Emotional Alliances in Bureaucratic Encounters

Abstract

Based on research on face-to-face encounters in bureaucratic organizations, this chapter explores paths to unearthing emotions and their role in formal interactions. I studied different public offices in Spain at two points in time. In 2004–5 I focused on several immigration offices and a police station. In 2009–10 I did research on the encounters between clients and civil servants in social security offices. In the following text I retrace the moment I noticed that emotions were circulating between individuals engaged in bureaucratic encounters. I realized that emotion management was a key issue for the understanding of interactions as they were strongly embedded in emotions. This insight—once I engaged reflexivity to notice and interpret my own emotions, since these presented themselves during the scenes I observed—generated a plethora of novel observations during my fieldwork. This contribution recounts some key points of this process.