Twenty-third International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The “emotional schema” in the piggery illustrates the tension between the construction of the pig as a commodity to be sold and as a life to be suffered in the pig farm. The emotional experience of pig farm employees is not only denied and repressed by masculinity, but also shaped and motivated by the economic principles that govern the pig farm, and by the specialised institutions. Through fieldwork in family pig farms and slaughterhouses in southwestern China, we illuminate how economic principles construct pigs as profitable, edible individuals through the daily interactions in pig farms - feeding, breeding, selling - and how state laws requiring of specialisation normalises the cruel side of the farm-to-eat process through institutionalisation, and thus helps the employees to manage their feelings about pigs. Whereby much of the sociological literature on edible meat production focuses on one end of the chain, we analyse the interactions of the meat production process to reveal how economic principles shape and transform the emotional experience of workers through institutionalisation and specialisation in order to reconcile the tensions of commodity and life, and how changes in the structure of the pig industry and price quotations affect the role of economic principles in the construction of the pig. This provides further insights into how economics principles and institutions influences the human-animal work and our emotional experiences with animals.