“Letting the Uniform Take It”: Emotion absenting and its role in institutional maintenance

Abstract

Emotion regulation is essential to the maintenance of institutions. To date, institutional scholars have focused on how individual actors express or suppress emotions according to internalized institutional “feeling rules.” Drawing on an empirical study of police officers, this article offers emotion absenting as a socially practiced, embodied form of emotion regulation. Police officers’ shared emotion absenting enabled them to practice fear in unarticulated yet highly coordinated ways in alignment with their institutional role. The practice of emotion absenting is learned through socialization into policework and the institution of law enforcement. Because police officers learn to regulate emotions together in subtle ways through the coordination of their bodies, emotion absenting can be functionally invisible in social interactions. This suggests that inappropriate emotions are not necessarily suppressed—that is, removed from the situation. Rather, our study shows that such emotions may function as a resource among members of a group, especially when these emotions are practiced in institutionally competent ways.