Heroic Efforts: The Emotional Culture of Search and Rescue Volunteers (review)

The stated goal of Jennifer Lois's Heroic Efforts: the Emotional Culture of Search and Rescue Volunteers is to understand heroes' understanding of heroism. She distinguishes heroes from other risk takers or paid emergency workers as individuals who voluntarily place themselves at risk in order to help others.

In order to enrich her discussion of heroism and to link it to other sociological concerns, Lois informs her topic with broader discussions of identity, organizations, emotion, and gender. Indeed, like other classic ethnographies of emotion, the bulk of her analyses illustrate how organizations create emotional cultures which not only influence actors' feelings, but also their views of themselves. Because of their heroic status, group members were often suspicious of new comers whom they believed might be joining for reasons inconsistent with, if not antithetical to, their understanding of themselves as heroes. Because of her "complete member" status, Lois documents effectively the hurdles that new group members must face to join the group, let alone to move from the periphery to the core (chapter 2).

In order for a volunteer to become a full-fledged hero, he or she must internalize a set of norms: consciousness, resources, and commitment (chapter 3). Furthermore, as individuals internalize each norm, they must also illustrate a shift from wanting to be a member for selfish reasons (i.e., public recognition, gaining mountaineering skills, or thrill seeking) to wanting to be a member for altruistic reasons (i.e., helping others or paying back the community, albeit anonymously). When striving members failed to uphold norms or engaged in selfish or otherwise non-heroic behaviors, they were pushed back to the group's periphery through both formal and informal sanctioning.

In later chapters, Lois's analyses turns to a more traditional study of emotion management/emotional labor, making the usual distinction between managing one's own (chapter 4) and others' (chapter 5) emotions. When detailing the former, she couches her discussion in terms of "edgework," or the work that individuals must do in order to extend the edge (or boundary) of their comfort zone, enabling them to engage in heroic acts. Unlike most studies of emotional labor that focus merely on interactions during a single transaction, Lois' analyses illustrate how volunteers experience, use, manage, and discharge emotions at various stages of an oftentimes lengthy rescue operation. Moreover, because of the greater gender balance in her study than typically found in studies of service workers, Lois fleshes out nuanced gender differences in emotion and emotional expression. She also reveals how even reportedly female-friendly organizations unintentionally fell back onto gendered stereotypes when interpreting and describing members' emotional reactions and behaviors. Furthermore, her distinction between "tight" emotional labor performed for victims and the "looser" type performed for victims' families reminds us that not all emotional labor is created equally or is equally easy to maintain.

While chapters 1-5 present a coherent whole, the substantive portion of the book closes with two brief chapters on the labeling of heroes by victims and victims' families in thank you letters and the emotional rewards of rescue work. While interesting in and of themselves both of these chapters seemed, in comparison to the rest of the text, out of order and slightly underdeveloped.

Overall, Heroic Efforts is an interesting study of the emotional culture of masculine organization that would be a welcome addition to an undergraduate class on emotion, organizations, identity or even social psychology more broadly. An ambitious study, Heroic Efforts cast a wide net and incorporated a number of core sociological concepts, drawing on the work of Goffman, Hochschild, Clark, and others. Unfortunately, however, although she provides an interesting introduction to a number of ideas, none are fully developed. Indeed, while always engaging from an empirical standpoint, the book lacks a compelling theoretical frame. While anyone teaching this book to undergraduates could undoubtedly enrich the plethora of interesting examples within with a good dose of symbolic interaction or any of its...