Studies of professions have begun to consider how social emotions shape inter-profession competition ( , & al., , & (). Preserving a Professional Institution: Emotion in Discursive Institutional Work. Journal of Management Studies, 57(4). 735–774. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12535 ; , & al., , , , & (). Constructing and Sustaining Counter-Institutional Identities. Academy of Management Journal, 63(3). 935–964. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.0528 ) . But so far, most research on client-profession relations has not used an emotions lens ( , (). How Professionals Construct Moral Authority: Expanding Boundaries of Expert Authority in Stem Cell Science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4). 989–1036. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211011441 ; , (). Professional Authority. InEyal, G. & Medvetz, T. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics. (1, pp. 453–C20P88). Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/45892/chapter/403307973 ; & , & (). The Role of Discernment and Modulation in Enacting Occupational Values: How Career Advising Professionals Navigate Tensions with Clients. Retrieved from http://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/amj.2020.1014 ) ; but see ( & , & (). Feeling Rule Management and Relational Authority: Fostering patient compliance in palliative care consultations. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01708406221081625 ) , in-press. A recent effort to theorize emotions in jurisdictional contestation by clients was made in ( , & al., , & (). From Grace to Violence: Stigmatizing the Medical Profession in China. Academy of Management Journal, 64(6). 1842–1872. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.0715 ) study of Chinese patients’ changing attitudes towards physicians. The study finds that a market-oriented reform of government financing for physicians’ work incentivized physicians to boost their income by overprescribing, which undermined patients’ trust in the profession’s expert knowledge. As a result, patients who used to proudly call physicians “angels in white” began shaming them as “wolves in white.” This shift, driven by widespread anger, led to a wave of aggressions by patients against physicians.

These recent findings echo early work by Everett Hughes, a canonical figure for scholars of professions ( , (). Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition. Sociological Theory, 14(1). 3. https://doi.org/10.2307/202150 ; , (). Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School. Social Forces, 75(4). 1149. https://doi.org/10.2307/2580667 ) , who wrote that there is an “aggressive suspicion which most laymen feel towards professionals, and fanatical anger which burns chronically in some people and which at times becomes popular reaction” ( , , p. 27 (). Men and Their Work. Quid Pro, LLC. ) . With these colorful remarks, Hughes implied that a profession’s ability to control a work domain depends on the extent to which clients trust the profession’s expert knowledge to appropriately inform the interpretation of, and prescribed response to, their felt needs. Hughes’ remarks also implied that client participation in jurisdictional contestation is an intensely emotional social process.

Emotions shaping client participation in jurisdictional contestation have been most abundantly documented in studies of social movements challenging professions ( , (). Moving politics: emotion and act up’s fight against AIDS. The University of Chicago Press. ; & , & (). From shame to pride in identity politics. InStryker, S., Owens, T. & White, R. (Eds.), Self, identity, and social movements.. University of Minnesota Press. ; , (). Homosexuality and American psychiatry: the politics of diagnosis. Princeton University Press. ) . Anger, for instance, led to the mobilization of activists who challenged the medical and pharmaceutical professions in the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, leading patients to push back against health professionals by setting up their own care and treatment organizations ( , (). Discourse and Adoption of Innovations: A Study of HIV/AIDS Treatments:. Health Care Management Review, 27(3). 74–88. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004010-200207000-00008 ) . In this episode, and many others henceforth cited, a highly emotional framing contest arose between a challenger social movement and an incumbent profession to gain the trust of clients in their respective forms of knowledge and to lead them to support their disruptive and defensive institutional projects, respectively.

We build upon emerging literature on clients in the relational perspective on professions ( & , & (). The Role of Discernment and Modulation in Enacting Occupational Values: How Career Advising Professionals Navigate Tensions with Clients. Retrieved from http://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/amj.2020.1014 ; , (). Professional Authority. InEyal, G. & Medvetz, T. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics. (1, pp. 453–C20P88). Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/45892/chapter/403307973 ; , (). The crisis of expertise. Polity. ) by theorizing how individual clients come to participate in jurisdictional contestation. We do so by mapping distinct configurations of social emotions, experienced by clients exposed to a movement/profession framing contest, to five modes of participation enacted by clients in episodes of jurisdictional contestation. We call these modes escape, opposition, accommodation, acquiescence, and stewardship.