Chapter 9: Emotions in Institutions: Bullying as a Mechanism of Institutional Control

Although institutional theorists have considered the potential role of emotions in institutional processes for decades, little empirical work has focused specifically on how inhabitants’ lived emotional experiences affect their engagement with the institutional context. In this chapter, we explore the emotional responses of women entering a traditionally all-male institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, immediately after it formally began enrolling women, but while still steeped in its traditional hypermasculine culture, and who experienced gender-based workplace bullying. We explore both the bullying and their responses based on social emotions, considering them both as targets of their male counterpart’s emotions and as inhabitants who experience their own emotional responses. We find a broad range of emotions are evident in incidents of bullying, that institutional conditions predicate a particular form of indirect bullying, and that some women engage in institutional work that transforms being the target of negative emotions such as hatred into more positive emotional responses such as pride.