Emotions and Client Participation in Jurisdictional Contestation

We develop a model of how emotions shape the participation of professions’ clients in episodes of jurisdictional contestation. Our model begins with a framing contest between a social movement that disrupts a profession’s jurisdictional control and the profession that defends it. We theorize how, through adversarial framing efforts, the movement and profession each seek to evoke emotions in particular ways to shape the actions of clients in their favor. We then explore how the emotional resonance of this framing contest leads individual clients to support, to varying degrees, one or both contestants. We argue that clients experiencing different configurations of pride, anger, shame, and fear—or ambivalence when these emotions overlap in conflicting ways—enact one of five modes of participation. With this article, we contribute to the literature on professions by (a) conceptualizing client participation in jurisdictional contestation across analytical levels, (b) considering the role of a constellation of intertwined social emotions in this process, (c) and introducing a typology of five modes of client participation in jurisdictional contestation. We develop the model by drawing on empirical examples from health-related professions, but we also discuss its generalizability to other work domains and stakeholders.