Beyond Ethos: Outlining an Alternate Trajectory for Emotional Competence and Investment

Abstract

The paper by Voronov and Weber (2016) moves this conversation to a higher level, theorizing beyond the simple (though important) idea that emotions occur and matter in social life, to a more fundamental engagement of emotions as a defining aspect of "institutional actorhood".We start by acknowledging the important contribution provided by the paper with its compelling introduction of the ideas of "emotional competence" and "emotional investment".Emotions, Voronov and Weber argue, are "institutionally conditioned and thus endogenous to institutional orders" (2016: 5), and emotional competence enables people to perform prescribed roles and inhabit institutional orders.Such competence leads to emotional investment.Voronov and Weber argue that "institutional ethos" is the basis of emotional competence.We take issue with this characterization of ethos and its relationship to the ideas of emotional competence and investment.For us, the ethos concept is confusing and, perhaps more importantly, unnecessarily detached from more established concepts in the institutional literature.This detachment not only adds to the "conceptual muddle" (Colyvas & Jonsson, 2011: 27) of institutional theorizing, but risks undermining the important contribution that emotional competence might make if linked to a more fruitful avenue of future research.We suggest an alternative framing -namely, connecting emotional competence to the more established concept of "institutional logic".Doing so connects emotional competence and emotional investment to the values that are embedded within institutional logics (Dunn & Jones, 2010;

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