discipline circuit is not carried out entirely by those embodying formal authority. While formal authorities are able to initiate evaluations of success and failure along some bureaucratic performance criteria, it is the publicity of such information throughout the organization that appears to carry the greater weight of the discipline. According to Jackall: There is no more feared hour in the corporate world than ‘blame-time’ . . .

Blame is quite different from responsibility. To blame someone is to injure him verbally in public; in large organizations where one’s image is crucial to one’s ‘credibility’ and therefore one’s influence, this poses the most serious sort of threat. For managers, blame-like failure has little to do with the actual merits of a case; it is a matter of social definition, that is, of public perception of having failed or, more usually, of being associated with a failure, a perception 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 the exercise of discipline. Publicizing a formal and presumably objective evaluation, with or without formal sanctions, sets into motion informal disciplines – loss of ‘credibility,’ tainted ‘reputation’ – that are decoupled from the evaluating agent. A passage from Men Who Manage also illustrates this sensitivity of bureaucrats to the appearance of their disciplines: Where all members of a deviant clique are considered indispensable and above the humiliation of what cannot be concealed as obvious disciplinary action, all may be dispersed to different parts of the firm, or incorporated into some kind of rotating system to limit expression of excessive clique skills or 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 the evaluative aspect for the formal structure while farming out much of its disciplinary aspect to the informal.

Therefore ethnographers are interested in telling the reader that despite its impersonal and neutral front, the formal is extremely powerful and embeds the members in social contexts characterized by the concomitant experience of strong negative emotions. According to the authors, inmates, workers, and managers are acutely aware that formal authorities possess the power to direct, evaluate, and discipline and the potential that one may be evaluated negatively and punished consistently induces fear, worry, nervousness, and anxiety.

The four ethnographers also tell us that normative systems of control are important in the day-to-day emotional life of members and that judges in organizational contexts are not restricted to those imbued with formal authority. General others in these contexts also enact their own systems of control via informal norms and rituals. According to Goffman’s (1967) Interaction Ritual, our daily interactions are governed by the rules defined in ‘mini-rituals’: If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the fact that societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilizing the individual for this purpose is through ritual; he is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self and a self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and a certain amount of poise. (Goffman, 1967: 44)

At one extreme we would expect many encounters in organizations to conform to these society level rules or directions and be wholly independent of the structures and cultures of the organization. However, at some point they do begin to overlap. The ethnographers claim that such faceto-face encounters with general others are rich in language, gestures, and subtle expressions that indicate one’s orientation to the overall social context and are therefore related to the organization’s interests and goals.

While at one level this context is grounded in society’s rituals as Goffman describes and allows general others to judge one qua ‘citizen,’ at another level they enable others to judge one qua ‘member’ and thus enter the realm of organization-unique normative control. The reader comes to see that these characters are not simply role occupants but instead are whole human beings embedded in a complex social world of observers and evaluators. The emotional well-being of these characters is intimately tied to

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how they are being judged by their fellow characters. By imagining these symbolic interactions, the reader is invited to perceive the full power of the iron cage.

According to this analysis, the ethnographers are particularly sensitive to normative forms of control. Dalton’s work, which is often remembered for its identification of informal structure and cliques, provides an illustration of the power of the formal to constrain the informal (normative) as well as the emotional ‘concern’ that it engenders: But however irregularly the informal operates to make changes, to check extremes of official – or other informal – action; or however purely evasive or organizationally superfluous the informal may be, the formal restrains it in at least three ways. First, the formal largely orders the direction the informal takes. Second, it consequently shapes the character of defenses created by the informal. And third, whether the formal is brightly or dimly existent in the blur of contradictions, it requires overt conformity to its precepts. Any concern about the state of operations or the trend of organizational events is directly or indirectly concern for the formal, whether it is only understood or is officially explicit. (Dalton, 1959: 237)

According to the texts, rules and norms backed by the authority embodied in general others create a pervasive context of potential judgment. Failing to uphold the organization’s norms of membership is to have one’s membership status questioned. Again, according to Dalton: Staff members were particularly concerned about their dress, a daily shave and a weekly haircut. The staffs ostracized the rare member who did not measure up. One competent and cooperative individual who shaved only every other day, rarely got a haircut, suspended the knot of his tie far below his unbottoned collar, and wore the required white shirt beyond the one day limit 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 entrepreneur. Behavioral rules are vague: be creative, take initiative, take risks, ‘push at the system,’ and, ultimately, ‘do what’s right.’ Much more attention is paid to developing what Mills (1940) calls a ‘vocabulary of motives’ – a specification of the emotional dimensions of membership that supposedly explains 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 organizational affiliation. Moreover, one is well advised to make these aspects of oneself public and – the final touch – to appear to be authentic in so doing. (Kunda, 1992: 90–91)

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Kunda also notes that rituals are mechanisms through which certain organizational members influence how other members are to think and feel – what they want, what they fear, what they should regard as proper and possible, and, ultimately, perhaps, who they are. (Kunda, 1992: 93)

The analysis revealed that all four ethnographers (especially Kunda) are highly sensitive to this form of control and go to great lengths to represent it and its emotional correlates in their tales. They do so, perhaps, because such controls are more intimately tied to the member’s identity, self-concept, and relations, and therefore are disturbing when they are coerced to serve the interests of the formal. Yet more importantly, it is doubtful that the reader would be convinced of the control thesis or feel sympathy for the characters without this rhetorical strategy.

Contradiction The rhetorical data in the texts tell stories of members embedded in formal and normative systems of control that direct, evaluate, and discipline their actions. However, in these data there are also many instances in which there is disagreement between these authorities. A Catch-22 arises in which any action (including inaction) is likely to be deemed a failure by some significant authority and precipitate punishment. Representation of such cases in the texts extends the critical aims of the authors.

According to Jackall, the dynamics of normative control systems can issue contradictory directions: The corporation stimulates the natural impulses of the erotic sphere through its gathering together of an abundance of attractive and energetic men and women and through its continual symbolic celebration of vitality, power, and success. At the same time, the managerial ethic of self-control imposes solemn 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 order promised 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 and put all these glowing messages in the system. But this business stuff really depressed 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 any questions that Poseidon people would ask! (Kunda, 1992: 118)

Dalton extends this theme and claims that such contradictions are structurally inherent facts of life to managers:

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To belabor the point for our situation, his sharpest moral pains grew out of the clash between administrative logic and social demands. The individual decision-maker in line or staff who tries, as he usually must, to match his official and unofficial moralities often finds himself without anchor or guiding precept. However he bears the blame of compromised issues that are never settled to anyone’s complete satisfaction and that reverberate endlessly. (Dalton, 1959: 243)

As these examples suggest, even though the contradictions depicted in the rhetoric involve disparate definitions of reality between the official and the unofficial, the locus of conflict is nevertheless within the member and is experienced emotionally.

Consistent with the rhetorical presentation of potential judgment already discussed, total institutions differ from other organizations in that their contradictions are more likely to involve a direct contest between the member’s personal codes of conduct and formal rules. According to Goffman, the staff employs routine methods to ferret out and correct any personal attachments that may run counter to formal definitions: I would like now to consider a source of mortification that is less direct in its effect, with a significance for the individual that is less easy to assess: a disruption of the usual relationship between the individual actor and his acts.

The first disruption to consider here is ‘looping’: an agency that creates a defensive response on the part of the inmate takes this very response as the target of its next attack. The individual finds that his protective response to an assault upon self is collapsed into the situation; he cannot defend himself in the usual way by establishing distance between the mortifying situation and himself. (Goffman, 1961: 35–6)

According to Goffman, such exercise of formal power is commonplace in total institutions. The inmate’s personal authority, when observed to deviate from formal direction, is directly penalized. In contrast, the rhetorical data from Jackall, Kunda, and Dalton present very few direct contests between the self and the formal. In these tales, ethics, morals, and codes of conduct are instead issues to be settled between the normative authorities and the self. Perhaps the authors want us to know that the formal authorities in bureaucracies are largely exempt from such institutional labor because formal rules, procedures, and policies are presumably impersonal and are framed as deriving from the needs of a logical and efficient production. The ethnographers are eager to tell us through their rhetoric that although managerialist scholars such as Taylor, Fayol, and Simon frame organizations metaphorically as impersonal or value-neutral machines, this is an illusion of the formal. Instead they portray a world in which the surface order is accomplished via institutional systems of control undergirded by

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strong, negative, and hidden emotions. The reader comes to see these controls as vivid and real because the authors have constructed characters subject to these controls and suffering from them. The ethnographers ground their institutional analyses with evidence of subjective experiences in rich social contexts.

Judgment Until now we have only considered those contexts in which the gavel has not yet fallen and judgment is taking its emotional toll only through its potentiality. However, according to the data, the ethnographers are also interested in telling us that some judgments do come to pass and result in private and negative emotions of a different stripe. Although less common in frequency than the rhetoric depicting potential judgment, descriptions of actual disciplines are still widespread in the texts and reinforce the author’s narrative aims. Jackall provides an example of the feelings that are evoked when judgment is publicly enacted: Although Patterson’s personal catastrophe was considered ‘a fall from grace of the highest order,’ the really remarkable aspect of it to managers who accept such contingency as commonplace was Patterson’s decision to take the demotion and the public humiliation that accompanied it. (Jackall, 1988: 67)

Jackall provides another example where the failure involves loss in a political battle: At the top of the organization, the loss of prestige occasioned by a major policy defeat leaves the loser with the hard choice between resignation or the daily humiliation of cheerfully doing something someone else’s way.

(Jackall, 1988: 196)

According to Goffman, embarrassment and its disciplinary function is direct and consciously used by authorities to control inmates: Less ceremonialized, but just as extreme, is the embarrassment to one’s autonomy that comes from being locked in a ward, placed in a tight wet pack, or tied in a camisole, and thereby denied the liberty of making small adjustive movements. (Goffman, 1961: 44)

The ethnographers consistently tell us that humiliation and embarrassment are common private responses to visible and shared public knowledge that one has failed in some way according to some recognized authority. The texts are telling a tale in which the power of authority is most obvious as the enactment of public judgment reinforces the notion that the potential for judgment is real and not simply a hollow threat. And, while the analysis of potential judgment suggested that the greater sting of discipline would

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emanate from the informal, it is confirmed here in the actual act of discipline. The authors paint a picture in which the formal authorities evaluate the member according to presumably rational criteria, but it is the publicity of the failure in the social community that exercises the brunt of the discipline.

Remedy According to the rhetoric of the ethnographers, members adjust and ‘adapt’ to such controls through strategies aimed at complying with the stated orders or obfuscating past actions that are vulnerable to negative evaluation. However, the ethnographers are also interested in conveying to the reader that this does not imply that members are comfortable with their experience or that they have regained emotional neutrality. Rather, these researchers are disturbed by the high levels of control they observe and share a common interest in telling the reader that institutions are best thought of as instruments of control and, as such, that there is a dark side to the institutional experience that needs to be remedied. Jackall offers the following 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, a regret at sustained self-abnegation and deprivation, finds expression principally in one’s private emotional life. One drinks too much; one is subject to pencil-snapping fits of alternating anxiety, depression, rage, and self-disgust for willingly submitting oneself to the knowing and not knowing, to the constant containment of anger, to the keeping quiet, to the knuckling under that are inevitable in bureaucratic life. (Jackall, 1988: 204)

A specific case from Men Who Manage tells how, for some, these effects may become so pronounced that they can no longer be hidden from others and become professionally harmful: Schwann was eased out because he couldn’t do the job. He’d complain of his stomach hurting him. Right in the middle of a meeting with a dozen people sitting around a table, he’d jump up in pain and run out into the hall to 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’d pretend he had indigestion. Hell, we all know he had ulcers. His nervous system just couldn’t stand up under that sort of strain. (Dalton, 1959: 171)

According to Kunda, high-tech companies have no choice but to acknowledge this as a fact of life; a taken-for-granted part of organizational life that needs to be avoided to preserve both personal and organizational wellbeing. 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 that sounds off-the-record, very personal, almost motherly: ‘There is a downside to all of this! There can be a lot of pain in the system! Be careful; keep a balance; 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’t let the company suck you dry; after nine or ten hours your work isn’t worth much anyway.’ (Kunda, 1992: 112–13)

Common to these examples is a concern on the part of the authors in relating an emotional toll that is suffered by prolonged exposure to ‘force fields’ of potential judgment; to social contexts of chronic probation created and recreated daily by others and by oneself. Not only is the reader invited to imagine the symbolic interactions leading to negative emotional experiences, but he/she is also invited to imagine that these experiences are systemic and are reproduced by the institutional culture and structure.

Discussion The analysis demonstrated how critical ethnography accomplishes its narrative aims through the widespread and consistent invitation of reader sympathy for its characters. To understand the rhetorical effectiveness of this genre of scientific discourse, we must take more seriously the notion that authors of these texts craft stories that compel social and emotional participation by the reader. The reader imagines the interactions taking place in these institutional contexts and is invited to identify with and have sympathy for the central characters. It seems unlikely that we the readers of these texts would be convinced that these institutions are in need of reform had we not gained this point of view. The power of the iron cage over the individual, they tell us, is not obvious from a surface inspection of actions and expressed attitudes, but rather from an intimate understanding of the structural and cultural contexts that shape the members’ subjective experience.

It seems that all four of the texts studied share the narrative aim of revealing this dark side of bureaucracy. For at least the three decades spanned by these ethnographies, organizational ethnographers used the presentation of hidden emotion to exemplify the de-humanizing contexts and costs of life in modern organizations. In contrast to the extant management literature, these authors characterized occupants of bureaucracy as subjective beings prone to socially proscribed emotions. The success of these ethnographies may be explained, at least in part, by their ability to generate a familiar

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sense of social constraint in their readers. The rhetoric of hidden emotions allows the reader to imagine the difficulty of living in these organizational settings, and to sympathize, if not empathize and identify with, the characters portrayed.

Sympathy and identification, however, are not the only rhetorical strategies capable of compelling symbolic interactions in the reader’s imagination. For example, virtually all dynamics that occur in face-to-face interaction can be rendered in text. Text also has the distinct advantage over face-to-face encounters in that it can unambiguously describe internal states. Social-psychological feelings such as obligation and reciprocity may also be compelled by texts. This offers us a means to more fully explore the ‘practical,’ as opposed to purely ‘cognitive’ or ‘aesthetic’ facets of textual rhetoric, by framing reading as an imaginative social activity.

In closing, we believe that it is fruitful both to approach the social world as a text and also to approach texts as social worlds – as we have done in this article. We encourage rhetorical scholars to include this perspective in future studies of scientific texts.

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Jackall, R. (1988) Moral Mazes. New York: Oxford University Press.

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PAUL NUGENT teaches as an adjunct faculty member at the Lally School, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is a Lead Systems Engineer at General Dynamics. He received his PhD in organizational studies from the University at Albany, SUNY, USA. Address: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Lally School of Management, 62 New Lenox Road, Lenox, MA 01240, USA. [email: paul.nugent@gd-ais.com] ■

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MITCHEL ABOLAFIA teaches organizational theory at Rockefeller College, University at Albany, SUNY. He received his PhD in sociology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. Address: Department of Public Administration and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY 12222, USA. ■

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