Part V: Emotions and health: Chapter 17: Emotions in rationalizing organizations.

This chapter moves the sociological analysis and understanding of emotions to considerations of processual and structural issues, located in the context of a discussion of U.S. health care settings and organizations. These, the authors argue, represent prime cases of substantial ongoing change, especially increasing rationalization, in contexts where emotions are significantly embedded in the work, thus generating a theoretically intriguing tension between demands for affective neutrality and desires for particularity. Transitions in these health care systems bring forth new structures where expectations, deeply ingrained in professional care-givers and related to important emotional and social issues, are no longer appropriate and new emotional responses have not yet been sufficiently developed or are fragmented. In opening up these questions of emotions in cultural, social and economic change, a topic thus far little explored in the growing literature on emotions, the authors therefore move the analysis of emotions from point in time issues to a more dynamic view. In doing so, they draw on previously developed concepts and positions such as emotional labour, feeling rules, the sentimental order, and the relationship of structure to emotions and evocative transformations, concluding with an agenda for future research utilizing comparisons of other settings such as business and industry.