Investigating Emotional Practices in Organizations: A Proposal for an Analytical Framework

This article proposes an analytical framework for examining emotional practices in organizations, addressing the lack of reflexive, situated, and methodologically rigorous approaches capable of integrating the discursive, symbolic, and structural dimensions of emotions. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology and combined with tools from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), the framework offers a practice-based lens to investigate how emotions are socially embodied, historically structured, and reproduced within organizational fields. The proposed qualitative approach integrates semi-structured interviews and participant observation as data collection techniques, enabling relational, reflexive, and context-sensitive analyses. By applying Bourdieu’s relational concepts, such as habitus, field, capital, doxa, and illusion, the framework advances understanding of how emotions are experienced, operationalized, and linked to organizational practices, and how ways of feeling, naming, expressing, and regulating become legitimized, marginalized, reproduced, or transformed through symbolic struggles. Unlike studies focusing primarily on the psychological or physiological dimensions of emotions, this proposal adopts a relational and practice-based perspective, considering people, objects, activities, experiences, artifacts, symbolism, and the relationships emerging from these interactions. The framework can contribute to organizational and critical research by addressing issues related to institutionalized emotional dynamics stabilized by norms, routines, and discourses, as well as embodied meanings that reveal how emotions are shaped by bodily dispositions and symbolic repertoires. It also facilitates the analysis of affective hierarchies that regulate the legitimacy and value of emotions across positions and groups, as well as the strategic circulation and mobilization of emotions to influence relational and organizational outcomes. This integrative approach offers both theoretical advancement and an operational pathway for studying emotions as socially embodied practices, expanding the methodological repertoire for qualitative organizational research.