Elizabeth Goodrick, Florida Atlantic University: " Losing their soul: Elites use of emotional rhetoric to defend an institution against demise"

Location: TC.3.10
Time and Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 16:00

We examine how elites discursively defend institutional values in response to threats and the role of emotion in such discursive efforts. While there have been important advances in redressing the neglect of emotion in institutional analysis, there has not yet been much attention to how emotions and values are intertwined in the dynamics of institutions. Institutional values, or conceptions of the preferred or the desirable which provide a standard against which social structures and practices can be evaluated (Scott, 2008), are commonly mentioned as integral to institutions but seldom examined independently of the practices which manifest them. We studied U.S. pharmacists whose ability to compound medications was made obsolete by the mass manufacturing of medications following World War II, threatening the profession. We examine the discursive institutional work conducted in the monthly editorials of the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association from 1960-2003. In response to the possible demise of the profession, we show how the elites first evoked emotion to convince pharmacists to change their practices to be consistent with traditional core values of the institution. Later, they redefined those core values and advocated for new practices manifesting these values to ensure the survival of the profession. We contribute to developing literature on emotions and institutions by examining strategic attempts to prevent value debasement using emotional appeals.

Elizabeth Goodrick (PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an associate professor in the Health Administration Program at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business, USA. She studies health care professionals and organizations from a neo institutional perspective. Her work has appeared in both organizational and health care management journals including Journal of Management Studies, Administrative Science Quarterly, Work & Occupations, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and Health Care Management Review.