In processes of informalisation ‚
institutionalized power relationships, came to be more and more ignored and
attacked, leading to growing negotiability and leniency in the ways people oppose
and cooperate with each other.‛59 Within the workplace, informalisation can be seen
in the move towards ‚flatter‛ organisational structures; decentralisation of decision
making; the growing complexity and ‚flexibility‛ of work roles; the dissipation of
organisational boundaries; and the less formal relations between superiors and
subordinates.60 Processes of informalisation relate to ‚
colloquial speech< confessing private feelings and expressing emotions, engaging
in intimate relations on the work floor, and in general the blurring of the boundaries
between ‚work life‛ and ‚private life.‛61 But this apparent ‚relaxing‛ of controls,
this opening of emotional exchange to greater variety, individual nuance, and the
growth of emotional alternatives, also involves at one level an intensification of
demands on affect economy central to processes of civilisation.62 In the relative ab-
sence of explicit and formal rules governing behaviour we are compelled to develop
more reflexive means of self-regulation in order to negotiate loosely-defined, ever-
changing networks of social relationships characteristic of more flexible organi-
sations.63
An example to help clarify processes of informalisation, both as a feature of these
processes, and as model for informalisation more generally, is that of the increasing
popularity of ‚mufti‛ days within large corporations in Great Britain and the United
States. These are days, usually once per week, when employees can ostensibly dress
as they wish, they do not need to wear the corporate uniform, or dress in line with
formal company policy. There are, of course, considerable variations in mufti days.
Some organisations may specify, very loosely, that even on these days, employees
must be smart-casual. Others may have no explicitly stated specifications at all.
However, rather than their constituting a simple relaxation of pressures on how to
dress, we are immediately presented with another set of demands, and these might
be even more intensely felt that those arising from company dress code. We must
previous ‚phases‛ of civilising processes, but rather, to mark a continuation of these. It is parti-
cularly important to view the previously discussed search for emotional authenticity as located in
longer-term civilising processes, not simply processes of informalisation.
58
Wouters, ‚The sociology of emotions and flight attendants: Hochschild’s Managed Heart,” 98.
59
Ibid., 98–99.
60
A. van Iterson, W. Mastenbroek & J. Soeters, ‚Civilizing and informalizing: organizations in an
Eliasian context,‛ Organization, 8 (3) (2001), 507.
61
Ibid.
62
Wouters, ‚The sociology of emotions and flight attendants: Hochschild’s Managed Heart,” 99.
63
van Krieken, Norbert Elias, 114.
Hughes: Emotional Intelligence
45
still dress appropriately. But what is ‚appropriate‛? We are compelled to ask a
series of questions of our clothes: ‚is this fashionable?‛ ‚Is this the right label?‛ (and
this refers as much to labels on the inside of our clothes as it does to those embla-
zoned on the outside). The questions are expressive of more than just commercial
concerns. ‚Is this too tarty?‛ ‚Does my butt look big in this?‛ ‚Is this too nerdy?‛
‚Is this too formal?‛ ‚Too casual?‛ ‚Too stiff?‛ ‚Too power-dressy?‛ ‚Too loud?‛
‚Too dull?‛ ‚Is this really me?‛ We are compelled to dress ‚correctly,‛ not so much
according to the formally defined ‚external‛ standard of the corporation, but now
according to a blend and balance of unstated ‚internalised‛ and explicit ‚external‛
standards and concerns. We must express both our individuality and our sense of
belonging through our particular way of dressing. On the face of it, we are free to
wear tracksuits to work, but would we be ‚comfortable?‛ And what might ‚they‛
think of ‚me‛ if I did? Likewise, what would ‚we‛ think of those who did?
By similar extension, the concept of informalisation is also useful in understanding
the rise of EI. As I have argued, rather than constituting a proliferation of simple
emotional scripts — of ‚emotional uniforms‛ — EI asks us to develop our emotion
management ‚skills‛ or ‚competencies‛ such that we are emotionally adept: we are
comfortable, we are angry at the right times, with the right people, and so forth. We
are asked to develop a playful, flexible approach to expressing and managing emo-
tions.64 It is precisely these central features of EI — demands for more playful flexi-
bility, and, in relation to this, the growing awareness of using emotions and the
management of emotions for competitive advantage — that are defining features of
processes of informalisation.
Viewed within the context of informalisation, it is also perhaps easier to make sense
of the seemingly contradictory aspects of the discourse of EI: it promotes an emanci-
pation of emotions from explicit ‚external‛ standards, while simultaneously consti-
tuting an elaboration of such standards under the guise of competencies not scripts;
it presents demands for emotional honesty and authenticity while simultaneously
rendering emotions as projects to be developed and managed; it involves calls for a
liberation of emotions from formalised controls whilst simultaneously leaving its
subjects to negotiate informal and implicit behavioural and emotional standards as
expressions of themselves. EI thus calls not for a scripting of emotion, as posited by
the concept of emotional labour, but instead a reflexive negotiation of our emotional
lives at work and beyond. This emotional reflexivity involves both a relaxation and an
intensification of emotional controls: we might well ‚screw the rules,‛ but we must
do so in a manner that stays true to ourselves — in ways that are appropriate and
intelligent.
64
Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ, 45.
Foucault Studies, No. 8, pp. 28-52
46
From Repression to Stimulation: EI as Governmentality
The observation of these ambivalent and seemingly paradoxical aspects of processes
of informalisation presents a source of potential common ground between the work
of Elias and Foucault. In an interview with the editorial collective of Quel Corps?
Foucault observes that with relations of power, one is always ‚
phenomena which don’t obey the Hegelian form of the dialectic.‛65 Foucault pro-
vides the example of bodily regimens such as exercise, diet, body-building and so
forth which, he proposes, first serve to produce the effects of power — the ‚healthy‛
bodies of children, soldiers, etc. — but then are used against power: ‚Suddenly, what
had made power strong becomes used to attack it.‛66 But power, he proposes, inva-
riably retreats, reorganises, re-invests itself in new forms, new modalities. Power,
thus, is characterised by a continual and recursive struggle involving moves and ad-
versarial counter-moves. However, such struggles occur not in the manner of
salvoes from opposite ends of a battlefield, but within the same sites and relays.
To clarify, Foucault’s more specific example is that of auto-eroticism and the revolt
against this in eighteenth-century Europe. In this context, masturbation came to be
viewed as a sickness, and a system of monitoring and control was instituted, in
particular over the bodies of children. Foucault writes, ‚But sexuality, through thus
becoming an object of analysis and concern, surveillance and control, engenders as
the same time an intensification of each individual’s desire for, in, an over his
body.‛67 The sexual revolt against such repression can be seen as the counterpoint to
this incursion. The response from power is not to ‚quell the rebellion,‛ but rather to
embrace it through an economic and ideological exploitation of eroticism and sexual
‚liberation,‛ from sun-screen to pornographic films.68 As such, Foucault argues,
‚
control by repression but that of control by stimulation. ‘Get undressed — but be
slim, good-looking, tanned.‛’69
In the case of EI, the ‚repression‛ of the emotional uniform is replaced by the
‚stimulation‛ of emotional mufti. Emotional expression replaces feeling rules and
scripts. But the intelligent management of feeling remains a lifelong project, one
involving the continual and uncertain negotiation of how and when it is right to be
angry, happy, enthusiastic, indifferent, and so forth: one to be undertaken against
65
M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin
Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 56.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid., 57.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
Hughes: Emotional Intelligence
47
the transient, shifting and indefinite standard of what is appropriate in the ebb and
flow of life within and beyond the workplace. In this manner, the emancipation
from the emotional uniform and the resistance of emotional scripts that is offered by
EI is simultaneously a new form of governmentality: resistance becomes discipline,
and equally, as I have argued elsewhere, this self-same discipline offers oppor-
tunities for resistance — perhaps in the very name of emotional honesty and
authenticity that has been solicited.70 The case of EI, then, would appear to exem-
plify Foucault’s arguments that power is exercised as much through what is per-
mitted as what is forbidden, through both collusion and opposition; indeed, it
consists in the generation of such fields of discursive possibility. As Foucault, here
citing Servan, argues: ‚A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains;
but a true politician binds them even more with the chain of their own ideas [which
is] all the stronger if we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our
own work.‛71
To employ a Foucauldian distinction, while emotional labour might best be under-
stood as a technology of domination, EI appears to constitute a technology of the self.72
Where technologies of domination are deployed to ‚
individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination;‛73 technologies of the
self involve new techniques of self-revelation, new ways of knowing oneself, and a
proliferation of new forms of expertise: techniques that ‚
effect, by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations
on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to
transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,
perfection or immortality.‛74
These technologies, Foucault argues, are historically variant but have centrally in-
volved changing conceptions of care of the self, knowledge of the self, truth-telling, and
self-disclosure.75 The guiding practice that characterises such processes of self-forma-
70
See Hughes.
71
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1982), 102-103.
72
M. Foucault, ‚Technologies of the Self,‛ in L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (eds.),
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988), 18.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
It is my express intention not to conflate ‚technologies of the self‛ with ‚care of the self.‛
Particularly in his later work, Foucault presented ‚care of the self‛ as an ethical position developed
in classical philosophy that he employed to make sense of a range of practices and technologies of
modern selfhood. ‚Care of oneself‛ escaped its first philosophical meanings before gradually
becoming more general in scope, acquiring ‚
vation of the self‛‛ that ‚< procedures, practices, and
Foucault Studies, No. 8, pp. 28-52
48
tion — one which stands at the juncture between technologies of domination and
technologies of the self — is the confessional. Confessional narratives range from
Christian confession to autobiography, and (most significantly in the context of the
present discussion) different forms of therapy. Confession involves a particular set of
discursive practices in which the self’s ‚self-relation‛ is constituted — whereby
subjects are effectively both ‚producers‛ and ‚produced.‛ The production of con-
fessional narratives draws centrally upon the techniques of self-knowledge, truth-
telling, revelation, exposure, in which the self is rendered visible and made ame-
nable to change, and ultimately transformation — motifs that are once again
repackaged under such guises as knowing and managing one’s emotions, and managing
and motivating oneself, and the more general quest to find one’s true self that is
enshrined in Goleman’s model of EI. Like other similar therapeutic discourses, a
particularly attractive aspect of EI its capacity to offer a potential resolution to the
seemingly irreconcilable ideals associated with different arenas of social life, such as
those which relate to the striving for corporate success, on the one hand, and
personal fulfilment on the other; or, in a similar manner, the seemingly incompatible
goals of interpersonal dynamism and emotional authenticity.76 In other words, such
notions offer a means to reconcile our ‚private‛ and ‚public‛ emotional lives.
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