Professional Emotions in Court

Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants ‘backstage’ – whether at the office or at lunch – in order to observe preparations for and reflections on the performance in court itself, this book sheds light on the emotionality of courtroom interactions, such as professional collaboration, negotiations, and challenges, with the analysis of micro-interactions being situated in the broader structural regime of the legal system – the emotive-cognitive judicial frame – throughout. A demonstration of the false dichotomy between emotion and reason that lies behind the assumption of a judicial system that operates rationally and without emotion, Professional Emotions in Court reveals how this assumption shapes professionals’ perceptions and performance of their work, but hampers emotional reflexivity, and questions whether the judicial system might gain in legitimacy if the role of emotional processes were recognized and reflected upon

Professional Emotions in Court

Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants ‘backstage’ – whether at the office or at lunch – in order to observe preparations for and reflections on the performance in court itself, this book sheds light on the emotionality of courtroom interactions, such as professional collaboration, negotiations, and challenges, with the analysis of micro-interactions being situated in the broader structural regime of the legal system – the emotive-cognitive judicial frame – throughout. A demonstration of the false dichotomy between emotion and reason that lies behind the assumption of a judicial system that operates rationally and without emotion, Professional Emotions in Court reveals how this assumption shapes professionals’ perceptions and performance of their work, but hampers emotional reflexivity, and questions whether the judicial system might gain in legitimacy if the role of emotional processes were recognized and reflected upon

Klimatförändring och emotionshantering:: Institutionalisering av miljörörelsen i Danmark

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The complexity of the issue, along with the breakdown of international negotiations of the UN Climate Change Conference in 2009, raise demands for new forms of mobilization and strategies. In this article, we discuss how strategies of environmental movements to combat climate change can be understood in relation to the ways in which the movement has been institutionalized in a national and global context. We base our analysis on environmental movement actors’ own reflections on their practices and organizational forms as well as previous research describing the history of environmentalism in Denmark. We conclude by discussing the implications in terms of the emotional strategies of the movement and whether climate justice as an issue has affected the strategies of the movement

Moving and Jamming : Implications for Social Movement Theory

The present compiled dissertation explores culture jamming as a social movement in late capitalist information society. Culture jamming embraces groups and individuals practicing symbolic protest against the expansion and domination of large corporations and the logic of the market into public and private life. The central aim is to understand the meaning of culture jamming; its “model” of collective identification, and its protest and mobilizing strategies. International social movement research mostly focuses upon well established movements that are traditionally organized and directed against conventional political institutions. Studying culture jamming as a social movement therefore entails implications for social movement theory and research. For instance, concepts must be adjusted to cover emerging “individualized” forms of collective action and the effects of cyberspace on collective identification. Furthermore, attention is directed to emotions in culture jamming. It is thereby also argued that social movement research generally may have a lot to gain from incorporating emotion theory. Data consists of texts and visuals from the organization Adbusters Media Foundation, and seven interviews with culture jammers. The groups represented in the interviews are Institute for Applied Autonomy, Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping, New York Surveillance Camera Players, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Rtmark, and the French Casseurs de Pub. The method of analysis is “abductive” qualitative text analysis inspired by hermeneutic qualitative analysis and the epistemological and ontological foundations of discourse theory and post-structuralism. Analysis is carried out in five separate studies presented in text I-IV (previously published) and in chapter eight. Text I maps the Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) along the lines of narrative, organization, ends, means, and strategy. Text II offers an analysis of the various nodal points in the AMF discourse and discusses the tensions inherent to the AMF effort to “hegemonize” the meaning of culture jamming. Text III offers an analysis of culture jamming as political activism from the thematic perspective of culture, place and identity, based on four of the interviews. In text IV the AMF visuals are analyzed from the perspective of emotions and social movement mobilization. Chapter eight brings together the seven interviews and the AMF material into an analysis of emotions in culture jamming

Patrik Hall, Vesa Leppänen och Malin Åkerström, Mötesboken. Tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel. Égalité, 2019

Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv</p

Epistemic emotions in prosecutorial decision making

The article examines epistemic emotions as part of the emotive-cognitive processes of prosecutors' knowledge seeking and decision making in preliminary investigation and court proceedings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and shadowing of prosecutors in Sweden, we show how emotions motivate and orient prosecutors' inquiries and the fundamental role of the 'certainty-doubt spiral' for 'doing objectivity'. In conclusion, we discuss the centrality of emotions for conscientious and well-considered decisions in legal work. The study contributes to the field of law and emotion by exploring the epistemic quality of emotions, notably the certainty-doubt spiral, in legal work

The Emotional Interaction of Judicial Objectivity

Like other Western legal systems, the Swedish legal system constructs objectivity as an unemotional state of being. We argue that the enactment of objectivity in situ relies on objectivity work including emotion management and empathy. Building on qualitative interviews and observations in Swedish district courts, we analyse courtroom interaction through a dramaturgical lens, highlighting tacit signals and interprofessional emotional communication aimed to secure objective procedures, while sustaining the ideal of unemotional objectivity. By analytically separating objectivity from impartiality, we show that judges’ objective performances balance empathic attunement and restrained expressions to uphold an impartial presentation. Prosecutors take pride in maintaining objectivity in spite of being partial, fostering the ability to switch between engagement and disengagement depending on the strength of the case. The requirement for legal professionals to be autonomous demands skillful inter-professional emotional attuning. Thereby, collaborative professional emotion management achieves the ideal of justice as being objective.Both authors contributed equally to this work.</p

Power, status, and emotion management in professional court work : The case of judges and prosecutors

We examine key characteristics of the work tasks of judges and prosecutors from a power and status perspective, discerning how emotions tie into this perspective. Analysis of court observations, interviews and shadowing of judges and prosecutors at four Swedish district courts and prosecution offices shows that power and status operate differently for the respective professions, resulting in distinct emotions and emotion management strategies. For analytical purposes we adopt a split power concept: power over and power to. The judges’ rather distinct power over requires a certain status in order to be comfortably executed, counteracting guilt and shame in relation to lay people. The prosecutors’ work is characterised by dependent power relations and the enactment of status both to the police and to judges for their power to perform their work. We suggest that this gives rise to different emotional profiles for the two professional roles. The article highlights the malleable and relativistic dimensions of power and status, and above all their inherent emotional qualities

Prosecutors’ habituation of emotion management in Swedish courts

The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of 41 prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. Our findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are little acknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.