Suppression or Expression: An Exploration of Emotion Management in a Special Care Baby Unit

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.