Webbläsaren som du använder stöds inte av denna webbplats. Alla versioner av Internet Explorer stöds inte längre, av oss eller Microsoft (läs mer här: * https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Var god och använd en modern webbläsare för att ta del av denna webbplats, som t.ex. nyaste versioner av Edge, Chrome, Firefox eller Safari osv.

Effective emotions - the enactment of a work ethic in the Swedish meeting industry

In English

Författare

Summary, in English

The meeting industry – an encompassing term for services related to various kinds of professional meetings, from mega-conventions to the ordinary work meetings – is increasingly consolidated and legitimated as a specific sector in the service in-dustry. New professions such as meeting designers, meeting facilitators and meet-ing consultants are emerging, promoting new knowledge in this field. By focuss-ing on processes and social interaction, and highlighting emotional dimensions of meetings, these professions pave the way for new modes of conceptualising and practising professional relationships. The intangible, emotional and playful di-mensions of social interactions are promoted as effective means to achieve eco-nomic goals, thus highlighting a professional ideal that is here called “effective emotions”. The aim of this article is to show how the work ethic promoted by the meeting industry encourages new intersections, and tensions, between the ideali-sation of the tangible/measurable/rational on the one hand and the intangi-ble/emotional/magical on the other hand, and between working life and intimate spheres. Through a discourse analysis of a Swedish corporate meeting magazine, it is shown how the distinction between work and leisure is dissolved in this specific work culture, and by this, it is discussed how the meeting profession acts as a normative regulator by reinforcing ideal ways of being and interacting with others. Creativity, personal growth, reflexivity and flexibility are enacted as idealised personal assets as well as moral imperatives in the discourse of the meeting pro-fession and through the practices of various meeting techniques, thus reinforcing not merely a professional ethic but cultural ideals of being as a person as well. It is also suggested that this reinforcement may, under certain circumstances, turn into its opposite and undermine the promoted ideals, thus pointing at the importance to pinpoint the dynamic and situated tension between economic rationality and emotional intensity.

Publiceringsår

2010

Språk

Engelska

Sidor

381-400

Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie

Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research

Volym

2

Dokumenttyp

Artikel i tidskrift

Förlag

Linköping University Electronic Press

Ämne

  • Cultural Studies

Nyckelord

  • Work ethic
  • meeting industry
  • emotions
  • discourse.

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISSN: 2000-1525