This chapter provides a conceptual framework to understand the processes, relevant to self-conscious emotions, through which social workers come to acquiesce or resist organisational attempts at control. It first outlines the research on compliance and resistance in social work practice before developing and extending these ideas through the analysis of pride and shame in professional practice. Drawing on Oliver’s (1991) analysis of strategic responses within organisations to wider institutional processes, how social workers perform professional practice in the context of organisational attempts at control, and the strategies that social workers employ to manage the organisational pressures, expectations and demands, are outlined. While some social workers can actively identify with the organisational representation in the moment, motivating them to enact its meanings and expectations, some reluctantly identify with it as a defensive strategy to avoid being shamed and humiliated, motivating them to comply despite reservation. However, some social workers, in some contexts, resist the organisational representation, feeling unable to comply, and, therefore, seek to compromise what they are expected to do, conceal their acts of resistance or influence the source of organisational attempts at control.
