Chapter Four outlined the role that pride and shame played in the creation of ‘appropriate’ child and family social work services. In the government's attempt at control, the emotions of organisational leaders and managers are regulated by evoking, eclipsing and directing experiences of pride and shame so that delegitimised practices are disrupted and new, more legitimate, practices are created and maintained. Given the systemic boundaries for praiseworthy and shameful behaviour, along with mechanisms of policing these boundaries through inspection and public grading, leaders and managers engage in emotion work in attempts to avoid being shamed and attract praise. Consequently, attributes of the organisation, that is, components of its identity, are altered. The success or failure of a child and family social work service to meet its new objectives, however, lies in the day-to-day work of the social workers. What the social workers do and how they do it is, therefore, considered a legitimate target in organisational attempts at control.

This chapter extends the theory of pride and shame in professional practice by considering how pride, shame and other self-conscious emotions are strategically used to regulate the emotions of the social workers to alter not just what they do and how they do it, but also who they are. While this chapter draws on social representation theory (Moscovici, 1961, 1981, 2001), and specifically how social groups ascribe, promote and support meanings and standards for the group (Breakwell, 2001; Duveen, 2001), it further draws on identity theory (Burke and Stets, 2009), the major theory of identity in sociological social psychology, which provides an explanation for how individuals come to develop and attach meaning to who they are, what they do and what groups they belong to. While these theories provide a framework to understand the interaction between the shared ideas within the social group and the personal ideas about identity, the role of pride and shame in these processes has received limited theoretical and empirical attention.

This chapter, therefore, develops the idea of organisational control by conceptualising pride and shame as central to this process.