Sociological Understandings of Teachers’ Emotions: A Short Introdution, Critical Review, and the Way Forward
©2015
Textbook
98 Pages
Summary
Teachers’ emotions have been issues drawing the attentions of educational scientists. Since teachers’ emotions has been regarded as a psychologial phenomonon, the educational scientists explain how teachers feel and how their feelings affect educational process with psychological theories. However, more and more educational scientists note that teachers’ emotions are socially constructed and the social construction of teachers’ emotions is not explained by the psychological theories. As a result, they swith their theoretical perspectives from psychology to sociology. In the literature, the sociological theories they have employed include the labor process theory, theory of bureaucracy, emotional labor theory, post-structuralism, theory of emotinoal geographies, and identity theory. Nevertheless, each of the theories has some limitations. Therefore, the goals of this book is to (1) introduce and review the sociological theories which are applied to explain teachers’ emotions critically and (2) propose a sociological framework and research agenda for further studies based on the critically review.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
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burnout in Hong Kong (Ng, 2010). Second, teachers' negative emotions affect the
quality and effectiveness of teaching (Sutton, 2005). Research has showed that
teachers' positive emotions like satisfaction and enjoyment are positively related to
teachers' motivation, self-efficacy, innovation, and commitment in teaching, while
negative teachers' emotions are negatively related to these sources of teacher
effectiveness (Choi & Tang, 2011; Sutton, 2005; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Thus,
Hargreaves said, "good teaching is charged with positive emotion" (1998b, p. 835)
which is "absolutely central to maintaining and improving educational quality in our
schools" (1998a, p. 315). Therefore, there is a growing body of literature which
investigates the patterns of teachers' emotions in order to find ways to improve
teachers' psychological well-beings and the quality of teaching (Corcoran & Tormey,
2012; Day & Lee, 2011; Day & Leitch, 2001; Hargreaves, 1998a, 2003; Kelchtermans,
2005; Nias, 1996; Saunders, 2013; Schutz & Zembylas, 2009; Tsang, 2014b;
Zembylas, 2005c)
Sociological inquiry
Traditionally, teachers' emotions are investigated from psychological
perspectives, because emotions have been recognized as psychological phenomena
(Schutz, Aultman, & Williams-Johnson, 2009; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). According
to the psychological perspectives, teachers' emotions are affected by a range of
psychological factors. For example, the theory of burnout, which a psychological
perspective to examine why some people are more prone to intense negative emotions
or psychological symptoms than others in a similar and even the same working
condition, suggests that teachers' emotions are the function of stressful working
environment and teachers' personality trait, emotional intelligence, self-efficacy belief,
coping strategies, and locus of control (Chan, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2013; Chan & Hui,
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1995; Friedman, 2000; Gavish & Friedman, 2010; Lau et al., 2008; Maslach, 1993;
Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Seidman & Zager, 1991). Although the
psychological perspectives successfully identify some potential causes of teachers'
emotions, the major problem of the perspectives is that they have neglected the social
causes of teachers' emotions. As Schwab (1983) noted, such neglect may attribute all
negative outcomes to individual teachers, making them solely responsible for burning
out. Moreover, psychologists have recently pointed out that human negative emotions
are not only caused by psychological factors, they may also be affected by social and
structural factors, such as the characteristics of occupations and organizations
(Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli & Leiter, 2009). In other words, the psychological
explanations about teacher's emotions are incomplete. The incomplete explanations
may distract our attention from identifying the deep social and structural root of
teachers' emotions and in turn create unnecessary accusations on teachers about their
imperfect personality traits, coping strategies, emotional intelligences, and the like
(Santoro, 2011). In this sense, the problem of teachers' emotions may not be
effectively improved if we only pay attention to the psychological factors of individual
teachers. In order to patch up the weaknesses of the psychological research, it is
suggested to approach teachers' emotions from sociological perspectives(Tsang, 2013,
2014b).One more justification to study teachers' emotions from sociological
perspectives is that the large number of teachers who have been found to be unhappy
and dissatisfied all over the world suggests that negative emotions in teaching have
become a social issue. In other words, we need to tackle the problem with sociological
imaginations.
4
Conception of teachers' emotions: Social constructionism
From sociological perspectives, teachers' emotions are socially constructed. The
means how teachers feel in teaching or at work is conditioned, structured, or shaped by
social factors in addition to teachers' psychological or biological factors (Saunders,
2013; Tsang, 2014b; Zembylas, 2005c). This conception of teachers' emotions is
rooted in the social constructionism of emotions.
In sociology literature, the social constructionist understanding of emotions is
well illustrated by Thoits (1989, 1990). On the basis of social constructionism, Thoits
suggests that emotions involve four components: (1) interpretations or appraisals of a
situational stimulus, (2) changes in physiological or bodily sensations, (3) the free or
inhibited display of expressive gestures, and (4) a cultural label applied to specific
constellations of one or more of the first three components. As Figure 1.1 shows, the
four components are inter-correlated, but Thoits (1989) states that they need not be
present simultaneously for an emotion to be experienced or to be recognized by others.
Therefore, a researcher not necessarily captures all the components when he or she
examines phenomena of human emotions. For example, some researchers focus on the
impacts of cultural or emotional labels on the configuration of emotional experiences
(e.g. Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Gordon, 1990; Kemper, 1987); some
researchers are interested in how emotional displays and expressions are caused by
cultural rules(e.g. Gross, 1998; Hochschild, 1979, 1983; Wharton, 2009); and some
others study how emotions are aroused by social actors' reflexive interpretations or
appraisals of situations and selves (e.g. Collins, 2004; Damasio, 1999; Dawkin, 1872;
Denzin, 1990; J. H. Turner, 2007). In other words, social constructionism argues that
how people feel is structured, conditioned, or shaped by social factors in addition to
5
psychological and biological factors (Stets, 2012; Tenhouten, 2007; J. H. Turner &
Stets, 2005).
Although the social constructionism of emotions is commonly accepted, there are
two different forms of social constructionism: strong social constructionism and weak
social constructionism (Lupton, 1998; Thoits, 1989; J. H. Turner, 2009). The
fundamental distinction between the two forms of social constructionism of emotions
is that the strong form emphasizes the influences of social structure to emotions but
the weak form focuses on the impacts of human agency. In the existing literature, it is
noted that some studies on teachers' emotions are inclined to rely on the strong form
of social constructionism, while others tend to adopt the weak form of social
constructionism. What studies can be categorized as strong form of social
constructionism include the studies which examine the impacts of education reforms,
school administration, and cultures of teaching on teachers' emotions, because they
tend to overlook the effects of human agency in investigations. On the contrary, the
studies which examine the relationship of teachers' emotions to emotional discourses,
self-identity, and social interactions tend to attach to the weak form of social
Emotional label
Situational cues
Physiological changes
Expressive gestures
Figure 1.1: A model of subjective emotional experience (Thoits, 1990, p.192)
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constructionism. This is because they emphasize how teachers' emotions are shaped
by teachers' definition of situations or reflexivity but not social structure.
It is argued that the independent use of either the strong form or the weak form of
social constructionism of emotions may encounter the problem what Giddens called
(1993, p. 4) "strong on structure, but weak on action" or "strong on action, but weak
on structure." According to Giddens (1984, 1993), the structure of every social
phenomenon is a duality implying that every social phenomenon is produced and
reproduced by dynamic interplays between structure and agency. Therefore, any
research which is "strong on structure, but weak on action" or "strong on action, but
weak on structure" is inappropriate. It is also true for the phenomenon of human
emotions. Sociologists of emotions, like Collins(1981, 1984, 1990, 2004), Hochschild
(1979, 1983, 1990), Kemper (1981, 1984, 1990, 2006), Stets (2010, 2012), Lupton
(1998), Tenhouten (2007), Thoits (1989, 1990), Turner (1999, 2007, 2010, 2011), and
Turner and Stets (2005, 2006b), have illustrated that emotions are aroused by social
actors' reflexive understandings of the self and situations, but the reflexive
understandings are conditioned by different macro- and micro-social structures,
including ideology, culture, institution, power, status, role, and social relation. In order
words, the existing sociological literature does not comprehensively capture the
phenomenon of teachers' emotions, because it neglects the duality of structure of
teachers' emotions (Tsang, 2014a).
Organization of the book
Therefore, the aim of this book is to propose a sociological framework which can
cater both structural and agential effects to teachers' emotions for further research.
The proposed framework is not developed from a vacuum. The book will develop the
framework by reviewing, criticizing, and then synthesizing the existing sociological
7
theories and studies about teachers' emotions. To achieve the aim, the discussion will
be divided into three sections. The first section is about the theories and research that
belong to the strong social constructionism. In the section, we will discuss the labor
process theory (Chapter 2), the theory of bureaucracy (Chapter 3), the emotional labor
theory (Chapter 4) respectively. In the second section, we will review the theories and
research that are categorized as the weak form of social constructionism, including
post-structuralism (Chapter 5), the theory of emotional geographies (Chapter 6), and
the identity theory (Chapter 7). Based on the reviews, the third section of the book will
propose a sociological framework (Chapter 8) and research agenda (Chapter 9) for
further research on teachers' emotions. The final chapter (Chapter 10) of that section is
the conclusion of the whole book.
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Section One
Strong Form of Social Constructionism of
Teachers' Emotions
10
Chapter 2
Labor Process Theory: Teachers' Emotions in the Contexts
of Education Reforms
Since the 1980s, sociologists of education have criticized education reform all
over the world for its tendency to transform the labor and labor process of teachers in
such as a way that they resemble those of industrial workers, resulting in poor working
conditions and lives for teachers, such as heavy workload and the lack of leisure time
(Apple, 1982; Ball, 1994; Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992; Hargreaves, 1994; Harris, 1994;
Robertson, 2000). In order to improve the situation, sociologists of education have
investigated how education reform transforms labor and the labor process in teaching.
This kind of research is generally based on the labor process theory (Smyth, Dow,
Hattam, Reid, & Shacklock, 2000). Although the labor process theory does not
directly deal with teachers' emotions, its concerns offers insights into how teachers
feel is conditioned by education reform.
According to the labor process theory, many states in the world have attempted to
increase external control over teachers' work in order to promote high quality of
education, which in turn supports the development of the state (Smyth et al., 2000).
The studies have found that states may increase external control through two
transformation processes of labor: deskilling and work intensification (Smyth et al.,
2000). Deskilling is the process of devaluing and deprofessionalizing teachers' work,
which in turn results in teachers being unable to define and design what they do at
work. According to Apple (1982, 1986), deskilling often starts from governmental
criticism of the education system.
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Studies show that governments in many countries and states attempted to
legitimize the education reform initiatives by blaming their education system as
insufficient to sustain the social and economic development of societies(Ball, 1994;
Berliner & Biddle, 1995). When they get the legitimacy, they tend to implement
education reforms to solve the "problems" of the education system with managerial
and market-oriented approach (Hargreaves, 2003), which is commonly referred to
managerialism (Mok & Welch, 2002; Simkins, 2000). Researchers argue that
managerialist education reforms may reinforce the process of deskilling because this
kind of reforms tends to make teachers subject to external supervisions and controls
from the government and the community by using the market logics for the operation
of state education like accountability and competition (Ball, 1994; Bowe et al., 1992;
Mok & Welch, 2002). One notable example is Hong Kong. Since the late-1990s, the
Hong Kong government has intensified its inspection and supervision of schools and
teachers by implementing several initiatives such as: School Self Evaluation (SSE)
and the External School Review (ESR) in 2003, the Quality Assurance Inspection
(QAI) in 1997, and Language Benchmarks Tests for teachers in 2000 (Tse, 2005).
Since teachers are subject to external control, they may become less able to control
and design their teaching process in the classroom (Kelchtermans, 2011). For example,
in western countries like the US, UK and Australia, teachers may be forced to train
students' academic skills rather than to foster their intellectual, social and moral
development, because the education reforms may narrowly define educational quality
and effectiveness by students' results in public examinations (Connell, 1995; Helsby,
1999; Valli & Buese, 2007). In order to ensure students' examination result, the
teachers may not be allowed to teach something outside curriculum and syllabus
designed by the government and education experts (Ball, 1994). As a result, they may
experience negative feelings like frustration, powerlessness and meaninglessness at
12
work because they may disagree with the narrow conception of teaching and education
(Smyth et al., 2000).
When teachers are deskilled, it becomes difficult for them to reject the extra
duties and workload imposed upon them (Apple, 1986). Thus, the labor process theory
claims that intensification of work is inevitable for the teaching profession during
managerialist education reforms (Apple, 1986). For example, a study conducted by the
OECD (2005) reported that teachers in the OECD countries were required to take on
many responsibilities in addition to classroom teaching, such as guidance and
discipline, organization of extracurricular activities, preparation of school-based
teaching and learning materials, management of the school's public image,
documentation, and writing reports for school internal and external inspection, and
other administrative duties. As a result of so many duties and responsibilities, teachers
may face excessive workload, lack leisure time, and thus feel stressed and burnt out
(Dworkin, 2002; Harris, 1994; Jeffrey & Woods, 1996; Penrice, 2011). Moreover,
studies suggest that work intensification also causes teachers to experience certain
negative emotions at work, such as guilty, frustration, anxiety, and meaninglessness,
because they are forced to do many tasks and duties (e.g. paperwork and
documentation) that are less related to teaching and education or have less educational
value (Ball, 2003; Hargreaves, 2003; Nias, 1999; Woods, 1999). As a result, teachers
may feel they are alienated from the work (Brooks et al., 2008; Kesson, 2003).
In sum, the labor process theory suggests that education reform may deskill
teachers and then intensify teachers' work. Deskilling and work intensification create
poor working conditions for teachers. Thus, the teachers may become dissatisfied,
stressed and burnt out at work. Moreover, the two processes together may lead to
teachers being unable to define and design what they do in schools and therefore being
13
forced to do a lot of work and duties that they think are irrelevant to teaching and that
they dislike. In such a condition, the teachers may experience the negative feelings of
meaninglessness, powerlessness and even alienation.
Nevertheless, there are two limitations when research applies the labor process
theory to study teachers' emotions. The first is that the theory implies that teachers'
emotions are purely a product of education reforms and disregard the agential effects.
As mentioned before, emotions are constructed by both agency and structure so that
any analysis ignoring either one dimension may be inaccurate. The second limitation
is that it overemphasizes the direct effects of education reforms on teachers' work and
emotions. Meyer (1992) and Oplatka (2004) illustrate that education system is a
decoupling system. In the decoupling system, schools can superficially conform to the
requirements and policies initiated by central government, but the school
administration can mediate the effects of the governmental requirements and policies
to teachers. For example, Crocco and Costigan (2007) discovered that teachers might
be less frustrated and stressed at work if the school administrators supported them to
do the best for students' interests and mitigated their workload and pressure caused by
education reforms. Leithwood and Beatty (2008) also indicated that transformational
practices of school administration (e.g. distributed leadership, shared vision, support to
teachers and participatory decision-making) were able to promote teacher job
satisfaction, morale, and commitment but significantly in a context of education
reforms. On the other hand, they also identified that bureaucratic and managerial
practices of school administration (e.g. hierarchy of administrative office, top-down
decision-making, centralization of authority and power) tended to create teacher stress,
anxiety, and burnout the same context of education reforms. In other words, a research
14
should also consider the effects of school administration to teachers' emotional
experiences at work in addition to those of education reforms and teacher agency.
15
Chapter 3
Theory of Bureaucracy: Effects of School Administration
System
Theory of bureaucracy suggests bureaucracy is the most efficient and rational
system of administration to achieve organizational goals. According to Weber (1946),
bureaucratic organizations have the following characteristics: division of labor and
specialization, hierarchy and centralization of authority and power, enforcement of
formal rules and regulations, and goal consensus. On the basis of these criteria,
researchers have argued school organizations as bureaucratic (Bidwell, 1965; Tyler,
1988). Indeed, a number of studies shows that school organizations more or less
exhibit the characteristics of bureaucracy (Firestone & Herriott, 1982; Herriott &
Firestone, 1984; Ingersoll, 1994, 2003; Wong, 1997). If schools are bureaucratically
administrated, what are the potential consequences for teachers?
According to the sociology of organizations, bureaucracy tends to bring negative
outcomes to employees' spirit and mentality, because of the neglect of individuals'
desires and interests at work (Volti, 2008). Sociologists suggest that the characteristics
of bureaucracy, such as hierarchy and centralization of power and authority, will break
a work process into minute segments and centralize the decision-making power in the
top of hierarchy (Braverman, 1974; Collins, 1975; Mills, 1951). Employees can only
be responsible for a piece of work without any understanding of and control over the
goals of the work defined by the organization. The separation of conception from
execution may be a problem for professionals like teachers, because the organizational
goals may be contradictory to the work purposes of the professionals (Apple, 1982;
16
Braverman, 1974; Derber, 1982). However, since they are employed by bureaucracy,
their purposes always are subordinate to the organizational goals. As Merton (1968)
illustrates, they may ultimately experience a series of frustration at work, because they
may be forced to do some things that they disvalue but they cannot reject to do.
Marxism and neo-Marxism refer the series of frustration to the feelings of
meaninglessness, powerlessness, self-estrangement (Blauner, 1964; Erikson, 1990;
Seeman, 1959; Swain, 2012).
Recently, researchers identify different types of school bureaucracy (Hoy &
Miskel, 2012), which may have different impacts on teachers' emotions. For example,
Hoy and Miskel (2012) illustrated that school administration is consisted of
bureaucratic pattern and professional pattern. The bureaucratic pattern focuses on the
coordination of school administrative work while the professional pattern focuses on
the technical and instructional work of a school. The variation of the combinations of
the two patterns may form different bureaucratic structures of a school. If the
bureaucratic pattern is high and the professional pattern is low, authoritarian
bureaucracy may occur. Authoritarian bureaucracy is similar to the traditional image
of bureaucracy described above, i.e. bureaucratic authority is emphasized, power is
centralized, rules and procedures are impersonally applied, teachers' interests and
purposes are subordinate to administrative one. Accordingly, this type of
administrative structure may relate to teachers' negative emotional experiences at
work, as described above. Chaotic structure of school bureaucracy may occur when
both bureaucratic and professional patterns are low. In the chaotic structure, teachers
may enjoy high autonomy in schools because there is little bureaucratic control over
them. However, it does not mean the teachers will be happy. This is because the
school may be full of inconsistency, contradiction, confusion, and conflict in
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day-to-day operations caused by the lack of effective means of bureaucratic and
professional patterns of administration (Hoy & Miskel, 2012). The inconsistency,
contradiction, confusion, and conflict may render teachers hard to fulfill their
professional aspiration so that they may feel negative at work even though they may
have a high degree of autonomy (Hargreaves, 2002). On the other hand, professional
structure of school bureaucracy is another type of school administration. This type of
school bureaucracy may occur when the bureaucratic pattern is low and the
professional pattern is high. It does not mean this type of administrative structure lack
bureaucratic means to coordinate and manage teachers' work. Instead, it tends to
establish bureaucratic mechanisms to support teachers to exercise their expertise and
competence in teaching in order to maximize the quality education (Hoy & Miskel,
2012). Leithwood and Beatty's (2008) study implied that this kind of school
administration may relate to positive emotions of teachers because this kind of
administration tends to support teachers to achieve their professional interest, which is
facilitating students to learn better.
Accordingly, the impacts of school administration on teachers' emotions at work
are complex. Different types of school administration may condition different
emotional experiences of teachers. Since schools may adopt different types of
administration, studies on the effects of school administration may empower us to get
a more complicated picture about why teachers in recent years tend to feel negative
toward and at work. However, the studies of school administration have been less
interested in how school administration affects teachers' emotions. Even though some
studies examine the relationship between school administration and teachers' emotions,
these studies generally are quantitative (Leithwood & Beatty, 2008). These studies
successfully demonstrate the statistical relationship between the variables, but they
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cannot help us understand how teachers' emotions are shaped and conditioned by
school administration. Although the theories of bureaucracy offer some explanations
about the "how" questions, such as impersonality of school administration, similar to
the labor process theory, the explanations are strong on structure but weak on agency.
This may be a weaknesses to understand how teaches' emotions at work are produced
and reproduced.
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Chapter 4
Emotional Labor Theory: Emotional Culture and Forced
Emotional Management
One of the prevalent research interests concerning teachers' emotions is
emotional labor in teaching (Tsang, 2011). To some extent, this kind of research aims
to explore the nature of teaching and its impact on teachers' psychological and
emotional well-being. Research on emotional labor in teaching is inspired by
Hochschild's (1979, 1983) work, which is influenced by dramaturgical theory and
alienation theory. On the basis of the dramaturgical theory, Hochschild noted that
there are feeling and expression rules specifying how we should feel and display our
feelings in every social setting. For example, feeling and expression rules specify that
people should be sad and should not smile at funerals, but that people should be happy
and should not cry at weddings (Denzin, 1984). If social actors cannot adjust their
feelings and displays according to feeling and expression rules, they will be perceived
as emotional deviants by others (Thoits, 1990). To avoid becoming emotional deviants,
people need to manage their emotions and displays appropriately. Hochschild referred
emotion management to emotion work and identifies two strategies of emotion work:
surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting involves modifying one's emotional
display in accordance with what is expected in a particular situation regardless of
one`s actual feelings, whereas deep acting involves trying to change one's feelings to
match the appropriate emotional display (Hochschild, 1979).
To some extent, emotion work is a normal act occurring in social actors' private
lives. However, from the perspective of alienation theory, Hochschild (1983) pointed
21
out that emotion management is not only an act occurring in one's private life, but also
the labor done for a wage in post-industrial societies. She found that more and more
enterprises, especially service-related, were inclined to sell employees' emotional
activities for profit making. In such a situation, employees are no longer able to
exercise control over their feelings and displays. For example, Hochschild (1983)
illustrated how flight attendants were required by their employers to keep smiling and
show warmth towards consumers because smiling and warmth are the selling points of
airlines. Other studies have also had similar findings among other frontline service
workers (e.g. waitresses and insurance sales), care giving workers (e.g. retail clerks
and child care workers), professionals (e.g. physicians and lawyers), and public
service workers (e.g. social workers and corrections officials) (Guy, Newman, &
Mastracci, 2008; Wharton, 2009). In other words, many people in post-industrial
societies have to manage their emotions under supervision. Hochschild (1983) referred
this kind of act to emotional labor: emotion management done for a wage. One
possible consequence of emotional labor is emotional dissonance, which is the
separation of feelings from displays (Hochschild, 1983). The higher the degree of
emotional dissonance, the higher the degree of the feelings of dehumanization,
self-alienation, depersonalization, depression, and burnout (Ashforth & Tomiuk, 2000;
Diefendorff, Richard, & Yang, 2008; Hochschild, 1983; Hopfl & Linstead, 1993;
Lewig & Dollard, 2003).
Generally, sociological studies on emotional labor suggest that it is more likely
that workers who are required to engage in face-to-face interactions with the public
with love and care perform emotional labor (Wharton, 2009). Accordingly,
educational researchers have argued that teachers are required to perform emotional
labor because they need to interact face-to-face with students with love and care
Details
- Pages
- Type of Edition
- Erstausgabe
- Publication Year
- 2015
- ISBN (eBook)
- 9783954898220
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783954893225
- File size
- 578 KB
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2014 (October)
- Keywords
- sociological understandings teachers’ emotions short introdution critical review forward
