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Emotion and learning in the workplace: critical perspectives
Emotion, learning and the workplace: a complex nexus
The articles in this special issue bring together three words: "emotion", "learning" and the "workplace". Let's start with the last one. When we sent out the call for papers, we wrote that we interpreted workplace very broadly - it might be located in quite different occupational sites of paid employment, in voluntary or other types of less formal work, or in the domestic sphere. Whatever particular view authors and readers might have of the workplace, we conceive of it as a space-time, a context, and/or a set of practices where people engage in productive or reproductive work. A fundamental assumption we make is that learning processes - formal and informal, designed or not designed - happen in workplaces on a daily basis.
The second word is emotion. Since the last two decades of the twentieth century, the study of emotion in the workplace and more broadly in organizations has emerged as a key topic in academic literature. Special issues appeared in international journals devoted to the burgeoning theme of emotion in organizational life (e.g. Work and Occupations (27/1), Human Resource Management Review (12/2) and Human Relations (60/3)). A new journal, the International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion , appeared in 2005. We have also seen the publication of edited volumes contributing to the constitution of this field. Here it is relevant to point to the classic books edited by [18], [20], [22] Fineman (1993, 2000, 2008); the text by [3] Askanasy et al. (2000); the work of [43] Payne and Cooper (2004); and the most recent book edited by [49] Sieben and Wettergren (2010). We discuss the key directions in this literature which follows. Notwithstanding this boom, however, rarely have learning and emotions in the workplace been investigated together in a special issue of a journal (see Management Learning 28/1 for a notable instance).
The third and final word, then, is learning. There is, of course, a massive theoretical and empirical literature on this topic, which it would be impossible to review within the remit of this editorial; and readers will be introduced by authors of the papers collected here to the particular theories which inspired them. However,...