Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

The Embodiment of Police Conduct: Beyond Interactionism

The way that police officers use emotional expression has been dealt with most thoroughly as a specific topic in its own right in sociological studies spanning the last two decades, which have at their collective theoretical basis the notion of ‘emotional labour’ developed by Hochschild (1983) in her well-known and influential text The Managed Heart (see, e.g., Brown & Grover, 1998; Hunt, 1984; Manning, 1997; Pogrebin & Poole, 1995; Stenross & Kleinman, 1989).⁵ The definition of emotional labour developed by Hochschild (1983) describes the labour that requires one to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (p. 7). In keeping with the idea that almost every profession requires workers to suppress or induce emotional expressions, the concept of emotional labour has been applied to employees in almost every employment situation and especially to those of the service industry including fast-food workers (Leidner, 1993; Paules, 1996), airline stewards (Hochschild, 1983), nurses (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; O’Brien, 1994), as well as police. Susan Ehrlich-Martin’s (1999) sociological contribution to knowledge about police typifies and draws upon many of these essentially interactionist studies, in which police officers are understood as artful and creative inducers and suppressors of their own emotions for the sake of impression management. In Ehrlich-Martin’s contribution, incidences of suppression and induction themselves revolve around a central point of the gender of both officer and citizen.

The sight of an ostensibly unemotional police officer is in Ehrlich-Martin’s study responsible for the continued impression made on the public of police impartiality and professionalism; the restriction of emotional expression is understood to be a physical sign that represents to citizens the idea that officers will not allow any circumstances to affect their capacity to be impartial. The idea that ostensibly unemotional officers give off impressions of neutrality and impartiality is of interest to this book, as subsequent chapters reveal. Equally though, at the Grayville department, and as Ehrlich-Martin also notes in her own study, officers often use emotional expressions selectively as physical display modes which they know will impact on citizen behaviour in particular and predictable ways.