Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Introduction

When a new wave of immigrants arrives in a country, they often settle in particular parts of cities and towns, where they discover ways of starting their new lives and supporting each other. Such pockets or ghettoes provide relative security as well as ways of maintaining traditions and links with the old country. It is tempting to view the study of emotion in organizations as a wave of immigration that started some thirty years ago and initially settled in specific pockets of organizational discourses, such as leadership, service interactions, and learning. When Fineman (2003) wrote his contribution to the earlier edition of this Handbook, he rightly complained that learning literature had long disregarded emotion or viewed it as an obstacle to cognition and rationality. He also noted that much of the politics of organizations had been stripped of its emotional content and expressed ambivalence towards the concept of emotional intelligence. Here was a concept that promised to put emotion back into learning and organizational agendas, but at a considerable price—that of turning emotion into an organizational resource to be managed and exploited.

Since the publication of the first edition of The Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, emotion has started to diffuse across learning and organizational discourses. A count of article abstracts containing the word ‘emotion’ in business and management journals revealed twenty-five such articles in 2003, ...