The appropriation of emotion

The subject of emotion has attracted renewed interest, including a recent explosion of publications on the subject of emotional intelligence (EI), a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking. It is suggested that the lure of EI has as much to do with emotional appropriation as appropriateness, and that the possibility of appropriation/incorporation for the purposes of interdisciplinary extension can be compared with the contradictory dynamic of containment and control that pervades the literature on emotion. These dynamics are explored, and it is argued that not only has emotion been allowed to creep 'back in' to organizational life, it has been appropriated/re-appropriated within the psychological study of intelligence.