Suppression or expression

Based on an interview study of neonatal nurses, this article sets out to explore the management of emotions within a work context where their suppression is a professional requirement. Drawing on Bolton’s (2000a, 2000b) identification of different types of organizational emotionality, in particular prescriptive and philanthropic emotion management, the article seeks to demonstrate the complexities involved in the performance of emotional labour. It does this by first exploring the times when a nurse chooses to perform one form of emotion management over another (e.g. prescriptive over philanthropic). Second, the article examines the relationship between these two forms of emotion management, taking into account their gendered nature and highlighting the existence of any tensions between them. Lastly, it considers how nurses create informal communities of coping (Korczynski, 2003) as a means of dealing with the consequences of having to move between these two different forms of emotion management.