The 'Right’ Use of Emotions

Few social scientific studies have examined the paradox in Weber’s bureaucratic model between the objectivity needed to establish a legal order and the subjectivity of civil servants, which constantly threatens to overstretch this framework. How can this paradox be resolved when civil servants increasingly display emotions in front of the public? The ethnographic study of a police department in charge of combatting procuring raises questions about the social meaning of emotions in public officers’ interactions with target populations. It reveals an institutional role which induces—and prescribes to police agents—specific forms of emotional work through which the law takes shape.