Professor Yanis Varoufakis. Born in Athens (1961), where he completed his secondary education, Varoufakis studied in England (from Bachelor to PhD level, reading mathematics and economics). His first academic appointments were in English Universities: University of Essex, University of East Anglia, University of Cambridge. Later he moved to the University of Sydney, Australia, with spells at the University of Glasgow and Université Catholique de Louvain. Since 2000 he teaches economics at the University of Athens where he also directs UADPhilEcon (an international doctoral program in economics). He has published in journals such as The Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Methodology, Erkenntnis, Science and Society. His books include Rational Conflict (Blackwell, 1991), Foundations of Economics (Routledge, 1998), Game Theory: A critical text (Routledge, 2004).

Sharon C. Bolton is Professor of Organisational Analysis at Strathclyde University Business School, Glasgow, UK. Her research interests include emotion in organisations, public sector management, nursing and teaching, gender and the professions, dignity in and at work, the human in human resource management. She is currently working on comparative research on dignity at work in Europe, with a focus on Greece and the UK and also gender and knowledge transfer. Research is published widely in leading international sociology and management journals such as Work, Employment and Society; Sociology; Journal of Management Studies; Gender, Work and Organisation, Sociologia Del Trabajo, Economia & Management andpractitioner periodicals such as People Management and Personnel Today. A sole authored book ‘Emotion Management in the Workplace’ was published by Palgrave in 2005 followed by two edited collections in 2007: ‘Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management’ (with Maeve Houlihan) (Palgrave) and ‘Dimensions of Dignity at Work’ (Elsevier). A new edited collection ‘Work Matters’ (with Maeve Houlihan) will be published by Palgrave April 2009. In her previous life, Sharon worked as a senior administrator in the public and private sectors.

The subject of emotion in organisations is now well established and widely debated. However, having spent the past twenty five years developing the debate on emotions at work we now seem to have become trapped in never ending circular arguments concerning what is or is not ‘emotional labour’. Of course, since Hochschild’s seminal contribution concerning the commodification of our emotion work, the debate has raged on with many paths in and out of it focusing on a range of issues from prescriptions for its management to concerns with identity appropriation. One of the latest contributions comes from the Italian neo-Marxist school – Lazeretto, Hardt and Negri – and their notion of immaterial labour which focuses on creative and intellectual labour. A subset of that is affective labour which ‘involves the production and manipulation of affect’ and includes ‘service with a smile’, ‘care labour’, and ‘kin work’. In combining different forms of emotion work, paid and unpaid forms of affective labour are conflated into one category of immaterial labour. In doing so the labour of emotional labour is now barely acknowledged. It is suggested that there are some tragic consequences of looking at emotion work through the lens of immaterial (affective) labour as, quite simply, it misses its materiality, i.e. that it is hard and productive work, devalued and unrewarded due to its links with the domestic sphere. In Celia Davies’ terms, immaterial labour represents a ‘masculine cultural project’ in the way it downgrades emotion work as immaterial, unproductive, unskilled and outside of the labour process.

Dr Tony Dundon, Visiting Academic, National University of Ireland Galway

Professor Charles-Henri Besseyre des Horts, Visiting Academic, HEC School of Management Paris

Associate Professor John O’Brien, Visiting Academic, University of New South Wales

Dr Jimmy Donaghey, Visiting Academic, Queen’s University Belfast

Dr Dennis Nickson, Visiting Academic, University of Strathclyde

Professor Ron McCallum, University of Sydney

Professor Peter Turnbull, Visiting Academic, Cardiff Business School