about 20 per cent of global foreign assets (Ginsborg 2005). Yet, taken singly, these
corporations are remarkably vulnerable entities, seething with uncertainties.
It is therefore surprising that a considerable part of the academic literature on
business seems to want to set affect to one side as having no official place in busi-
ness, perhaps as a result of an untoward emphasis on calculation. Yet all relevant
research shows that corporations are a series of affective soups. It is a truism that
all corporations are emotional entities and since the death of the robotic ‘organ-
ization man’ in the 1960s that truism has slowly become accepted. These are
organizations where emotional attachments are formed out of the play of anger,
elation, envy, disappointment, shame, suffering, even violence of various kinds,
as numerous films (Citizen Kane,Wall Street) and novels (Bonfire of the Vanities)
have set out to show. These are organizations where thriving traditions of
emotional engineering have grown up, most especially in human resources and
marketing but now extending over into commodity design and engineering. And
these are organizations which are now starting to receive due academic attention
as emotional formations, for example in the study of international finance (Pixley
2004 ), internet commerce (Kuwabara 200 4 ), and innovation.
For quite some time, emotions were thought of as important to the conduct of
business but as essentially epiphenomenal. For example, they might be thought
of as ties that were formed only because the correct organizational structure could
not be found (Jaques 1995). If not dysfunctional, they were usually regarded,
therefore, as informal elements of organization. But the change in the modern
corporation to flatter management structures, coupled with a determined push by
numerous elements of the cultural circuit of capital to highlight the emotional
elements of corporate life since at least the 1960s has changed all that. Emotion
is now something of a corporate watchword and in innumerable workshops and
seminars all kinds of workers, from the highest manager to the lowliest worker,
are being taught at least some bowdlerized principles of emotional intelligence.
This is no coincidence. There are at least five reasons why emotion has become
accepted as an explicit element of all corporate life. One is the rise of the afore-
mentioned flatter management structures. The fluidity and subsequent lack of
clarity of relations of accountability and authority and the substitution of networks
of influence and persuasion for formal lines of authority in these management
structures, coupled with the subsequent need to generate trust, have all highlighted
the importance of affective ties and skills as key elements in the corporation, as
well as in all manner of corporate interactions – from interacting with the customer
to interacting with other corporations. Second, as corporations expand into new
areas of business, often buying up whole new areas of expertise which have their
own cultures, corporations can often become affective swamps. Indeed, many
mergers and takeovers have failed precisely because corporations have been unable
to attune their cultures, and not least their emotional cultures. Third, the pressure
for higher rates of innovation in many corporations has promoted high interaction
cultures which often have very high emotional strains attached to them (Thrift
2006a). Fourth, it seems possible that the context within which organizations find
themselves is more dynamic. Certainly, it is often feltto be so, a fact not entirely
244 Part III