Content uploaded by Kathleen Rodgers
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Kathleen Rodgers on Feb 08, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csms20
Social Movement Studies
ISSN: 1474-2837 (Print) 1474-2829 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csms20
‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and
Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist
Organization
Kathleen Rodgers
To cite this article: Kathleen Rodgers (2010) ‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and
Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization, Social Movement Studies, 9:3,
273-291, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2010.493660
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2010.493660
Published online: 30 Jul 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 1367
View related articles
Citing articles: 27 View citing articles
‘Anger is Why We’re All Here’: Mobilizing
and Managing Emotions in a Professional
Activist Organization
KATHLEEN RODGERS
Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
ABSTRACT The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to,
motivation for, and sustainability of social movements. But this perspective on the role of emotions
within social movements contrasts with studies of emotions within mainstream organizations where
employees are called on to manage their own emotions and those of others. Thus, while much social
movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional expression, these ideas
rarely intersect with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of
working life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize emotions.
Using in-depth interviews with activists at Amnesty International, this article bridges this
theoretical divide by examining emotional labour and emotional regulation among paid activists
in a professional social movement organization. I explore the ways in which employees struggle
with the emotional component of their work and the implications of these emotions for the
quality of their working life, the stability of such organizations and the maintenance of social
movements.
KEY WORDS: Emotions, Social Movement organizations, professional activists, Human Rights
movement
Anger is why we’re all here, it’s why we all chose to work in an NGO rather than
somewhere else ... anger at injustice ... and even anger that we live the life we
live ...
1
The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to,
motivation for, and sustainability of social movements (Jasper, 1997; Goodwin et al., 2004;
Flam & King, 2005; Goodwin & Jasper, 2006). In recent years, scholars of social
movements, with the goal of coming ‘closer to understanding the subjective experience
of social actors’ have highlighted this significance (Jasper, 2009, p. 179). In asserting the
importance of the emotional content of social movement dynamics, much of this
sociological research focuses on the constructive role of emotions within protest activities
(Jasper, 1997, 1998, 2009) but also in more formal channels of activism such as
1474-2837 Print/1474-2829 Online/10/030273-19 q2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2010.493660
Correspondence Address: Kathleen Rodgers, Faculty of Social Sciences, 55 Laurier East, Desmarais Building, RM
8101, University of Ottowa, Ottowa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada. Email: Kathleen.Rodgers@uottawa.ca
Social Movement Studies,
Vol. 9, No. 3, 273–291, August 2010
professionalized social movement organizations (Goodwin et al., 2004). But this optimistic
perspective on the role of emotions within movements is in stark contrast to studies of
emotions within organizations that focus on the extent to which employees are called
upon to manage their own emotions and those of others (Hochschild, 1979, 1983, 2001;
Vince & Broussine, 1996; Domalgaski, 1999; Grandey, 2000). Thus, while much social
movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional responses
and how social movements benefit from shared emotions, these ideas rarely intersect
with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of working
life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize certain
emotions.
2
In this article I bridge this theoretical divide by examining emotional labour among paid
activists in a professional social movement organization. Using data from in-depth
interviews with paid activists at Amnesty International, I confirm the assertion put forward
within social movement studies that by motivating employees and providing a sense of
solidarity, several emotions do play an important organizational function at Amnesty
International.
3
Indeed, as the introductory quote indicates, for many the emotional
component of the work is precisely what attracts them; for many there is a perverse
attraction to work that makes them angry, highlighting the centrality of shared emotions to
Amnesty’s ability to recruit staff.
4
However, the content of this emotionally-charged work
may both motivate and distress workers, compelling them to develop strategies for dealing
with the discomfort of emotional strain. In this article I explore the ways in which
employees struggle with the emotional component of their work, the implications of these
emotions for the quality of their working life and the extent to which this could become a
dilemma for organizations seeking to harness the ‘emotional energy’ that commitment to
principled issues can provide (Aminzade & McAdam, 2002).
I begin by documenting the unique dynamics surrounding emotion within Amnesty
International’s International Secretariat in an effort to provide insight into the ways
through which the emotional components of paid activism present problems for an
increasing number of organizations that straddle the divide between being a movement
organization and an institution (Della Porta & Diani, 2006). Thus, I employ these findings
as a theoretical tool to understand the role of the emotional content of social activism in the
evolution of social movements.
Methods
Amnesty International is a complex bureaucracy with a combination of centralized and
decentralized decision-making processes. The Amnesty International Secretariat (IS), the
focus of this study, is a formalized bureaucratic structure with over 400 paid staff and a
professional leadership.
5
Located in London, England, the IS is a distinct organization
within Amnesty’s larger global structure. It is the headquarters and workhorse for the
global network of national chapters that cumulatively mobilize over 1 million members,
and that exercise the ‘base’ of the Amnesty ‘movement’.
Amnesty’s International Secretariat is composed of researchers, campaigners,
fundraisers, and administrative and executive staff. With a few exceptions, all research
and activist campaigns are coordinated through the London headquarters. Although my
interview sample included respondents from all sectors of the organization, my analysis
focuses on the largest section of the IS – Research and Administration – which works
274 K. Rodgers
most closely with the group’s substantive human rights issues. However, I also draw
important insight from interviews with people outside of these positions. My sample
includes 50 in-depth semi-structured interviews with present and former employees from
all levels and sectors of the IS, as well as a review of internal organizational documents.
Data collection began in March 2003, and was completed in October 2006. In addition,
Stephen Hopgood (2006) conducted a superb ethnography of the internal dynamics of the
Amnesty Secretariat, though his work was not done through a lens of emotional labour.
However, I draw extensively on his detailed work in order to illuminate my understanding
of the emotional component of work within Amnesty International.
Emotions in Activism and Organizations
Academics have long lamented the absence of a scholarly focus on emotions in both
organizational studies (see, for example, Fineman, 1993; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995)
and research on social movements (Calhoun, 2001; Goodwin et al., 2001; Goodwin et al.,
2004). Domalgaski (1999, p. 836) argues that the inattention in organizational studies is
‘largely due to the longstanding emphasis on rationality and more deliberate modes of
performance in organizations’. The same critique has been levelled at theorists of social
movements who, by rectifying the lack of rationality attributed to social movement actors
in early social movement theory, ultimately neglected the legitimate role of more
subjective forces in mobilization (Lofland, 1981; Calhoun, 2001; Gould, 2003). There has
been a recent and dramatic resurgence in the study of emotions in each of these fields, but
the analysis of emotions within organizations generally focuses on client-focused service
occupations. Studies of emotion in social movements, by contrast, focus primarily on
unpaid activists, despite the fact that professional social movement organizations are
increasingly operating not only as sites of activism, but also of large-scale employment
(Minkoff & McCarthy, 2005). Below I briefly discuss the development and intersection of
these fields.
Beginning in the 1980s, scholars within the social movement field lamented the overly
structuralist and rationalistic focus in dominant models of social action and called for
return to a focus on the subjective elements of activism (Jasper, 1997, 1998). The ‘cultural
turn’ that took place in the 1980s brought a focus to cognitive ‘frames’ and in so doing,
began to draw attention to ideas that ‘resonate’ with people (Goodwin et al., 2000, p. 78).
Despite this focus on culture, however, many scholars argue that the dominant political
process/resource mobilization models even now lack an accurate understanding of the
central role that emotions play in the dynamics of protest and politics (Goodwin et al.,
2000; Flam & King, 2005). As Schrock et al. (2004, p. 64) argue, ‘naming something an
injustice ... simultaneously instructs others that anger is appropriate and social change is
necessary’ particularly where broader emotional cultures instruct that the collective
expression of emotions such as anger is unacceptable. Thus, alongside the cultural turn in
the study of social movements that emphasized how activists ‘frame’ their message in
ways that foster or support activism (Gamson et al., 1982), scholars studying emotion have
noted that successful framing is almost always achieved through the strategic use of
‘moral emotions’, emotions based on values, beliefs or social expectations (Goodwin et al.,
2004, p. 422).
6
Thus, in an attempt to reclaim territory eroded by the focus on the rationality of social
movement actors in the political process/resource mobilization literature and the cognitive
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 275
focus of the framing literature, much of the recent sociological research on emotions and
activism focuses (quite logically) on this constructive aspect. Even where attention is paid
to more bureaucratically structured organizations, promoting an emotional association
between individuals and the social cause is seen as key to maintaining a committed staff.
Indeed, Goodwin et al. (2004, p. 422) argue that there are consequences to an absence of
emotions within professionalized social change organizations, cautioning that those
organizations ‘that create an environment of neutral professionalism may find themselves
losing members to organizations whose passions are more up-front’. Thus, the decision of
individuals to work for Amnesty International may reflect the organization’s appeal to
moral emotions, a commitment to a broader set of human rights principles. Yet Morgen’s
(1995) work on rape crisis centres indicates that balancing this emotional component is
a delicate endeavour for activist organizations. Morgen demonstrated that in working
with traumatized individuals, employees struggled with feelings of anxiety, anger, sorrow
and fear.
Thus, while emotions may be central to the staying power of social movements, this
article, like Morgen’s research above, focuses on some of the dilemmas associated with this
emotional component of paid activism. This is an important gap in this literature, given the
claims that emotions are so central to motivation and mobilization and that professionalized
movement organizations with paid staff are a central feature of contemporary societies.
Thus, if we accept the role of emotions as motivating forces, what is the impact of the
emotional content of human rights work on Amnesty International’s employees? What are
the implications of these effects for organizational sustainability? This hints at perhaps the
biggest lingering concern and that is that organizations that have undergone the process of
professionalization, such as Amnesty International, are inherently appealing to potential
employees precisely because of the emotionally charged and gratifying nature of the work.
Increasingly, as these organizations become institution-like, their jobs appeal to a wide
range of educated and professionally oriented individuals. This means, however, that
greater attention needs to be paid to situations where organizations rely on an assumption
that employees are emotionally motivated but may not be willing to make psychological or
at least, emotional sacrifices for their work.
Sociologists of emotions have successfully focused attention on these sacrifices through
the concept of emotional labour in organizations, noting that the need to manage emotions
to avoid distressing and uncomfortable sensations, can be accompanied by emotional
exhaustion, burn-out, withdrawal and negative work attitudes (Hochschild, 1979, 1983;
Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Grandey et al., 2005). Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983)
argues that managing emotional experiences is done to bring them in line with social
expectations. For instance, in her classic research on flight attendants, Hochschild
documented how employees concealed and suppressed their emotions to meet the needs
and expectations of passengers (Hochschild, 1983). Thus, sociologists emphasize the
degree to which emotion norms are deeply embedded in the cultural expectations of a
given setting. As a result, if a person experiences emotions that breach a given set of
cultural expectations, they may engage in emotion management in order to suppress,
modify or emphasize an emotion. In The Time Bind (2001) Hochschild noted, however,
that emotional labour is not always a negative organizational attribute. Instead it may lead
to work environments that are self-gratifying and enjoyable, particularly in contrast to
home lives that are thankless or stressful. Indeed, the emotionally gratifying nature of the
work of Amnesty International is a key explanation for people’s desire to become involved
276 K. Rodgers
with Amnesty International as well as helping to explain the fact that many people who
experience significant emotional strain in their work nonetheless remain in their jobs.
Thus, while recognizing the positive functions of emotions at Amnesty International,
this article also balances this view with the observation that the emotional repertoires
of movements can be unintentional and undesirable (Flam, 2005). As such, I focus on
explaining normative expectations at Amnesty International and how these shape the
ways in which employees engage in emotion management. In the sections that follow,
I outline the aspects of the organizational and emotional culture relevant to this
discussion and then detail the emotional dynamics involved in two common Amnesty
International activities: office work in the London headquarters, and ‘mission’ research
in the field.
Victims, Members and Selflessness: A Context for Emotional Labour
Within social movements, ‘emotional repertoires’ emerge in order for participants to
express their feelings surrounding movement-oriented events (Jasper, 1998). These
repertoires are no less important within the more formal organizational structures of social
movements but once transferred to organizational settings, these repertoires become
‘emotional cultures’, part of the organizational culture and key to setting out rules and
norms about acceptable and unacceptable forms of emotional display (Hochschild, 1983;
Gould, 2003). In all organizations, multiple and sometimes competing cultures exist and
they are seldom characterized by a single cultural type. Indeed, Stephen Hopgood (2006,
p. 34) astutely describes the culture of the International Secretariat as ‘unsurprisingly
messy’. But scholars also emphasize that while multiple cultures are part of organizational
reality, some elements of these cultures are more dominant, enduring and influential than
others (Schein, 1988). This is particularly the case where a dominant culture mirrors the
‘official’ corporate culture (Schein, 1988). This is no different for emotional cultures and
consequently, what I outline below is not a complete picture, but a very important element
of Amnesty International’s organizational culture.
A historically important cultural element at Amnesty International on which the
emotional context rests has been that of selflessness, a discourse common to social and
religious activism.
7
In the case of Amnesty, selflessness means many things but most
importantly for our purposes, it refers to the fact that, for many, a committed Amnesty
employee is expected to be above personal indulgence. Using the terms ‘driven-ness’ and
‘obsessiveness’, this former manager describes his experience with selflessness:
...I used to be driven to distraction by some of the absolute driven-ness of the staff.
[And] you get into it – I find myself doing the same thing. For one thing, the work is
much bigger than the space that is manageable by any measure. But it’s a never-
ending thing. It’s extremely difficult to say stop and the culture exists because of the
nature of the work that’s being done. Burnout is a very serious problem. And it
relates a little bit to this sense of guilt – you’re letting the victims down. People are
unforgiving of themselves, and they are unforgiving of others. ... I don’t think
Amnesty would be the same organization if we solved this unsolvable problem.
8
The idea of selflessness is embodied and reinforced in ubiquitous organizational
discourses of commitment and sacrifice and through various organizational policies that
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 277
discourage the public celebration of individual employees. The concept of ‘freedom from
distinction’, for instance, is a profoundly influential idea at Amnesty International. Where
this is most evident is surrounding individual recognition: individual staff names are not
made public and are not published in reports, even where an employee has been
responsible for research and writing. There is, therefore, a sense that the organization is
more than the individuals that compose it and in this way, personal aspirations are not
only denied but also greatly frowned upon. Related to this belief, paid employees are
viewed as the workhorses, acquiescent to the moral authority of the victims and the
membership. Underlining the subservience of the paid staff, an internal report comments,
‘the primary responsibility of the professional staff is to provide political analysis
necessary to give the membership a framework for strategic thinking for action. The role
of developing strategies for action must increasingly be devolved toward membership
structures’.
9
But while selflessness is promoted through organizational policies, it is also encouraged
by the nature of the work that human rights employees engage in. The gravity of the
circumstances of human rights victims and the generous contributions of volunteer
members discourages employees’ indulgence in their own needs. As a result, many
individual employees view their own personal needs in the office as unimportant and
unjustifiable in the context of their work. Commenting on this tendency, one non-research
manager made the following comment:
I was consulting the staff about the proposals to refurbish the office, there was some
staff who just said, ‘this is corporate ... We don’t want a dollar of Amnesty’s
money spent on refurbishing our offices, however ‘scuzzy’ they might be, because
that’s money we could spend on human rights issues in the external world.’ And
there’s Amnesty’s tension. So, we’ve worked in a building which hasn’t been
maintained properly in the past twenty years, and so now has severe problems with
its services. It has toilets that don’t flush. It has electric wires which are a fire hazard.
And we have staff here who work in quite unhealthy physical environments because
the money has been directed outside. And they think that if the offices are
refurbished, that puts the staff in a very difficult position because they think they are
working in lavish, selfish, indulgent conditions, compared with those ‘poor human
rights victims’ that we work with every day.
10
Thus, the extreme gravity of victims’ circumstances serves to motivate individuals in their
own work even beyond their seemingly minor personal concerns. In another example, this
employee, commenting on her decision to relinquish her Amnesty union membership,
reflects on the evaluation of some employees of their working conditions vis-a
`-vis the
needs of victims:
[I] was sitting in the union meeting where union members compared themselves to
trade union victims in Latin America and I just thought ... I found that quite
insulting to the victims, to the real victims, and ... I just don’t share those views and
I don’t belong in this room with these people, so I just left.
11
Similarly, commenting on the reaction he received to his decision to retire from Amnesty
International, this former employee points to the degree to which working at Amnesty
278 K. Rodgers
comes before all other aspects of one’s life: ‘when I retired ... the question I got from a lot
of the members was – one that puzzled them: “how can anybody retire?” The concept of
retiring from Amnesty is so foreign to the way of thinking’.
12
The ubiquitous discourse of selflessness pervades the internal dynamics of the
organization, and in terms of the emotional culture of the organization, it means that
displays of personal strain, sadness, or depression, while perhaps understandable, are
viewed by a considerable amount of the staff as unnecessary and self-indulgent. Like the
acceptance of meagre pay or long working hours, emotional distress is viewed as a
sacrifice for the cause, and it is not regarded as something that either the employee, his/her
supervisor, or the organization as a whole is compelled to deal with transparently and
purposively. The selfless employee is one who recognizes their physical and emotional
needs and professional aspirations as secondary to the moral authority of the victims of
human rights abuse and the volunteer members of the global organization.
However, to claim that there are no positive or motivating aspects of the discourse of
selflessness or that there are no additional dimensions to the emotional culture at Amnesty
International would be overly simplistic and incorrect. Like Summers-Effler (2005), who
argues that a culture of selflessness (or ‘agape’) produces a rewarding emotional energy
for individuals, I found at Amnesty that there is a keen sense of optimism and enthusiasm,
such as from the display of cut-out paper hands covering one wall of the main lobby,
symbolizing the campaign on violence against women. And it is this optimism and sense
of purpose that attracts many to the organization in the first place. According to most
respondents, strong emotions surrounding the injustice of human rights abuse are the
prime reason for choosing a career that is underpaid, stressful and thankless. Indeed, anger
and indignation alongside compassion for example, are prime motivators of the culture of
Amnesty. This sense of injustice unites employees and motivates them in their pursuits.
For instance, in the staff-produced report discussed above, employees proposed their
own mission statements for the organization. Included in the list of suggestions
are the following excerpts, which demonstrate the meaning that employees attach to
their work:
Accurate research puts governments in the dock ... 400 bleeding hearts provide
nerve centre for international human rights movement ... IS indispensable staff –
finding facts, mobilizing missions worldwide! ... The IS is the heart of the global
movement fighting injustice worldwide ... The mother of a dynamic, globally
effective human rights movement
13
And several employees reflected on the degree to which the sacrifices of their work
provide them with release from their guilty feelings of living in wealthy and indulgent
societies.
Thus, even as a professional organization, Amnesty International continues to maintain
an emotionalized workplace effectively. And while I demonstrate further on how some
emotions are increasingly problematized within Amnesty, it is clear that ‘legitimate’
emotions play an important role in allowing bureaucratic employees to retain a sense
of activism. This being said, given the well-covered territory of the constructive role of
emotions, my goal in this article is also to document the less common element of
emotional strain in social movements. Against the backdrop of selflessness, the next
two sections examine how the experience of guilt and sadness inherent in the office and
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 279
mission work of human rights employees are negotiated and how employees’ responses to
the realities of their work are shaped by this emotional context of the organization.
The ‘Burden of Daily-ness’: Guilt, Emotion Regulation and Human Rights Work in
the Office
There’s a built-in potential for guilt, of not doing enough about the people who are
the victims of violation, that ‘deserve’ or ‘need’, or ‘must have’ the attention, and
every bit of attention, and every bit of energy that we can possibly bring to it, so that
failing to produce, or not getting your report done on time, or arguing about
mundane matters, in some ways is sort of like a betrayal of the victims. And it’s
never, never enunciated in those terms, but that is ... what it’s about.
14
The daily work of Amnesty’s paid employees involves the documentation and processing
of global human rights abuses and often intense interactions with Amnesty members and
human rights victims, in meetings or by telephone. While this content is taken to be a
gratifying element of their jobs, the nature of interactions and the reality of time
constraints also means that employees struggle with feelings of guilt, an emotion
understood in the social movement literature as a pervasive motivator of action (Scheff,
1994) but also one that highlights the challenging aspects of the emotional elements of
activism. In this section I focus on the emotional experiences of employees in their daily
work, the profound burden of guilt that emerges from their feelings about their inability to
always help, and the way in which they manage their feelings of guilt.
Amnesty International’s complex organizational structure results in many different kinds
of stakeholders, including what is referred to as ‘the movement’ (the global organizational
structure including members), the victims, the media and organizational management. In
part because of these multiple interests, it was common for employees to refer to these
various responsibilities as a list of ‘competing demands’. As one researcher states,
...there are always competing and irreconcilable demands ... And that becomes
sort of like an emotional drain because you then feel that even if you don’t, you have
to say something and even if you can’t do very much, it is very difficult not to do
anything. ... Especially if you know the people or it’s people you indirectly know
... [And all of this] is exacerbated when you have a direct knowledge of someone,
they are in prison, the report is coming out, and you just feel more helpless then you
would feel normally.
15
Indeed, many interviewees found the necessity of choosing amongst these priorities a
deplorable necessity that creates a persistent and profound sense of guilt. This researcher,
for example, comments,
these cases aren’t abstract, they are real people .. . There is tremendous pressure in
this way to be accurate in your evaluation [of priorities]. I would say I always choose
right but that might be a justification. After all, who is most worthy?
16
Thus, while each of the constituencies involved in human rights work is viewed as
important, the victims of human rights abuses, their families, and the individuals who
280 K. Rodgers
represent them in the country (human rights defenders) were often described as the
researcher’s ‘priority’. Employees work closely with each of these groups and spend much
of their time in the office discussing and updating cases through phone and email contact.
Respondents explained that while they gather data in this correspondence, a central aspect
of this task involves expressing empathy and caring, giving hope to broken and frightened
individuals and their families while possessing knowledge that in many cases they will be
unable to help. For instance:
there is a vast set of requests that are really beyond what you can do but then, the
drawback is that if under certain chances you are not able to fulfil them, then you are
kind of feeling that you are letting people down all the time so that sort of then
becomes not only a sort of work related stress but also an emotional drain ... a
failure.
17
It is in telephone conversations in particular, where researchers speak to victims and
human rights defenders, some of whom may be severely traumatized, have witnessed or
experienced abuse, or have family members missing that employees feel most powerless.
In these situations, the callers are depending on the researcher to help them find their
family member, to escape the country, to update the employee on an earlier case (such as
an imprisonment or disappearance) or to publicize an abuse. As the following researcher
explains, these interactions serve as a persistent motivation but the daily persistence of
these interactions is often overwhelming:
you can spend hours on the phone and in interviews, ... you want to know how
people are, how families are ... Sometimes I stop myself and say ‘enough. This is
not my mother I am talking to’. You need to remind yourself, and sometimes them,
that there are limits to what you can do and be to them ...
18
These repeated and persistent individual exchanges underline the gratification that
people derive from the emotionally charged content of their work but this simultaneously
becomes emotionally burdensome simply because of the knowledge that few others are
listening, or have the power to bring some relief to individuals, and this creates a powerful
incentive to become intimately involved in these lives. As a demonstration of how
troubling this involvement can become, this former researcher shares his story of the
emotional impact of one such situation and highlights the comparison between his own
stress and that of the victim. In so doing he illustrates how employees minimize their own
concerns in light of the concerns of others:
I remember at the time of the [country] crisis, I was in constant contact with my
contacts on the ground. ... I even gave them my mobile number. But I had this same
feeling every time the phone rang ... that it was like a running death toll ... every
time I hung up the phone I felt like I somehow was out of control, I could protect
them ... or at least they were fine ... so long as I could hear them ... When it came
to an end I was a nervous wreck, but there is always this tendency to say ‘well, if
you’re a nervous wreck imagine the people who face it everyday’. There is always
this tendency to compare what you feel and what you experience to the reality of
victims and defenders in the regions. ... I don’t know if you necessarily feel better
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 281
by doing it but you feel a little like your concerns are imagined or at least
overly dramatic.
19
It is not necessary for Amnesty management to evoke emotional imagery to motivate
this particular group of employees in their work. The content of the work dually
provides both motivation and guilt.
20
Thoits (1990) argues that employees will engage in
both cognitive and physiological strategies in order to assist them in dealing with
distressing emotions. Indeed, I found that while some said that they make a conscious
effort to shut themselves off from work concerns outside the office, this response was
rare and that people had consciously developed tools to manage their feelings of guilt.
And though the option of quitting was real for everyone, many spoke of conflicting
emotions around leaving the organization because the thought created more guilt, based
on the concern that you are leaving people ‘without someone who works on their
behalf’.
21
Employees reported coming to grips with their guilt by taking work home, working late
and on weekends or ‘compulsively’ thinking about their work when they were outside of
the office. Reflecting on this, an employee comments,
it doesn’t seem like much of a trade-off when it means choosing between working an
extra hour, or an extra day if it means that you don’t put aside a case that has as much
merit as any other or more often, that for some reason has become a priority of the
membership.
22
And so, stories of people sleeping in the office or leaving to continue work at home were
common. The sense of commitment to the cause and guilt at not being able to do more
results in a drive to produce: ‘a researcher will do his/her utmost and work fifty hours a
week in order to produce the best possible product that is going to make a difference in that
particular area in their country’.
23
This finding highlights the findings of emotional
regulation scholars that employees not only act to reveal, conceal and suppress emotions
but also attempt to regulate the degree which they experience these emotions (Thoits,
1990; Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Grandey et al. 2005). At the same time, however, by
increasing the amount of work employees do beyond the hours allocated in a working day,
they manage to give others the impression that they are committed and unaffected by the
more troubling aspects of their work (and thus, truly selfless).
Thus, while coping strategies demonstrate that employees regulate their work schedule
in order to alleviate guilt, these findings also reflect normative expectations that emerge
from the culture of selflessness. As a quote used earlier highlighted, ‘people are unforgiving
of themselves, and they are unforgiving of others’.
24
And this employee echoed this
sentiment:
It’s the Amnesty thing about it being a duty and not a job. ... I mean, you feel guilty
every time you walk out at six o’clock ... there is a tendency for people to say
‘Ohhhh, I was here until ten o’clock last night’. And well you know, it’s a kind of
macho thing really.
25
Expanding one’s hours of work is therefore, not only an individual approach to emotional
regulation but an acceptable method that is ‘policed’ by colleagues.
282 K. Rodgers
This expectation is also communicated through managerial structures. For instance, this
employee commented on the tendency for this kind of commitment to be promoted by
management:
There is a kind of macho boasting, that’s not limited to one sex or the other. ... For
instance, my program director – she works late because she’s one person doing all
these roles, and she’s often there until ten o’clock at night. But she gets e-mails from
our [director] sent at two A.M. ... It looks good: ‘I got this from [our director] at two
A.M.’, and [our director] looks good ... and I often think ‘I wish I could do that’.
26
Indeed, most respondents felt their managers would be unlikely to encourage them to ‘go
home’ when they themselves would be working late into the evening. This tendency is
consistent with theories of ‘long hours cultures’, ‘whereby long hours are interpreted as
demonstrating commitment’ (Liff & Ward, 2001, p. 23).
The tendency for managers to encourage employees indirectly to work long days is in
part, the result of a controversial policy that promotes researchers to management rather
than hiring professional managers. As a result of this policy, the same individuals who
are motivated by genuine emotion, commitment, selflessness and the consequent guilt,
continue to play this role in a managerial position, reinforcing and institutionalizing the
normative expectations of selflessness. This manager and former researcher highlights this
dynamic:
it is difficult to witness people breaking their backs to do a job in the organization
... This brings a challenge to management of being careful you don’t take
advantage but also being conscious of the welfare implications of people because
they are so committed to their jobs. There are instances that you see people
imploding through the amount of work they are taking on, but who are incapable of
dropping stuff. And to persuade them and work with them to be able to do that is
very difficult, and it’s having measurable, obvious impacts on people’s work and
personal lives ... there is an element, which you need to be very careful about, of
guilt – Saying, ‘Christ, I’m not working that hard, or I’m not that stressed. And I as a
manager should be working harder and be more stressed because it’s part of my job
to be ...’ I think [it is] a quite unique situation, which I think would be rare to find in
other management situations ... of people working too bloody hard.
27
As this manager reveals, few employees have the ability to shut off the guilt that
accompanies their work, so they work late and at weekends or consistently take work
home in an effort to meet more of the competing demands that create guilt. Moreover,
these routines are exacerbated because the work ethic is shared by managers and is an
integral part of the organization culture of selflessness.
In sum, the tendency for employees at Amnesty International is to become closely
involved with the often-traumatic lived realities of their research subjects and the
guilt-laced daily office work of researchers frequently becomes physically and
emotionally burdensome to them. These findings are not unique to Amnesty; stress,
overwork and burn-out are common features of many human service occupations such as
nursing and police work where resources are limited and demand is great (Martin, 1999;
Lewis, 2005). Moreover, the emotional component of police and nursing work and the
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 283
necessity of concealing one’s emotions are integral and highly unrecognized aspects of
the job. In this way, professional activists share many of the experiences of other
professionals in that the emotional component of their work is central but unrecognized.
And in the same way that emotional labour in mainstream organizations threatens
efficiency, by potentially alienating the less than truly selfless employees, the emotional
labour of activists threatens the capacity of organizations seeking social change.
The ‘Profound Weight’ of the Mission: Emotional Distress as Self-Indulgent
I remember this particular time. I was sitting in this hotel room after a particularly
horrid day of interviews. ... I mean we hadn’t taken a break from 7 until 6, or
something. I remember thinking I was going to go down to the bar and have
something to eat and a drink to relax – like alcohol. And I stopped myself and
thought ‘how can I drink what would be a week’s meals for one of these families?’
You know?. ... That was a low moment but when the reality is there in your face it
very easy to get carried away with this kind of thinking. An incredible sense of guilt
at what we have, what we are going home to.
28
If the emotional impact of daily office work is the result of interactions that become
compounded over days, weeks and months, the emotional impact of mission work is
exactly the opposite: the intense immediacy of interaction, leading one former researcher
to comment, ‘research missions are incredibly demanding. I mean, they’re certainly not
9 to 5 things; they’re “24 hours for three weeks” kind of things’.
29
Missions, in which
researchers travel abroad for a period of time, are conducted for the purposes of gathering
research on abuses within a given country, and form the core work of researchers and the
raw material for member advocacy. The intensity of interactions on missions drives
employees to experience many powerful emotions that, like their office work, have the
effect of motivating while also causing distress. In the intensity of the mission situation,
feelings of sadness, despair and depression are particularly pronounced. In this section
I outline how, in denying individuals the space to express these feelings, it is again the
cultural context of selflessness which requires that many of these strong emotions be
managed.
During missions, researchers are given a very short time to conduct work that is
central to the claims-making process. Because missions are key to successful
fundraising, member support and substantive outcomes, the challenge is one of both
physical and emotional exhaustion. Employees repeatedly spoke of the difficulty
involved in balancing the importance of the work with the trauma they experience from
the nature of the work. Often, for instance, researchers remarked that they experience a
kind of ‘vicarious trauma’ from the interviews they conduct with victims of abuse and
their families:
when you encounter the same people (and their families) each time you go on a
mission there is a returning sense of empathy but also ... dread. This might evolve
into a kind of vicarious pain because you feel their pain. ... Like, in [country name],
there are mothers whose sons ... have been missing in the mountains for years and
... they come to be interviewed every time we are there, year after year ... And in
these cases, you know, and they know that there is no hope. You feel the anxiety they
284 K. Rodgers
feel of not knowing, of the possibilities of what has happened to them. ... You
simply cannot go unaffected by this and it is not something you leave behind
easily.
30
Similarly, this researcher comments on the enduring personal impact of such interactions:
Sometimes, just in part because you are doing this everyday ... [it can] emotionally
wash over you as you begin to write down all the traumatic details. ... Sometimes, it
is just a story that is no different from the others but just something that someone
says that can trigger off the realization of how many of the terrible stories in the
previous year one has been listening to. And ... it subconsciously builds up and at
the end of the mission you are mentally exhausted. You get sort of pulled into a
whole series of different people’s lives at an incredibly intimate level. They are
telling you the worst thing that has ever happened to them and ... you are coming
up with ideas of what is there to do and you come away thinking terrible feelings and
it is quite depressing when one comes back to the daily grind that one realizes that
you can only do so much ...
31
Respondents frequently spoke of being overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and despair
as a result of this trauma and sometimes, of experiencing what they described as ‘post-
traumatic stress’ following missions.
32
The experience of post-traumatic stress is an
increasingly common way to conceptualize the effects of work done within the field of
humanitarianism (Bracken, 2002; Pupavac, 2006). Pupavac (2006, p. 25) argues that the
increasing levels of diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among aid workers is
not necessarily the result of more stressful humanitarian emergencies but can be explained
in part by staff demoralization. While many at Amnesty expressed that the negative
emotions they felt could be left to ‘take over’ in this all-encompassing way, they also said
that simply mentally pushing aside traumatic experiences was the more common way to
overcome their emotional difficulties. Thus, employees described the need to balance
between providing a sense of caring and empathy and ‘getting on with’ their work:
These are people that are, truly, truly traumatized. When I was in [name of country]
after the massacre, I interviewed women who had witnessed their husbands and
brothers being shot and thrown into a ditch. Putting aside my job, you really want to
reach out like you would with a child and say ‘I hear you. It’s going to be fine, we’re
going to fix it.’ But the other part of you is like, ‘get on with it’.
33
Thus, in a process not unlike Hochschild’s concept of surface acting researchers felt the
need to convey that they were unaffected by these experiences. Using the term ‘inured’, this
researcher also highlighted a tendency toward overcoming feelings that the work creates:
No, I can’t be devastated after each mission. It just isn’t possible. If you look at the
lives of other people, at least what I am doing, to a very minute degree, is helping.
When I go home I feel like my time isn’t wasted. You have to become inured to what
you see and hear or it destroys you and I think maybe that is ... maybe what
separates those of us who have been here for a longer time from those who leave ...
a kind of self-preservation.
34
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 285
In this way, in the face of difficult emotional experiences, many employees felt that
they must either truly become numb to their personal reactions or they must appear to.
This respondent explains:
This work really takes over your life ... you go away on a mission and are really,
really affected by what you see and hear. When I came back, and I know this is very
common, it is like a runaway train. You must work, you must work late ... you
nearly kill yourself because it is the only thing that really makes you feel better about
what you know. I got to a point where I realized I could drive myself into the ground
everyday or I could find a way to deal with it. So, you just sort of turn off after a
while.
35
Either way, the necessity of ‘becoming numb’
36
is a conscious form of emotion
management where researchers must learn to feel or act, unaffected.
In sum, in contrast to their daily interactions, missions leave employees experiencing
vicarious trauma and related emotions because of the immediacy of their experience.
Employees spoke of working longer hours to overcome the guilt they felt at leaving the
country but they also spoke of the difficulties of dealing with their experience once they
returned home. Despite the pervasiveness of these experiences, the powerful influence of
selflessness means few people find a space in which to discuss their issues. The normative
expectation that the needs of victims and members be placed ahead of employees
discourages individuals from dealing with the serious emotional distress that emerges
from mission work. And this emotional labour is not only a problem for individual
employees who must ‘withstand the feelings of anxiety, anger, sorrow and fear that
accompany work with traumatized groups’ (Goodwin et al., 2004, p. 237). These
experiences also play a potentially destructive role in the maintenance of organizations.
Employees risk burn-out and may choose to leave the organization because the only
acceptable means of diminishing these negative emotional states is to work longer hours.
The physical burn-out and stress of overwork may inevitably lead to employee turnover
and turnover at Amnesty International is high. Indeed, in the period which my project
spanned, I attempted to contact many of my informants for follow-up interviews. By the
end of the project, a full one-third of them, including many that were long-time employees,
had left the organization. One researcher I did manage to contact toward the end of
the project confirmed my observations, commenting that some within the organization
speculated that around 100 staff members had left and been replaced in the last year.
37
Employees also speculated that the emotional burden of the work contributes to a
phenomenon of repetitive strain injury (RSI) within the organization. Repetitive strain
injury is a condition in which physical damage occurs as a result of repeated movement (in
office work the usual manifestation is usually wrist injury from excessive computer
usage). And while the physical and psychological manifestations are beyond the
sociological scope of this article, the respondents’ interpretation of the emotional and
physical link indicates the importance of the observation. Though I was unable to obtain
statistics, all of the staff – including managers – I spoke to felt that RSI was a serious
problem within Amnesty International. On the phenomenon, a manager commented:
It’s a way of signaling there’s something wrong ... particularly ... if management
is absent or you can’t get access to a manager to say, ‘hey, I’m having a real problem
286 K. Rodgers
with this piece of work, or I’m struggling with these different things you’ve given
me and I can’t make the deadlines, or it’s just not happening ...’Theyall feel like
that. And to a certain extent I think it’s tough because staff here do compare their
day-to-day work situations with people where they’re working ...
38
Repetitive Strain Injury was suggested as a physical manifestation of the emotional
strain-overwork bind but many interviewees discussed related psychological and personal
problems such as emotional breakdowns, alcoholism, drug abuse and family problems that
resulted from the emotional strain. This former manager reflects on his observations
of these ‘private’ problems and in so doing, emphasizes the possible dilemmas that
organizations such as Amnesty International may encounter:
It can be damaging. I’ve seen it; I’ve seen people divorce and separate and so on, and
I’d put part of it down to the nature of that commitment they’ve got to the work. It’s
bad. The business of caring for the people in the organization is not resolved ...
39
Conclusion
Amnesty International works hard to promote the idea that it is, in itself, a social
movement, comprised globally of chapters of local members that financially support
organizational functions and which can be drawn on to protest at global human rights
infractions (Clark, 2001; Hopgood, 2006). The promotion of this vision provides
legitimacy, allowing the organization to claim they genuinely represent the interests of
victims and conscience constituents and making them distinct from non-governmental
organizations that can make no claim to a mass base. However, despite strong currents of
this ideology running through the culture of the IS, it is very much a professional and
bureaucratic organization that attracts not only dedicated (and selfless) members but also
educated professionals seeking rewarding employment who maintain the organization’s
professional capacity to fulfil its mandate. Indeed, although Amnesty possesses many ‘old-
timers’ who are deeply committed to the organization and its goals, as activism becomes
less a calling and more a viable and rewarding career, professional organizations need to
respond to the emotional dilemmas of its employees who may not be willing to accept the
emotional trade-offs of the gratification.
Some of the broadest themes of social movement studies concern the emergence,
maintenance and decline of social movements. In recent years, scholars of emotions have
successfully defended their claim that in contrast to arguments of previous eras,
emotionality is integral at each of these stages (Jasper, 1997, 2009; Goodwin et al., 2004;
Flam & King, 2005; Goodwin & Jasper, 2006). This article continues this tradition by
examining the twofold effects of the emotional content of professional activist work.
Based on the recognition that ‘individuals make sense of emotions through their
understanding of the social environment in which the emotions are experienced’ (Morris
& Feldman, 1996, p. 179), I have argued that the normative expectation at Amnesty that
employees be selfless, denying their own needs in light of the gravity of human rights
abuse, is deeply ingrained into the organizational culture, and so too is the expectation of
emotional control that accompanies it. This, combined with the compelling nature of
human rights tragedies, makes it ‘hard to stop’ working
40
and employees feel morally
obliged to work to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. As a result, employees
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 287
place the immediate needs of victims and members at the forefront of their energies and
view indulgence in their own concerns with guilt. Thus, these findings demonstrate that
many emotions involved in activism not only motivate potential recruits and current
activists as they become engaged with an issue, but similarly influence the experiences of
participants in a multitude of ways over the long term.
The findings therefore challenge scholars of social movements and emotions to include
the analysis of emotions in addressing questions of sustainability of emotional energy.
That is, while mobilizing emotions may play a key role in the emergence and growth of
social movement activism, emotionality within activist organizations may also work
against the goals of social movements. Professional social movement organizations such
as Amnesty depend not only on voluntary labour and money but also on the skill and
commitment of professionally trained employees who could find better remuneration in
less stressful environments. If, as discussed above, professional activists are leaving the
organization because the organizational culture fosters overwork, the emotional content
of human rights work may also contribute to non-participation (Norgaard, 2006). This
contradiction presents potential problems for social movements that do not address some
of the emotional components of paid activism.
Notes
1. Informant #10, Female, 23 September 2003.
2. Exceptions include Smith and Erickson (1997) and Morgen (1995).
3. This study of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International provides a means of understanding the
dynamics within a formal social movement organization. These findings are therefore more accurately
generalized to other professionalized organizations and not to the volunteer sections of the movement.
4. This is despite that most of Amnesty’s staff have not experienced abuse directly and many had not previously
been members of the organization. This highlights Jasper’s (2009) distinction between reciprocal and shared
emotions. Reciprocal refers to those emotions that create feelings of solidarity or friendship through
engagement in protest. In contrast, shared emotions refer to those that are ‘consciously held by the group’ in
which anger, indignation or other emotions are consciously cultivated. It is this cultivated anger within
Amnesty that means members of staff do not have to have directly experienced abuse to feel akin to the
outrage that surrounds it. Instead, the discourse of universal human rights promotes the notion that all humans
should feel indignation at the infraction of rights by a government or other party. The argument could also be
made that potential recruits are also attracted to the drama and valour associated with media portrayals of
human rights work (see Rodgers, 2007). Thanks to anonymous reviewer #1 for the term of ‘perverse
attraction’.
5. For a complete analysis of Amnesty’s global structure please see Hopgood (2006).
6. Frames are also thought to resonate better where potential recruits perceive themselves as directly affected by
an injustice. For instance, Schrock et al.’s (2004) study of transgendered activists found that transgendered
people were primed for recruitment because the frames used spoke directly to the individual’s personal
emotional dilemmas.
7. See Hopgood (2006) for additional facets of Amnesty’s culture. In particular, Hopgood distinguishes
between ‘Keepers of the Flame’ as those who are most protective of the traditional motivations and modes of
operating of the organization and reformers as those employees who feel that ‘Amnesty must adapt or die’
(2006, p. 221).
8. Informant # 1, Male, 15 August 2004.
9. Report of SYSTEC’s Review of Strategy and Techniques for Amnesty International, March 1993, p. 7.
10. Informant #34, Female, 9 July 2004; emphasis in original.
11. Informant #5, Female, 9 September 2003.
12. Informant #28, Male, 15 August 2004.
13. Ibid., pp. 49 – 50.
14. Informant #1, Male, 18 August 2003.
288 K. Rodgers
15. Informant #50, Male, 11 July 2005.
16. Informant #44, Female, 12 March 2004; emphasis in original.
17. Informant #50, Male, 11 July 2005.
18. Informant #13, Female, 2 October 2003; emphasis in original.
19. Informant #1, Male, 18 August 2003.
20. The evocation of moral emotions at an organizational level may be a more necessary endeavour for
employees outside of those employees dealing directly with victims. However, in the several interviews
I conducted with people outside of the research division, I found people derive a similar gratification
from doing a job that contributes to the promotion of human rights.
21. Informant #10, Female, 23 September 2003.
22. Informant #11, Male, 23 September 2003; emphasis in original.
23. Informant #36, Male, 11 July 2004.
24. Informant #1, Male, 15 August 2004.
25. Informant #5, Female, 19 September 2003.
26. Informant #5, Female, 19 September 2004.
27. Informant #36, Male, 11 July 2004.
28. Informant #14, Female, 2 October 2003.
29. Informant #50, Male, 15 July 2005.
30. Informant #50, Male, 15 July 2005; emphasis in original.
31. Informant #14, Female, 2 October 2003.
32. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a clinical condition defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). However, many have argued that this definition is inadequate when
attempting to understand the effects of ‘trauma-related personality changes’ (Reyes et al., 2006, p. 115).
33. Informant #14, Female, 2 October 2003.
34. Informant #14, Female, 2 October 2003.
35. Informant #13, Female 3 October 2003; emphasis in original.
36. Informant #11, Male, 23 September 2003.
37. Reliable numbers on turnover were not made available to me. While the 100 employee turnoverfigure is most
likely to be inflated due to the prevalence of short-term contracts, the perception that such a change has taken
place is indicative of the reality. The view was also confirmed in a previous interview with a member of the
human resources programme who explained that the recruitment process is ‘never-ending’ because of the
problem of turnover. In addition, the staff-produced document ‘Change IS’ (2002, p. 11) cited high turnover
as the reason for ‘lack of institutional knowledge’.
38. Informant #34, Female, 9 July 2004; emphasis in original.
39. Informant #1, Male, 18 August 2003; emphasis in original.
40. Informant #1, Male, 18 August 2003.
References
Aminzade, R. & McAdam, D. (2002) Emotions and contentious politics, Mobilization: An International Journal,
7(2), pp. 107–109.
Ashforth, B. & Humphrey, R. H. (1993) Emotional labour in service roles: the influence of identity, Journal of
Management Review, 18, pp. 61–72.
Bracken, P. (2002) Trauma: Cultural Meaning and Philosophy (London: Whurr).
Brotheridge, C. M. & Grandey, A. A. (2002) Emotional labor and burnout: comparing two perspectives of ‘people
work’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60, pp. 17–39.
Calhoun, C. (2001) Putting emotions in their place, in: J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds) Passionate Politics:
Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
Clark, A. M. (2001) Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Della Porta, D. & Diani, M. (2006) Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
Domalgaski, T. A. (1999) Emotion in organizations: main currents, Human Relations, 52 (6), p. 833.
Fineman, S. (1993) Emotions in Organizations (London: Sage).
Flam, H. (2005) Emotions’ map: a research agenda, in: H. Flam & D. King (Eds) Emotions and Social Movements
(New York: Routledge).
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 289
Flam, H. & King, D. (2005) Emotions and Social Movements (New York: Routledge).
Gamson, W., Fireman, B. & Rytina, S. (1982) Encounters with Unjust Authority (Chicago, IL: Dorsey).
Goodwin, J. & Jasper, J. M. (2006) Emotions and social movements, in: J. E. Stets & J. H. Turner (Eds) Handbook
of the Sociology of Emotions, pp. 611– 650 (New York: Springer).
Goodwin, J. & Jasper, J. M. & Polletta, F. (2000) The return of the repressed: the fall and rise of emotions in social
movement theory, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 5 (1), pp. 65–83.
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M. & Polletta, F. (2001) Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press).
Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M. & Polletta, F. (2004) Emotional dimensions of social movements, in: D. Snow, S. Soule
& H. Kriesi (Eds) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford: Blackwell).
Gould, D. (2002) Passionate political processes: bringing emotions back into the study of social movements, in:
J. Goodwin (Ed.) Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning and Emotion (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield).
Grandey, A. A. (2000) Emotion regulation in the workplace: a new way to conceptualize emotional labour,
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), pp. 95–110.
Grandey, A. A., Fisk, G. M. & Steiner, D. D. (2005) Must ‘service with a smile’ be stressful? The moderate role of
personal control for American and French employees, Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), pp. 893 – 904.
Hochschild, A. (1979) Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure, American Journal of Sociology, 85,
pp. 551–575.
Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Hochschild, A. (2001) The Time Bind (New York: Holt).
Hopgood, S. (2006) Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University).
Jasper, J. M. (1997) The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press).
Jasper, J. M. (2009) The emotions of protest, in: J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds) The Social Movements Reader:
Cases and Concepts (Oxford: Blackwell).
Lewis, P. (2005) Suppression or expression: an exploration of emotion management in a special care baby unit,
Work, Employment and Society, 19 (3), pp. 565– 581.
Liff, S. & Ward, K. (2001) Distorted views through the glass ceiling: the construction of women’s understandings
of promotion and senior management positions, Gender, Work and Organization, 8 (1), pp. 19 – 36.
Lofland, J. (1981) Collective behavior, in: M. Rosenberg & R. Turner (Eds) Social Psychology (Basic Books),
pp. 411–446.
Martin, S. E. (1999) Police force or police service? Gender and emotional labor, The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 561, pp. 111– 126.
Minkoff, D. & McCarthy, J. (2005) Reinvigorating the study of organizational processes in social movements,
Mobilization: An International Quartely, 10 (2), pp. 289– 308.
Morgen, S. (1995) ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’: emotional discourse in the work cultures of
feminist health clinics, in: M. Marx Ferree & P. Yancey Martin (Eds) Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the
New Women’s Movement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple).
Morris, J. & Feldman, D. (1996) The dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of emotional labor, Academy of
Management Review, 21 (4), pp. 986– 1010.
Norgaard, K. M. (2006) ‘People want to protect themselves a little bit:’ emotions, denial, and social movement
nonparticipation, Sociological Inquiry, 76 (3), pp. 372– 396.
Pupavac, Vanessa (2006) Humanitarian politics and the rise of international disaster psychology, in: G. Reyes,
G. Jacobs, C. Spielberger & B. Saraceno (Eds) Handbook of International Disaster Psychology:
Fundamentals and Overview (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood).
Reyes, G., Jacobs, G., Spielberger, C. & Saraceno, B. (2006) Handbook of International Disaster Psychology:
Fundamentals and Overview (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood).
Rodgers, K. (2007) How human rights organizations experience change, Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
McGill University.
Scheff, T. J. (1994) Emotions and identity: a theory of ethnic nationalism, in: C. Calhoun (Ed.) Social Theory and
the Politics of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell).
Schein, E. (1988) Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (New York: Jossey-Bass).
Schrock, D., Holden, D. & Reid, L. (2004) Creating emotional resonance: interpersonal emotion work and
motivational framing in a transgender community, Social Problems, 51, pp. 61– 81.
290 K. Rodgers
Smith, D. A. & Erickson, R. J. (1997) For love or money?: Work and emotional labor in a social movement
organization, in: R. J. Erickson & B. Cuthbertson-Johnson (Eds) Social Perspectives on Emotions
(Greenwich: JAI Press).
Summers-Effler, E. (2005) The emotional significance of solidarity for social movement communities: sustaining
Catholic Worker Community and service, in: H. Flam & D. King (Eds) Emotions and Social Movements
(New York: Routledge).
Thoits, P. A. (1990) Emotional deviance: research agendas, in: T. D. Kemper (Ed.) Research Agendas in the
Sociology of Emotions (New York: Suny Press).
Vince, R. & Broussine, M. (1996) Paradox, defense and attachment: accessing and working with emotional and
relations underlying organizational change, Organization Studies, 17 (1), pp. 1 – 21.
Kathleen Rodgers is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa
in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She conducts research on global and Canadian social
movements.
Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization 291
