Introduction

The subject of this chapter is the emotional labour of practitioners in the field of residential care. It focuses on the creation of an emotional atmosphere in the interaction between professionals and service users. The chapter examines the hypothesis that by creating an emotional atmosphere, practitioners try to engender either positive or negative emotions in service users, based on the definition of a given situation by professionals. This way of looking at emotional labour is discussed in the light of ethnographic data from a study by the author, with a focus on the creation of a shaming atmosphere in interactions between practitioners and service users in the field of residential care. In this context, the emotional labour of practitioners is understood as a way to produce an emotional atmosphere in interactions with service users that is used to create potential spaces for learning and development, but also comprises processes of normative regulation aimed at influencing the behaviour of the latter (Schröder, 2017). Central to these processes is the question of how practitioners use emotional labour to produce a shaming atmosphere and thus draw service users into negative emotional trajectories of shame or guilt. The aim is to show that emotional labour is a powerful tool for producing conformity with normative expectations in service users, expectations that are both institutional and defined by the practitioner. On the one hand, working with one's own emotions and those of others can be an opportunity to open up potential spaces for the development of the subject, something which points to the emancipatory element of emotional labour. On the other hand, it also has an instrumental aspect insofar as work on and with the emotions of service users is used as a means to produce conformity with expectations. The theoretical discussion thus examines the dialectically structured relation of emotional labour in professional social work settings as an oscillation between emancipation and social control. The chapter is subdivided as follows: to begin with, the significance of emotions in professional interactions is explored in detail in order to show that professional interactions in social work necessarily require work on one's own emotions and those of others. This is followed by a discussion of shame and shaming in social interactions, before using empirical analysis to examine the negative emotional trajectories of being shamed.