Understanding emotions as effective practice. The performance of emotional labour in building relationships

In this chapter we study the performance of emotional labour by probation practitioners to reveal the complex emotion management undertaken to develop the officer-offender relationship. We begin by discussing the rise of managerialism and its effect on how emotions should be used in the officer-offender relationship, before focusing on Skills for Effective Engagement and Development and Supervision programme. We use data generated through interviews with probation practitioners to analyse one aspect of SEEDS: the development of the professional relationship through getting to know and understand the client and the need to create clear boundaries. By analysing the data through the lens of emotional labour we focus on the use of surface and deep acting in order to create effective professional relationships as required by the SEEDS model. We found that practitioners are required to perform considerable emotional labour which has, until now, remained unacknowledged in probation policy and discuss what needs to be done if SEEDS were reintroduced following the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation.