ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 examines the joint and divided hardships, to which the legal professionals submit in order to prove their worth in the group of judges and prosecutors, by presenting how emotion management is embedded in the organisations of the courts and the prosecution offices. We first demonstrate how neoliberal management ideology organizes emotion, pushing a less personalized and more detached relation to cases. We then proceed to demonstrate the management of fear by organizational security concerns and discuss how fear relates to institutional self-confidence and generalized trust, tied to the legitimacy of the rule of law. Finally, the chapter deals with the organizational silencing of emotions fueling a ‘teflon culture’ shared by the two professional groups. Teflon culture is fundamental to the apparent accomplishment of unemotional legal practice by generating various techniques to separate the professional from the emotional, but also to provide spaces and ways to, in fact, manage strong emotional experiences on an informal and collegial basis. The different emotional profiles are furthermore seen in that judges are manifestly lonely in their autonomous position, while prosecutors are backed up by a strong collegial group solidarity which tolerates some breaches of the norms of the emotive-cognitive judicial frame.
