The role of pride, shame, guilt, and humiliation in social service organizations: A conceptual framework from a qualitative case study

Emotions have become increasingly recognized as constitutive elements of organizations and organizational processes. While the emotions of pride, shame, guilt, and humiliation have long been considered to play a significant role in what people do and how they do it, they have received little theoretical and empirical attention within the literature on social service organizations. This paper responds to this research gap by outlining a conceptual framework for the role these emotions play, developed from an ethnographic case study of one English local authority child protection service. The framework outlines how these emotions influenced the wider institutional processes to construct an ideal form of practice, which was then used to evaluate the social workers’ actions and praise, shame, or humiliate the social workers accordingly. The threat of shame, and promise of praise, influenced most social workers to enact or conform to the standard, thereby regulating their identities. Some social workers, however, felt ashamed or guilty of what they were doing and sought to resist these attempts at control through acts of compromising, concealing, and influencing. This paper considers how this understanding contributes to our understanding of these emotions and how they are experienced in a modern social service context.