Rolling with the punches: receiving peer reviews as prescriptive emotion management

ABSTRACT

Although Collier’s [2002. “The Changing University and the (Legal) Academic Career – Rethinking the Relationship between Women, Men and the Private Life of the Law School.” Legal Studies 22: 1–32] ‘emotional economy’ of academia is well travelled in management and organization studies research, this literature is predominantly informed by Hochschild’s [1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press] original formulation of emotional labour as mandated by management for commercial reasons. Equally, there is little analysis of research and even less of receiving peer reviews. Nonetheless, authors can find peer review emotionally challenging, especially when they receive rejections or caustic reviews. Qualitative interviews with management and organization studies academics indicate an understanding of the receipt of peer reviews as properly governed by Bolton’s [2005. Emotion Management in the Workplace. London: Palgrave, 2009. “Getting to the Heart of the Emotional Labour Process: A Reply to Brook.” Work, Employment and Society 23: 549–60; Bolton and Boyd 2003. “Trolley Dolly or Skilled Emotion Manager? Moving on from Hochschild’s Managed Heart.” Work, Employment and Society 17: 289–308] prescriptive feeling rules. This suggests such emotion work demands private processing to underpin public displays, even though these are anonymized and written. It may mean authors choose not to appeal to editors about reviewing outcomes except where due process has been breached, as well as involving proxy work by editors to forestall potential hurt to authors.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• emotional labour
• emotion management
• management and organization studies
• receiving peer reviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Carnall’s (1990) much quoted ‘coping cycle’ which outlines how we react to organizational change. As Jamie’s remark indicates, it is loosely modelled on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant for transcription from the University of Leicester