The Story of Work: A Narrative Analysis of Workplace Emotion

This paper argues that work-related emotion is best accessed using indirect means, including figures of speech and narrative. An analysis of 452 narratives drawn from previously published works is presented to the end of addressing two research questions: Where is the emotion in work? and What is the emotion in work? In response to the first question, a series of prototypical work situations are isolated, all of which are heavily charged with emotion. In response to the second question, clusters of emotion associated with each prototypical situation are identified. An image of the vital dynamics of organizational life is presented based on these results, and it is argued that narrative analysis is a useful and accessible means of examining the experience of emotion in organizations.