'Managing' Stress

Emotion and Power at Work

This volume provides a thought-provoking and timely alternative to prevailing approaches to stress at work. These invariably present stress as a 'fact of modern life' and assume it is the individual who must take primary responsibility for his or her capacity - or incapacity - to cope.

This book, by contrast, sets stress at work in the context of wider debates about emotion, subjectivity and power in organizations, viewing it as an emotional product of the social and political features of work and organizational life.

Tim Newton analyzes the historical development of the dominant `stress discourse' in modern psychology and elsewhere. Drawing on a range of perspectives - from labour process theory to the work of Foucault and Elias - he explores other possible ways of understanding stress at work. He offers a cogent critique of the typical stress management interventions in organizations through which employees are supposed to increase their effectiveness and become `stress-fit'. With contributions from two colleagues, he explores various ways of `rewriting' stress at work. Together they emphasize the gendered nature of stress, the collective production and reproduction of stressful work experiences, and the relation of stress to issues of emotion management and control in organizations.