Happy objects at work: the circulation of happiness

ABSTRACT

Many organisations believe that workplaces ought to be happy spaces. However, actions to promote happiness often overlook the variety of impacts emotions may have. While the current literature on emotional labour focuses on feeling rules, emotional displays and normative control, this article links happiness to materiality by exploring affects and the power relations produced. After reviewing the literature on happiness and emotional labour, this article investigates the circulation of emotions, or how emotions become ‘sticky’ to objects and bodies while having different flows of intensities. Building an empirical study of happiness, I followed the flows of happiness around an organisation and found that happiness produced unintended and unsettling intensities for employees. In doing so, I argue that emotions and their intensities are entangled with power effects of regulating affective experiences, as an affective form of relational control.

KEYWORDS:

• Happiness
• emotion
• affect
• materialities
• relational control

Introduction

At first glance, encouraging happiness at work seems like common sense for organisations. After all, many academics argue that organisations ought to provide happy environments to create a productive workforce (see Cooper 2010; Achor 2010; Achor 2013; Warr 2019). Happiness, as experiences of joy or elation, can be associated with employees’ wellbeing and life satisfaction (Cardell 2015; Stearns 2018). Many organisations now focus on how to manage and measure happiness:

Happiness, in its various guises, is no longer some pleasant add-on to the more important business of making money, or some new age concern for those with enough time to sit around baking their own bread. As a measurable, visible, improvable entity, it has now penetrated the citadel of global economic management … Techniques, measures and technologies are now available to achieve this, and they are permeating the workplace, the high street, the home and the human body. (Davis 2015, 3)

Many accounts of happiness in organisations only focus on the positive impacts of happiness and ignore power relations which may permeate everyday work (Fineman 2006). Davis's quote suggests that a ‘happiness agenda’ includes management techniques and technologies which control various spaces and bodies for the benefit of corporations. This suggests the need for a closer investigation to critically question happiness and ask the question ‘what does happiness do?’ (Ahmed 2010, 2) when it is encouraged as part of work.

To develop our understanding of the impact of happiness, this article will build on the concept of emotional management to explore emotions’ relationship to affect. The current literature on emotional labour has developed emotion as a social and cultural construct requiring a display of surface or deep feeling (Hochschild 1983). This literature has expanded to include the study of bodies, both human and non-human, as well as an acknowledgement that emotional work is often framed by gendered and sexualised expectations. Much of the literature focuses on how individuals experience emotional labour, however, the relationship between emotions, affect and materialities is underdeveloped in current studies. Drawing on Sara Ahmed (2010; 2014), emotion can have: affect, or the ability to move us; intentionality, or where to direct our feelings; and judgement, or expectations on how we should or ought to feel. By exploring emotions, affect and materialities, this article will present an alternative way of understanding emotions and power at work. In particular, it will analyse power within the circulation of emotions, seen in different intensities of affect.

In this article I examine the affective flows of happiness in an organisation. A study of an organisation was used to analyse the traces of happiness, using an ethnographic approach, including interviews, observations, photography and a humour diary. The aim was to analyse how happiness emerged and what affects were produced. This paper firstly contributes to our understanding of emotion by examining the ‘stickiness’ of emotions like happiness onto organisational materialities such as objects and bodies (Ahmed 2010). I add to the research on emotional control by examining how ‘stickiness’ and affective pathways reinforce specific understandings of emotion. Stickiness suggests affects becoming attached to objects and persons through the repetition of that affect. Emotions are performative in having an agency, but on the other hand, this stickiness also suggests the emotions may repeat in the future. Secondly, it contributes to our understanding of emotion and power by presenting an account of the flows and intensities caused by happiness as it circulated around the organisation. It suggests that power was located in affective relations formed during the circulation of happiness. In looking at moments where power was more transparent, it notes how emotions are part of affective paths that encourage some emotions while excluding others.

The article has the following structure. It first sets out emotions at work by reviewing emotional labour and then presenting an alternative affective understanding of emotion. To do this I use the work of Sara Ahmed to elaborate on how emotions have affect, direction and judgement, and are embedded in power relations in organisations. The review explores the significance of emotional objects, seeing materialities as an important and often overlooked site for exploring emotions. Finally, it sets up affective power as the ways in which emotions are performative and push us towards preferred affective routes. After setting up the methodology, I then introduce the study, which features an organisation advocating happiness and having fun at work. In asking ‘what does happiness do?’ in this organisation, I follow the flows of happiness from management values to the materiality of the organisation. Three flows of intensities are explored revealing how happiness (and unhappiness) emerged and affected employees. The findings reveal how it holds some affects in place through ‘sticky’ associations and intensities which can be both enjoyable and unsettling for employees. These associations and intensities produced paths of affect which embedded and produced organisational power relations.

Happiness, emotion, and affect

This literature review builds on a sociological perspective of emotion positioning emotions as social and cultural practice (Durkheim 1966; White 1993; Hochschild 1983). Much of the literature from this tradition in organisation studies focuses on emotional labour, demonstrating the relevance of feeling rules, and surface and deep acting (Hochschild 1983). There is already an extensive body of literature that discusses various dimensions and conditions of emotional labour, where employees are expected to manage emotions such as happiness as part of their work (e.g. Williams 2003; Warhurst and Nickson 2009; Humphrey, Ashforth, and Diefendorff 2015). Hochschild (1979, 1983) locates emotional labour within ‘feeling rules’ which tell us about how we should behave in different contexts and emotional management which employees use to negotiate these rules. Happiness can be expressed through emotional display rules, where smiling and displays of happiness have a social function (Lindebaum 2017). For example, Bolton and Boyd (2003) set out four types of emotional labour: presentational (how employees are socialised to feel); philanthropic (emotional work directed towards others selflessly); prescriptive (the feeling rules of the organisational culture, see also Fineman 2008 on emotionologies); and pecuniary, the feeling rules of customer interactions. This paper contributes towards prescriptive emotional labour, specifically around happiness as a shared emotion which organisations, using their cultural values, may expect employees to feel.

This literature on emotional labour usefully acknowledges how emotions come from social expectations, overlapping with gender and sexuality, and from employment conditions, especially in service roles. However, emotional labour tends to focus on emotion as an individual experience in relation to social rules and expectations. This paper offers an alternative to this by arguing we need acknowledge emotions’ entanglement with other human and non-human bodies (see Knights and Thanem 2005; Dashper 2019). Sara Ahmed’s work presents an opportunity to revisit happiness and emotional work, to examine how everyday lived experiences of emotion are informed by the structures under which they are produced. In other words, it examines the agency of emotions to affect us as subjects and bodies. As this article explores, everyday organisational lives are partially formed through power relations which produce not just rules about how emotions ought to be expressed, but also expectations about the affects which will be experienced. Much of the literature on emotional labour assumes that positive emotions, like happiness, will lead to positive affects for employees (Humphrey, Ashforth, and Diefendorff 2015) Alternatively in Ahmed’s work, emotions are performative as they have agency to affect, both positively and negatively. By understanding emotions as performative, we can ask what emotions ‘do’ when we interact with them and develop a nuanced understanding of emotions and power relations in work. This is important of organisations’ interest in managing space, objects and materials towards particular aesthetics to evoke emotional reactions (Strati 1999). As a result, Ahmed’s approach allows us to know more about the power relations through which particular emotions are evoked and the materials which are entangled with those emotions.

Ahmed argues that emotions do not reside in people or objects but are formed constantly in the in-between, in the movement and accumulation of affect (Ahmed 2010; 2014). As emotions ‘circulate’, they become attached or connected to human and non-human objects. Circulation for Ahmed does not refer to emotional contagion, i.e. the transference of emotion from one person to another, but instead to how emotions move and shape us as we become entangled with them. For Ahmed (2014) emotions can be ‘sticky’, becoming attached and giving significance to materialities such as bodies and objects, both through experiences of past affects and promises of future potential. Stickiness occurs because of repetition, where affect accumulates. Words become signs as they become detached from their materiality but where traces of their context continue, resulting in a lingering affect. For example, to name something as disgusting attaches disgust as a value onto that object (Ahmed 2010). Alternatively, where objects are perceived to be the cause of happiness, they become ‘happy objects’ (Ahmed 2010). For Ahmed (2010, 29):

Objects would refer to not only physical or material things but also to anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, styles, as well as aspirations.

This article focuses on the materiality and affects of these objects. Ahmed’s definition of object is useful because it allows us to explore how materiality, values and practice move us towards certain aspirations. It presents an assemblage of material and mental objects that operate in specific contexts to ‘lead us’ through their promise of affect. Matter, both human and non-human, can have an agency, a ‘thing-power’ (Bennett 2010) which is always in becoming (Massumi 2015). This vibrancy of materiality is its affective capacity, which draws our attention. While Ahmed’s primary focus is on non-human objects, she also explores how emotions circulate between bodies, specifically drawing on the concept of attunement. For Ahmed, attunement is similar to mood or atmosphere that we may encounter in a space. Atmospheres affect us, although they may affect bodies differently, and some people may be more attuned to the mood than others. When our mood is not in line with an atmosphere it can make us into a stranger or an ‘affect alien’ (Ahmed 2014, 221).

The strength of Ahmed’s argument lies in exploring emotions both at the level of bodies and objects while also linking to the wider societal norms. Happiness may be based on social expectations and boundaries that can have detrimental impacts on specific and non-specific persons and their access to ‘happiness’, such as positioning bodies in relation to the happy housewife (Ahmed 2010), the angry Black woman (Hooks 2000; Ahmed 2009) and the feminist killjoy (Ahmed 2010; 2014). The circulation of emotions may be blocked, especially if a body is ‘out of place’ (Ahmed 2014). Emotions orientate bodies: for example, a woman may be seen as overly-emotional in a context where she is expressing emotions like anger or frustration. Locating happiness in social expectations opens up a critique of what happiness ‘does’ in a collective sense as well as how it affects specific bodies. Emotions circulate through having affect, direction and judgement (Ahmed 2010).

Affect

Affect refers to intensities, or connections, between bodies that shape ourselves and others, both human and non-human (Ahmed 2010; Bennett 2010). Ahmed is particularly influenced by Spinoza’s concept of intensities to refer to the body’s increasing or decreasing capacity to be affected and to affect. Emotions bring us into contact with objects and other bodies, which produce different intensities that shape us, including in organisational settings (Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani 2017). Scholars of affect often draw on Massumi’s (2015) work on intensities and flow, where he argues that some affects create flows of intensities, while other intensities disrupt or transgress flows. Where affect is connected to intensities, emotions are seen as a distinct concept. Massumi (2015, 4–5) describes emotion as ‘the way that the depth of that ongoing experience registers personally at a given moment … ’ and is thus ‘a very partial expression of affect.’ In Massumi’s writing and that of scholars influenced by him, such as Probyn (2005), Wetherell (2012) and Seigworth and Gregg (2010), emotion is seen as separate and a qualified intensity, or a sociolinguistic expression of a personal experience. Affect, on the other hand, is seen as an unqualified intensity that is beyond narrative. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) even suggest that to study affect is to move beyond emotion, where Massumi (2002) describes affect as a different logic than emotions (see Ahmed 2014, 207).

While Ahmed draws on Massumi’s concept of intensities, her work contrasts with his approach to affect, which sees emotions and affect as autonomous (Ahmed 2010). Ahmed counters the view that emotions are simply sociolinguistic explanations, arguing that emotions are also intensities that shape how bodies are moved. She argues that in everyday life emotions and affect ‘are contiguous; they slide into each other; they stick, and cohere, even when they are separated.’ (Ahmed 2010, 230) In practice affect and emotions are connected and often difficult to differentiate between. As a result, she is not interested in distinguishing between the two as separate processes. For her this limits our ability to discuss how emotions orientate us and provide judgement. This is important for the study of emotions in organisation studies because it recognises the importance of emotions not only as a form of labour but also as part of our being in the world, of the ways in which we are embodied in organisations. When we recognise that emotions are intensities, then we can begin to ask how these intensities also direct us towards organisational practices.

Direction

Emotions have intentionality in that they direct us towards or away from people and objects (Ahmed 2014). ‘We might say that happiness is an orientation towards the objects we come into contact with. We move towards and away from objects through how we are affected by them.’ (Ahmed 2010, 24) The pursuit of happiness directs us to wish for certain objects. Happiness contains an uneasiness and a sense of desire, and these affects often push or pull us in different directions (Ahmed 2010; Guschke, Christensen, and Burø forthcoming). Affect presents the question of whether that potentiality (the what-if) presents a promise or threat (Seigworth and Gregg 2010). We also form memories of objects through previous encounters that then influence our future orientations. Even while expectations of emotions frame and shape affective encounters, this does not mean affects are completely determined by emotions: for example it might be that we expect to be happy but experience disappointment. This is also the case in an organisational context, with the additional layer of organisational culture formed through values and norms. Organisational processes are designed to align with these values, and create affects for employees when they come into contact with them. This connects to Ahmed’s final consideration, that emotions also contain judgement or a sense of what emotions are considered of value in an organisational context.

Judgement

Emotions contain judgement: they can be perceived as good or bad, desirable or undesirable and moral or immoral. Emotions have value and our connection to objects is also appraised by others. This attribution of significance is another reason why Ahmed rejects Massumi’s separation of emotion from affect: for Ahmed we are already aware of the significance of emotions as we encounter them. We know we ought to be happy at our wedding or sad at a funeral. They also reflect our willingness to follow these emotions as social goods as well as our will to resist (Guschke, Christensen, and Burø forthcoming). To say that emotions have judgement therefore is also a statement about power relations. Ahmed draws heavily on Butler’s concept of power, specifically her argument that social norms are an effect of repetition. ‘As Judith Butler suggests, it is through the repetition of norms that worlds materialise, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced.’ (Ahmed 2014, 12) Often power which underpins what emotions should be felt and by whom is concealed under these social norms. Exploring emotions as having judgement recognises that emotions ‘propel’ us into action through our interactions with them. They become performative, through the repetition of acts that make them appear normal (Ahmed 2014; see also Tyler and Cohen 2008).

Power is not located in individuals, but in the ability for materialities to ‘do’ something; in the capacity of emotions to form relations, often in ways where we do not even register their affect (Ahmed 2014; Bennett 2010). Ahmed is known for analysing emotions in terms of gender and race, noting how some spaces may be occupied by certain bodies but exclude others, producing deep social differences through the judgement of emotions. ‘Ideas of happiness involve social as well as moral distinctions insofar as they rest on ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way’.’ (Ahmed 2010, 13) In studying racism, she notes how emotions such as hate and fear are performative: they can produce objects ‘sticky’ with anger or anxiety. Emotions ‘both generate their objects, and repeat past associations.’ (Ahmed 2014, 194) They shape relations into being, and in doing so reinforce associations with emotions that become difficult to deviate from.

People are encouraged to seek out activities, lifestyles and jobs which they believe will make them happy in the future (Davis 2015). When it comes to an organisational context, many companies use culture management to encourage values that are of benefit to the organisation (Willmott 1993). Employees may be encouraged to express and identify with emotions like happiness, particularly through organisational values and normative control (Jenkins and Delbridge 2014; see also Bolton 2005). Fleming and Sturdy (2011) argue normative control can include emotional labour and the management of emotion (Hochschild 1979). There may be an element of emotional control which can be seen as ‘the deliberate cultivation of an emotion’ and is the effort by which emotions are generated and required to match ideological and societal expectations (Campbell 1987, 71). Institutions may also regulate emotional expression, such as neutralising, buffering, prescribing and normalising emotions (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993). Many of the studies on emotional labour have focused on labour, skills and social competencies, but many of them take emotions like happiness as a bodily display rather than an affect. Examining emotions and power from Ahmed’s perspective allows us to ask how emotional control relies on repetition to make emotional displays appear ‘normal’ around societal expectations and how happiness shapes the boundaries of bodies and the self. It opens up questions of the ethics of emotional control, asking who benefits from emotions like happiness, and how they benefit. To explore power in an organisational context, happiness can be embedded in the relations between people and the materiality of the organisations. This allows us to explore emotions as a subtle form of control, one that is linked to the promise of possible future feelings as well as the exclusion of some people. Control within these contexts is not only imposed on employees through ideology but also produced by their entanglement with materialities and associations with emotions.

This raises two interesting areas for questioning related to the study of emotion in organisations. The first is whether happiness is a privilege in organisations. How does it become attached to certain objects and bodies? Is it in employees’ interests to be seen to be happy and what affects does this produce? How ethical is happiness? The second area of questioning relates to those who do not align with a happiness agenda. Does happiness leave any space to resist? People who choose not to orientate themselves towards happy objects can disrupt the flow of affect and may be positioned as deviant or ‘killjoys’ (Ahmed 2010; Guschke, Christensen, and Burø forthcoming). To answer this I follow flows of intensities amongst employees and objects, examining how happiness is affective, directed and judgemental. In analysing the circulation of emotion around organisations, employees and objects, I ask how happiness might be ‘sticky’ onto specific objects and bodies within the organisation to become ‘happy objects’. Finally, I consider different affects and intensities experienced where power relations become more transparent. The following section sets out the methodology which was used, followed by analysing data from an organisation where happiness, fun and humour were actively encouraged.

Researching happiness

This article emerged from a research project where the overall aim was to investigate how employees experienced ‘fun’ organisations. The project asked how fun was embedded into the everyday work practices and employees’ interactions, for example through their use of humour; the formalisation of fun into work structures such as performance reviews and assessment of their work; the attitudes of employees, including how they felt about and identified with the fun values of the organisation; and finally observations of practices where control and resistance might emerge. This article focuses on one organisation Marketing Inc.¹ where happiness was explicitly communicated to employees as a corporate value. I aim to build an in-depth and rich analysis of the flows of happiness.

‘Marketing Inc.’

Marketing Inc. was a UK office, based in the Midlands, of an international conglomerate specialising in advertising research. The work centred on analysing market research related to clients’ advertising, and as a result used both professional and creative skills including gathering market insights through questionnaires and interviews, presenting findings to clients, and winning and managing client accounts. Employees were organised into ‘pods’ that sat together and represented different clients, which formed the basis of work and social interactions. New employees were quickly initiated into the company culture through group activities. It was common for employees to socialise, live with and date other employees. It was possible to observe a rich collection of activities including staff meetings, social activities and group break-out activities. Marketing Inc. claimed to provide a fun, happy environment as part of their corporate values and image, making it a suitable site to understand how happiness circulates when it is encouraged.

The initial project followed a critical ethnographic technique allowing multiple voices to emerge (Putnam et al. 1993; Thomas 1993) and also looking at the wider patterns of power within the workplace (Fournier and Grey 2000; Alvesson and Deetz 2000). The study was influenced by critical ethnographies such as Collinson (1992; 2002) and Warren and Fineman (2007) and feminist ethnographies such as Hochschild (1983), Tyler and Abbott (1998) and Kondo (1990). This paper does take the data in a different direction from the initial study, through exploring emotions as affective encounters by reflecting on the entanglement of subjects (Wetherell 2012), materiality (Bennett 2010), atmospheres (Anderson 2009) and cultural politics and power (Ahmed 2010; Massumi 2015). Since the study was completed, affect has emerged as a new and important area in organisation studies (Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani 2017), contributing to understanding the subtlety of power relations (Ashcraft 2017), subjects in becoming (Pullen, Rhodes, and Thanem 2017) and affective materialities (Bell and Vachhani 2020; Baxter 2021). Emotions and affect opened up a new way to look at the study by connecting emotion to materialities of the organisation. While applying this theoretical lens after the study meant there were some limitations due to how the study was conducted, this did not become a significant impediment, because of the richness of the data.

Methods and emotions

In the findings, I draw on data from interviews, observations, photography and humour logs which I gathered over two months within Marketing Inc. Participants volunteered to take part, and after giving each participant information about the project, informed consent was given.² Each participant was interviewed for between thirty minutes to an hour and a half. They then completed a daily humour log for a week, which was followed by a second interview which lasted approximately one hour. The humour log asked the participant to write about at least one humorous event per day and was used as a tool in interviews to facilitate conversation about employees’ experiences. Nineteen employees were interviewed: six were managers and thirteen were employees in a variety of roles. The interviewees represented a mix of experience, positions, age, gender and ethnicity. Many of the employees were either university graduates who had recently entered into employment, or college leavers who entered on a non-graduate route.

The humour log draws on the method of diaries, which have also been used by Cieslik (2015) to research emotional events and responses. Laughing, smiling and expressing happiness or joy were taken as opportunities to investigate embodied affects when participants relived humorous events from the week in the interviews. They were also opportunities to discuss emotions such as happiness, frustration, anger, embarrassment and stress. Where possible, I compared participants’ accounts of events with observation notes. Finally, as the materiality of the organisation emerged as being important in the interviews, I used photography to create images of the objects and spaces participants discussed or that I noted in my observations (see also Warren and Fineman 2007).

Emotions in the analysis: flows of happiness

Data analysis occurred through two stages, the first for the original project and the second at a later stage to explore emotion in more depth. Four themes emerged in the original data analysis for the project: employees’ identity; emotions; materiality and the movements through space; and sexual humour. After completing the original analysis, I revisited the theme of emotions to ask: ‘what do emotions do’ in Marketing Inc.? In this second stage of analysis, I looked at emotions that emerged in the interviews and observation notes, seeing emotions as performative in day to day interactions, the diaries and interviews. I decided to trace the flows of happiness in employees’ interviews, my own accounts of events and the materiality and spaces of the organisation.

The article brings together an assemblage of material, experiences, reflections and voices, both my own and those of the participants in the study. I followed the flows of happiness in the data, as well as noting moments where those flows were unsettled or where unhappiness emerged. Three significant encounters are discussed where happiness became prominent and different types of intensities arose. These moments had a vibrancy (Bennett 2010) or shimmered (Seigworth and Gregg 2010) with affective intensities. I asked where and how emotions circulated and became sticky to objects. Rather than describing and categorising objects or bodies in themselves, flows of intensities may bring certain emotions into being. In a different context, these same objects might not have been associated with happiness or produce the same affect (Ahmed 2014). I do not claim to show all flows of happiness which emerged in the study, nor that an ethnographic approach can ever explore the totality of experiences in a moment. As a result, the data is presented as a partial, fragmented and non-representational account of how happiness circulated.

Happiness at work

The data will first explore the circulation of happiness as intended by the organisation, by examining values in objects produced by management. These are presented as intentional happiness, as they position it as a positive and desirable thing for the employees and the organisation. After this, three flows of happiness will be followed, each with a different intensity. In the first case, employees produced happy objects, entangling the materialities with associations to non-work happiness. In the second example, happiness had an unintended affect for employees, presenting a moment of heightened intensity. In the final example a mistake leads to an affective atmosphere where there was ambiguity on how employees should respond. The data demonstrates how happiness had affect, direction and judgement. I will examine how power relations were often opaque but emerged as more transparent in these sudden moments of intensity. Happiness was often experienced smoothly as part of the everyday, but in these moments heightened but ambiguous intensities took on often unintended affects.

An organisational pursuit of happiness

Two years before the research was undertaken, Marketing Inc. introduced four ‘pillars’ or values to reinforce its corporate culture in a time of expansion and growth. These pillars were: ‘Client First’, ‘Brave and Resourceful’, ‘Have Fun’ and ‘Stronger Together’. This section will explore how happiness emerged from these four pillars. These pillars were discussed at length by the organisation and the employees, feeding into team meetings and ways of doing work. Management also created team values, linked to the four pillars, with suggested actions that team members could take. To feed these key pillars down into the teams, team managers made presentations to the employees on what their work should look like. Soon after I started my research, I sat down with Neil, one of the team managers, in his office, to talk through a recent presentation he had given. He described the values as the following:

• Happiness: Making yourself and other people happy and passionate.

• Learn: Try new things and be paid for it. Know about new things in their work such as great ads and brand media.

• Being Open: The culture should be open and transparent.

• Love: Build relationships and friendships in projects, not just in their own team but between pods and other departments.

• Finding Meaning: Look for meaning and appreciate work day in and out. Look for what adds value to their clients.

• Be positive: Choose your attitude. Drive a positive workplace and get rid of outside worries.

• Participate: Get involved. Follow our passion and contribute to ideas.

  (Neil)

The presentation was an example of an object that was strongly associated with emotion. These were intended emotions, and happiness in particular was seen as something that should be encouraged through having fun (‘Happiness’ and ‘Be Positive’). Emotions also emerged in serving the client (‘Finding Meaning’), being innovative, creative and resourceful (‘Learn’ and ‘Be open’) and working with other employees (‘Love’ and ‘Participate’). The presentation encouraged employees to associate their work with happiness, especially through their connections to others. The presentation connects happiness to other values and activities, such as producing ads, taking part in team building activities and being passionate about ideas.

Happiness was performative as it moved employees to relate to each other. Each of the actions suggested how individual employees and teams could enact the pillars, often through building an inspirational and positive connection between work and happiness. Employees were expected to reproduce these values in their work, especially through group activities. By embedding the values into team activities, as will be explored in the later sections, it stressed to individuals that emotions should be shared and reproduced. When discussing the presentations with Neil, I was struck with how charged the presentation was with emotion: language such as ‘love’, ‘passion’, ‘happiness’ and ‘being positive’ suggest deep connections and intensity to how emotion ought to be experienced. There was a vibrancy to the words which they chose.

When I interviewed employees, many appeared to uncritically accept the values as well-intended and fairly innocuous. When asked what the values signified to them, many employees responded they meant ‘just enjoying coming to work’ (Doug), ‘enjoying yourself’ (Gina), or ‘people relaxing and enjoying themselves’ (Hugh). In other interviews, happiness connected to adding value for the client. For example, Mary, a manager, reflected this link between happiness and work performance: the values, ‘makes you do a better job because you feel better, loyal and happy and wanting to do better.’ Some employees at least were aware that the values were performative, in that happiness was supposed to make employees better at their jobs. For example, Hugh stated:

They [some employees] are happy to buy into it [the values] because either a. they are happy and enjoy it, or b. it furthers the business. That’s another reason why I would be quite cynical. I would never ever think they are doing it because they enjoy it, I think they are doing it because they get something out of it.

Hugh recognises there is a possibility that the values may be meaningful to the employees because they make them happy. However, it's clear that he also thought that happiness was used to further the business. Employees were expected to demonstrate the core values, especially in social environments which they were actively encouraged to take part in. Happiness in the organisation had a sense of obligation: an employee ought to be happy for themselves, their colleagues and the organisation. This is what Ahmed (2010) refers to as the intentionality of happiness, in how it orientates us towards objects. We move towards, or away, from objects as we are affected by them. In this case, happiness directed employees towards certain activities and behaviours, such as being sociable or trying new things, while directing them away from others (‘get rid of outside worries’).

This intentionality of happiness presented itself through the materiality of the building. On entering the building, the pillars were written onto the walls, forming my initial encounter with the organisation (see below). At the end of the hall was a TV screen which rotated images related to the pillars (Figure 1).

Figure 1 . Entryway, with close up of ‘Have Fun’ banner.

Keith, the IT specialist, designed the images at the request of management and as part of the internal marketing of the firm. When asked why he chose these images, he reflected:

So it is just all about, you know because some people say you can't really make an office look fun, so I stayed away from the whole office environment thing. Well outside, bright sunshine, rays of sun, people holding hands, couples having fun together, child on a swing, child playing, that's basically where it came from. (Keith)

These pictures were ‘sticky’ with happiness: not from work but from association to nostalgic views of childhood, gatherings and relationships. The connections brought happiness into the workplace, which by his own assessment was difficult to make ‘look fun’. These were happy objects that borrowed from the outside, using the association to produce the intended happiness. Warren (2005) also found a similar theme of employees finding pleasure in outdoor spaces in employees’ photographs of organisational space. However, in her account it was the immediate outdoor space around the building that employees took pictures of, in essence extending the boundaries of work to include non-work space. The images seen at Marketing Inc. used imaginary connections to outdoor spaces, family and friendship, highly saturated in their association of happiness. The materialisation had an intentionality that directed employees towards associating work with non-work happiness (Figure 2).

Figure 2 . ‘Have Fun’ image from TV screen in entryway.

The discussion so far has focused on the intentionality of happiness in objects such as the presentation and the materiality of the building. The following data section looks more closely at power relations related to the circulation of emotion, firstly through the ‘stickiness’ of happiness to specific objects produced by employees and secondly through the flows of affect from happiness. Three examples trace the flows and employees’ entanglement with the materiality of happiness resulting in different intensities.

Materialising happiness: ‘PASSION’

Management decided to encourage employee engagement by setting up staff ‘Social Committees’. One of the first responsibilities of the social committee was designing the space of the office, and management asked employees to volunteer to choose colours, paint the walls and select games and playful items (see Figure 3). Keith describes how management encouraged them to get involved:

They [management] have only started to do that a year ago, they went from sort of a very dull office environment and they decided that it was going to be one of our core areas and we had to make an effort … ‘we have to make the office look cool, how do we do that?’ and they get everyone involved and say ‘we can have chairs there’ … they have actually said, ‘you guys are the ones who are working there so you come up with ideas for it’. Because everyone takes pride in what they suggest and then it’s now, it’s on the wall, and it looks really good. (Keith)

Figure 3 . Social Area.

A significant focus was placed on employees taking ownership of the space, so in addition to the décor of the office, employees were also encouraged to personalise their desks. Similar to the images in the last section, often what made them happy was non-work related objects. In interviews, employees discussed items such as photographs of family, toys on their desk and using screensavers to show personal interests. Employees expressed how these personal items were important to them, reminding them of the happiness they associated with their family or hobbies. The association to non-work happiness also featured in other objects, for example games like dartboards and Wii gaming consoles were placed in social areas for employees to engage with on their breaks (Figure 4).

Figure 4 . ‘Inspiration’ kite.

In addition to the decoration of the space, activities often focused on creating material objects that reflected the values. I observed several group activities, including building towers from straws, playing darts and making flags for the Olympics. One of the most visible examples of happiness was when employees were encouraged to create posters reflecting the values of PASSION (Pride, Action, Success, Sense of fun, Inspiration and Nurturing Happy People). On entering the office, each group or ‘pod’ had a poster next to them, some the size of an A4 sheet and others larger, including banners or other objects that made sounds.

‘Pride’ was the team presented as a lion pack. ‘Action’ was spelt out by the employees, with their bodies forming the words. ‘Success’ showed different celebrities or sports stars with the team's faces transposed. Finally, in ‘Sense of Fun’ the team members pulled silly faces. In this example employees portrayed themselves as embodying happiness in the posters. The jumping with joy in success, spelling out of action, pulling silly faces, recreating themselves as a pack of lions and imagining themselves as successful celebrities all form their ‘organisational bodies’ (Dale 2005). The employees’ bodies became part of the materialisation of happiness. This example demonstrates where employees seeming to enjoy taking part in producing happy objects. While the materiality of the organisation was intended to cause happiness, in some cases, such as the next example, the materialisation of happiness instead produced unhappiness for some employees.

Happiness and killjoys: ‘shove in under the carpet’

Much of the interview discussion around happiness focused on how to get along with your colleagues. In the second example, happiness also appeared during a confrontation with another employee. Evan, a trainee account executive, described an incident where he and another colleague were having fun pretending to call each other using their headphones, usually used for customer service. They were in an open plan office space as described in the section above. The playful conversation with the headphones resulted in a lot of laughter. However, one of his other colleagues, Susan, suddenly yelled at them for causing too much noise in the office, threatening that she ‘wanted to bang their heads together.’ Evan described his reaction at the time as being surprised but laughing, and while Susan was angry, later she also laughed with him about yelling. Evan discussed experiencing difficulty at the time, not knowing how to deal with being yelled at for ‘having fun’ in the office:

It made me quite angry actually, I’m laughing about it now but at the time it was like if I didn’t laugh about it, it probably would have caused an argument. So you kind of choose to laugh to push it under the carpet. (Evan)

When looking at the circulation of affect, Evan and his other colleague were following the expected value of being happy and having fun. They made the headphones into happy objects, and their engagement with the headphones was causing Evan to laugh and enjoy himself. However, Susan’s affective response indicated frustration and stress, and by yelling at him an intensity was created. She went against the flow of happiness, causing a rupture, and altering Evan’s affective experience of happiness. Susan was in Ahmed’s term a ‘killjoy’. Interestingly Evan talks about how anger emerged but he did not express it: to do so would also move him into the position of a killjoy by having an argument. Instead he laughs about it. Later she too laughed about the confrontation, co-opted back into the flow of happiness as it changed in its intensity (Figure 5).

Figure 5 . Pod posters (clockwise from top left): ‘Pride’, ‘Action’, ‘Success’ & ‘Sense of fun’.

Unsettled intensities and affective atmospheres: ‘photocopying her T**s’

I was part-way through my research at Marketing Inc. when an incident occurred which was extensively commented on in the interviews. Nicola, one of my participants, had emailed her pod warning a broken printer was hot and not to touch it. Brian emailed back, joking: ‘You’d better tell Dani not to photocopy her T**s again.’ This email, by mistake, copied in the entire company including local and international co-workers and management. Nicola recounted the incident to me:

And he sent a reply saying ‘You should probably tell Dani not to keep photocopying her tits on it.’ And the thing is it was just one email obviously, but then it went around everybody. But it was so funny. I just sat with my head on my desk thinking I am not going to get any work done for the rest of the day, it was hilarious. I felt so bad for him … But yeah that was hilarious. So umm, everybody responded by email … (Nicola)

Being in the office at the time, I felt electricity in the atmosphere. One of the participants waved me over to show me the email, with a whispered explanation. The atmosphere had a sudden intensity to it: what would happen next? The email was an object which was intended to be happy but suddenly seemed ambiguous. People began to respond to the email to continue the joke, with responses like ‘Toes?’ as an interpretation of the T***. While the not so subtle reference made it scandalous, another participant Keith explained it was not just the language but that it was an email directed at one individual:

It’s not the use of language just who it is directed at generally. If he had been ‘well then people better stop photocopying their bits’ then it would be like what do you say to that, ‘I know what you are saying but it’s not directed at anyone.’ (Keith)

In the end, Brian, who sent the email, was called into a meeting with his line manager, although no formal discipline was given. The buzz created by the email and the feedback from interviews suggested that this was an unusual example and had broken the norms of the organisation. The email as an object produced an atmosphere, a whispered ‘hilarity’, cascading into more emails making light of the situation. Every participant I interviewed after this point brought up the email. Emails could be happy objects, but this object had unintended consequences: happiness here was not as the organisation intended, to make staff more productive, but instead was more anarchic. The taboo was the mistake of sending it to the entire company, disrupting the norms of professional behaviour. While the email affected many people, as seen by Nicola’s statement of the hilarity, two employees’ affects stood out: Brian who sent the email and Dani to whom the email was directed. Colleagues like Nicola were more concerned in the interviews about what would happen to Brian rather than Dani. The expectation was that Dani would laugh about it because to do otherwise would counter happiness. The email, which was humorous for many, had a significantly less than ‘happy’ impression on these employees.

Discussion

In this paper, I have followed the circulation of emotion looking at the flows of intensities as happiness became entangled with objects and bodies. By studying materialities of the organisation, the article examined ‘happy objects’, including the design of the office space, posters created by employees, everyday objects like headphones and the email about the broken printer. Some of these were happy objects where the materiality of the organisation became ‘sticky’ with the intended happiness, reinforced by the pillars and values of the organisation. There was a flow to happiness that was multidirectional: the materiality and employees’ bodies also reinforced happiness and produced affect as others encountered these objects. Other happy objects such as the headphones and the email about the broken printer had unintended and ambiguous affects. Stickiness demonstrates how happiness holds on to associations and maintains connections in place. Adding to Ahmed’s work, these happy objects are not simply imposed on employees by management but instead, through management’s ‘encouragement’, are (re)produced by employees. These happy objects draw on employees’ personal lives, such as photographs or their prior associations to happiness such as childhood. Other happy objects blended with employees’ bodies, such as the PASSION poster and the email about Dani, where the boundaries of employee bodies and the organisation are at least for a moment dissolved.

The three examples of flows of happiness demonstrate how happiness had affect, direction and judgement (Ahmed 2010). In the first flow, employees felt a responsibility for taking part in decorating their office. These happy objects often borrowed from non-work happiness. In the second example, the play using the headphones was interrupted by another employee yelling at them. Through creating the expectation that the organisation was a happy space, there was also an assumption that a certain type of affect would be shared. The flow of happiness was temporarily disrupted until it was later restored when they could all laugh about it. In the final example, the email became a happy object, producing an atmosphere and differing affects for those involved. For many people there became an awareness that something was happening through people’s attunement to an atmosphere of ‘hilarity’. There was a degree of ambiguity on how to judge the email, in an organisation where happiness is good but the affects can be potentially harmful. This had a temporary unsettling effect and it demonstrated the unintended affects which happiness could produce.

The three flows of happiness illustrate different intensities related to the intentionality of happiness. In the first encounter, where employees designed posters, happiness was being shared as intended by management through the space and use of employees’ bodies (Lefebvre 1991; Dale 2005). The circulation of happiness had a ‘smooth’ intensity where happiness was seen as part of the everyday. This contrasted with the second and third examples where the flows of happiness were intensified. In the second example, an employee was yelled at, creating a sudden intensity of feeling anger. In the third example, as employees opened the email, they experienced an attunement to the affective atmosphere of ‘hilarity’ (Ahmed 2014; Anderson 2009) like a ripple effect. The usually smooth intensity of the office altered as employees became aware of the email.

When analysing the three flows, values directed how employees ought to feel and expectations that they should work on happiness especially in social situations. While the current literature on emotional labour looks at how employees ought to manage their emotions, often with detrimental effects for employees (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993), there is little exploration of how emotion can produce power in the nuanced, everyday flows of affect. The intensities and disruption brought power relations to the fore, highlighting not only how certain expressions of emotions were allowed over others, but how happiness co-opted other affects back into the flow. The flows solidify into affective patterns (Wetherell 2012), for example, the expectation that joking in the office was normal behaviour, which was then used to reinforce expectations in the future. Repetition of affect was key to employees embracing happiness as the norm. It was also interesting to note employees’ role in maintaining these affective paths, shaping emotion towards happiness as intended by management. Keith’s comment about designing the organisational space demonstrates this engagement: while management may have set out the values, it was intended that employees would reproduce them and should take pride in doing so. Happiness, in general, was seen as a ‘good’ for the organisation, however when these intensities emerged power relations became more transparent. Ahmed (2010) states that judgement limits the range of affects that can be experienced, as well as producing power effects of labelling some bodies as Other. Happiness positioned some employees as a stranger or killjoy (Ahmed 2010). The flows of happiness unintentionally opened up anger, embarrassment and exclusion. Compared to Humphrey, Ashforth, and Diefendorff (2015), the findings here suggest we need to further consider how positive emotions may have negative affects.

The discussion of Ahmed’s approach to emotions led to two areas of questioning in relation to organisation studies. In the first area, the ethics of privilege in relation to emotions was raised. In a broader context, Marketing Inc. consisted of knowledge workers, whose work focused on advertising and marketing products, within an office environment. Employees worked long days, often to difficult deadlines, but overall the workplace was also a comfortable and supportive environment including secure and often creative employment. It was therefore more likely that employees should expect happiness as a core part of their work, as part of a wider narrative of creative class (Florida 2012). Therefore these workers already started from a position of privilege, as knowledge workers they were perceived as deserving of happiness. This article has added to our understanding of emotional labour within this context, to explore how workplace dynamics also played a part in how happiness was experienced, with some employees being positioned by happiness as ideal employees. As a subtle form of control, happiness has ethical implications in how bodies relate to the workplace and other bodies in an embodied, material and conceptual manner. The second set of questions related to those bodies which did not align to happiness, who may even resist being happy. A more critical eye will have noted that participants in the data did not actively resist, although some expressed moments where they were ill at ease with happiness. Expressing emotions other than happiness often had the result of the person being positioned as a ‘killjoy’ or a stranger (Ahmed 2010) to the values and the other bodies around them. This raises further ethical issues for the study of organisations: not only that happiness is a subtle form of control reinforced through repeated iterations of affect, but that the logic that underpins it leaves little space for other affect. This adds to studies such as Fleming and Sturdy (2009) who argue that there can be resistance to normative control in such cultures. Contrary to their study, the findings here suggest that where other affects like anger were expressed, employees often adjusted their affect back to happiness rather than challenging these norms.

Conclusion

This article has asked ‘what does happiness do?’ in organisations. The article found that as happiness circulated in the organisation it produced affective control in the relations between employees, while also becoming ‘sticky’ to some objects and bodies (Ahmed 2010). Frequently, employees embraced the expectation to be happy as a way to get on in their work and to get along with their colleagues. As such, I argue that happiness as affective control normalised certain emotions and marked others as deviant. Affective paths were reinforced by the expectations of the organisation, expressed through happy objects, about what emotions were expected. Employees took a significant role in circulating happiness, especially by translating this into the materiality of the organisation. Employees reinforced these affective paths and it was in these encounters that power relations played out. This presents an alternative understanding of emotional labour through analysing emotions and power in our entanglement with materialities. By exploring how happiness circulated between values, materiality and bodies of employees, power can be seen to operate at a subtle emotional level of relational control. Many participants accepted happiness, but other employees may have experienced affects other than being happy.

For Ahmed, happiness can be ethical when it has the potential to be playful and heterogeneous. Affect would also need to have the potential to disrupt, however, happiness in Marketing Inc. produced strong affective paths directing how employees ought to act. Happiness excluded some affects, for example driving outside worries away and creating situations where other affects, like anger, were seen as alien. The findings suggest, then, that happiness does not always lead to an ethical workplace, nor only create positive affects for employees. The study has highlighted a need for other forms of work, for example Ahmed (2010, 220) states that to be ethically concerned with happiness means to seek out possibilities: to be open to ‘forms of happiness that are directed the wrong way’, to be willing to be affected by others, especially when they are different from ourselves, and not to follow happy objects around. While this study has highlighted power in affective relations in organisations, it also has opened up new questions. Specifically, can happiness be part of organisational life in a way that does not drive intentional happiness and maintain a sense of openness and generosity to difference (Ahmed 2010; Diprose 2001)? To do so would entail a different enactment of the values with heterogeneous affects, based around a sense of ethics of affect rather than relational control.

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank the editor Thomas Lennerfors and all the reviewers for their patient and supportive reviews of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the WMO writing group at the University of York and feedback from presenting the paper at the Critical Management Studies conference in 2017. My warmest thanks especially to Lynne Baxter who gave detailed feedback and encouragement along the way. Finally I would like to thank Melissa Tyler for her supervision of my thesis which generated the data for this article and Loughborough Business School for providing the scholarship funding that made it possible.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A pseudonym is used for the organisation and all employee names within the article.

2 Ethical approval was given by the Ethics Review Sub-Committee, Loughborough University.