Abstract

Emotions are increasingly recognized as central to understanding ethical issues in social contexts. While much of the existing scholarship takes a functional account of emotions, this conceptual paper aims to further advance our understanding of how emotions co-construct morally tense relations. We build on Sara Ahmed’s performative and critical theorization of emotions, focusing on what emotions do in terms of surfacing relations between selves, objects, and others, and in terms of attaching subjects to social structures. We apply this perspective to understanding morally tense relations in cross-sector partnerships, using an ethnographic study of a partnership involving a Dutch corporation, a Dutch consultancy, and a South African nonprofit as illustration. Centering the voice of the nonprofit’s head, we develop three vignettes, showing how three emotions—passion, shame, and threat, intensely expressed to us in an interview—shaped self-other relations within the partnership and reinforced the nonprofit’s marginalization. Building on this empirical illustration, we propose three theoretical implications of revisiting the role of emotions through Ahmed’s lens.