New publication: "Prosecutors’ habituation of emotion management in Swedish courts"

The article examines the crucial professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court, analyzing dimensions of prosecutors’ habituation of the tacit feeling rules governing professional emotion management.  Contrasting previous research, we focus on emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. The analysis builds on interviews and shadowing with 41 prosecutors at five offices in Sweden. The theoretical framework rests on sociological theories of emotion adapted to the legal field. We divide the analysis into three key dimensions of habituation pertaining to the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. The findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are still unacknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.