Stina Bergman Blix
Biographic Data
| ID | 250231 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stina Bergman Blix |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stina Bergman |
| FAMILY NAME | Blix |
| SIGNATURE | BLIX S B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3522-4963 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Beyond a reasonable doubt: The emotive-cognitive evaluation of intent and credibility
Credibility and intent are important but imprecise legal categories that need to be assessed in criminal trials as neither common nor civil legal systems provide decision-makers with clear rules on how to evaluate them in practice. In this article, drawing on ethnographic data from trials and deliberations in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluations of credib…
Artificial intelligence and real decisions: Predictive systems and generative AI vs. emotive-cognitive legal deliberations
The use of artificial intelligence in law represents one of the biggest challenges across different legal systems. Supporters of predictive systems believe that decisionmaking could be more efficient, consistent and predictable by using AI. European legislation and legal scholars, however, identify areas where AI developments are at high risk or too dangerous to be used in judicial proceedings. In this article, we contribute to this debate by pro…
Navigating uncertainty and negotiating trust in judicial deliberations
Autonomy and independence are key features of legal decision-making. Yet, decision-making in court is fundamentally interactional and collective, both during the information gathering phase of hearings, and in evaluations during deliberations. Depending on legal system and type of court, deliberations can include different constellations of lay judges, jurors, or judge panels. In this article, we explore the collective dynamic of knowledge acquis…
Expanding emotional capital in court
This article develops the concept of emotional capital by exposing its operation in proceedings between legal elite professionals. We argue that (a) the micro-structural restraints of the interaction order among the participants have to be accounted for in order to understand the dynamics of emotional capital, and; (b) the emotional processes at play have to be expanded beyond feelings of care showing how emotions can be employed to reproduce sta…
(Dis)passionate law stories: The emotional processes of encoding narratives in court
In this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers’ transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: demarcation , fragmentatio…
Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication
This article analyzes rational decision-making in court as an emotive-cognitive process formed in and through social interaction. Current theoretical perspectives have shown how emotion and thought are intertwined in the workings of the human brain but have seldom elaborated on the contextual and structural features of rational-emotional decision-making. I propose a model that maps emotional processes and emotional management demands to the tempo…
Comparing culturally embedded frames of judicial dispassion
The aim of this chapter is to outline a theoretical framework for the comparative study of emotions in Western legal systems of different countries. Our focus is on the legal actors, and our primary interest is how internal legal culture - conceptualized as ‘the emotive-cognitive judicial frame’ - is embedded in a broader context of a socio-culturally specific emotional regime. The emotive-cognitive judicial frame combines national emotion norms …
Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts
The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confi…
Introducing an Interdisciplinary Frontier to Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work
This special issue of Oñati Socio-legal Series, titled Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work, is the result of presentations and discussions during an interdisciplinary workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) held in May 2018. This issue builds on the growing critique of the dispassionate ideal of judicial work, combining original theoretical insights with imaginative empirical analyses to extend the understanding of e…
The Emotional Interaction of Judicial Objectivity
Like other Western legal systems, the Swedish legal system constructs objectivity as an unemotional state of being. We argue that the enactment of objectivity in situ relies on objectivity work including emotion management and empathy. Building on qualitative interviews and observations in Swedish district courts, we analyse courtroom interaction through a dramaturgical lens, highlighting tacit signals and interprofessional emotional communicatio…
Different roads to empathy: Stage actors and judges as polar cases
Using judges and stage actors as instructive polar types this article elucidates factors that influence the inclination to empathise. Both come in close contact with dramatic life stories on an everyday basis but approach empathy from contrasting vantage points: emotional distance versus emotional engagement. Similarities between these polar types can thus disentangle some of the factors that influence professional empathic perspective taking in …
Power and status in court
Chapter 5 examines judges’ and prosecutors’ background emotions and emotion management from a power and status perspective. How do the dynamics of power and status in the courtroom influence emotions and emotion management strategies? How do judges and prosecutors deal with power in their work roles? How do professional power and status shape judges’ and prosecutors’ interactions with other professionals and with lay people? Increasing workloads …
Why emotions in court?
The aim of the project Emotions in Court (2012–2016), on which this book is based, was to study emotions and emotion management in Swedish courts. Departing from the theoretical distinction between background and foreground emotions, we wanted to find out not whether, but in which ways, emotions are active and acted upon in legal practice. In this chapter, we first present the background and the overall argument of this book, along with its theor…
Background emotions in legal professional life
Chapter 2 presents an overview of the professional profiles of judges and prosecutors. These profiles are the outcome of judges’ and prosecutors’ different functions and work tasks in the legal system and of how they are selected for their respective careers. These partly shared profession-specific circumstances to generate emotive-cognitive dispositions and challenges. Uniting features are professional pride, a highly valued independence, and a …
Concluding discussion
Chapter 7 presents a summary of the book’s empirical results and thereafter develops and discusses the theoretical implications relating to its main concepts: the emotive-cognitive judicial frame, emotional profiles, and background emotions. We conclude that the emotive-cognitive judicial frame lacks workable concepts for disentangling and evaluating emotional information. The judicial frame thus serves a disciplining and performative function by…
The dramaturgy of court emotions
Chapter 4 focuses on the drama of the court ritual; how emotions and emotion management are silenced by the entire dramaturgy of the legal setting. We demonstrate how the performance of the different legal roles, nevertheless, relies on skilled empathic engagement in, and management of, the emotions of the lay people in court. The concerted performance of objective justice furthermore requires the professionals to communicate emotions between the…
Objectivity work as situated emotion management
Chapter 6 scrutinizes the core of a legitimate rule of law and power usage: objectivity. The emotive-cognitive judicial frame holds positivist objectivity to be static, something one ‘is’. Furthermore, objectivity is assumed to be unemotional, because emotion, as opposed to instrumental pure reason, carries social bonds and affiliations, and morality (good and bad, likes and dislikes). We challenge this notion of objectivity by showing, first, th…
Organizational emotion management
Chapter 3 examines the joint and divided hardships, to which the legal professionals submit in order to prove their worth in the group of judges and prosecutors, by presenting how emotion management is embedded in the organisations of the courts and the prosecution offices. We first demonstrate how neoliberal management ideology organizes emotion, pushing a less personalized and more detached relation to cases. We then proceed to demonstrate the …
Professional Emotions in Court: A Sociological Perspective
Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants 'backstage' - whether at the office or at lunch - in order…
Observing judicial work and emotions: Using Two Researchers
Observation is an important component of research to examine complex social settings and is well-established for studying courtroom dynamics and judicial behaviour. However, the many activities occurring at once and the multiple participants, lay and professional, make it impossible for a sole researcher to observe and understand everything occurring in the courtroom. This article reports on the use of two researchers to undertake court observati…
Professional Emotion Management as a Rehearsal Process
The work of stage actors has long been used as a simile for every day role playing, generating theoretical concepts to describe how people work to present themselves in general and how they manage their emotions in particular. Building on this tradition, this article analyses professional stage actors’ deliberate emotion management as an embodied professionalisation process, focusing the relation between emotional experience and expression throug…
Martine Herzog-Evans, French Renentry Courts and Rehabilitation: Mister Jourdain of Desistance
Martine Herzog-Evans, French Renentry Courts and Rehabilitation: Mister Jourdain of Desistance
The emotional labour of gaining and maintaining access to the field
The role of emotions in qualitative research receives increasing attention. We argue for an active rather than a reactive approach towards emotions to improve the quality of research; emotions are a vital source of information and researchers use emotions strategically. Analysing the emotion work of researchers in the process of gaining, securing and maintaining access to the Swedish judiciary, we propose that the emotion work involved is a type …
Skådespelarens yrkeskunnande - en fenomenologisk studie
Six theatre actors of both sexes differing in education and length of experience were interviewed individually on their professional competence. Phenomenological reduction generated six fundamental constituents of the actors’ professional competence interpreted in terms of a ”wheel model”: mastery of technical skills such as being able to control one’s voice and one’s body; daring to approach each new role with an open mind; being able to work ef…
The emotional labour of gaining and maintaining access to the field
The role of emotions in qualitative research receives increasing attention. We argue for an active rather than a reactive approach towards emotions to improve the quality of research; emotions are a vital source of information and researchers use emotions strategically. Analysing the emotion work of researchers in the process of gaining, securing and maintaining access to the Swedish judiciary, we propose that the emotion work involved is a type …
Professional Emotions in Court: A Sociological Perspective
Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants 'backstage' - whether at the office or at lunch - in order…
Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication
This article analyzes rational decision-making in court as an emotive-cognitive process formed in and through social interaction. Current theoretical perspectives have shown how emotion and thought are intertwined in the workings of the human brain but have seldom elaborated on the contextual and structural features of rational-emotional decision-making. I propose a model that maps emotional processes and emotional management demands to the tempo…
Different roads to empathy: Stage actors and judges as polar cases
Using judges and stage actors as instructive polar types this article elucidates factors that influence the inclination to empathise. Both come in close contact with dramatic life stories on an everyday basis but approach empathy from contrasting vantage points: emotional distance versus emotional engagement. Similarities between these polar types can thus disentangle some of the factors that influence professional empathic perspective taking in …
Observing judicial work and emotions: Using Two Researchers
Observation is an important component of research to examine complex social settings and is well-established for studying courtroom dynamics and judicial behaviour. However, the many activities occurring at once and the multiple participants, lay and professional, make it impossible for a sole researcher to observe and understand everything occurring in the courtroom. This article reports on the use of two researchers to undertake court observati…
Expanding emotional capital in court
This article develops the concept of emotional capital by exposing its operation in proceedings between legal elite professionals. We argue that (a) the micro-structural restraints of the interaction order among the participants have to be accounted for in order to understand the dynamics of emotional capital, and; (b) the emotional processes at play have to be expanded beyond feelings of care showing how emotions can be employed to reproduce sta…
Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts
The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confi…
(Dis)passionate law stories: The emotional processes of encoding narratives in court
In this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers’ transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: demarcation , fragmentatio…
Skådespelarens yrkeskunnande - en fenomenologisk studie
Six theatre actors of both sexes differing in education and length of experience were interviewed individually on their professional competence. Phenomenological reduction generated six fundamental constituents of the actors’ professional competence interpreted in terms of a ”wheel model”: mastery of technical skills such as being able to control one’s voice and one’s body; daring to approach each new role with an open mind; being able to work ef…
Professional Emotion Management as a Rehearsal Process
The work of stage actors has long been used as a simile for every day role playing, generating theoretical concepts to describe how people work to present themselves in general and how they manage their emotions in particular. Building on this tradition, this article analyses professional stage actors’ deliberate emotion management as an embodied professionalisation process, focusing the relation between emotional experience and expression throug…
Martine Herzog-Evans, French Renentry Courts and Rehabilitation: Mister Jourdain of Desistance
Martine Herzog-Evans, French Renentry Courts and Rehabilitation: Mister Jourdain of Desistance
The emotional labour of gaining and maintaining access to the field
The role of emotions in qualitative research receives increasing attention. We argue for an active rather than a reactive approach towards emotions to improve the quality of research; emotions are a vital source of information and researchers use emotions strategically. Analysing the emotion work of researchers in the process of gaining, securing and maintaining access to the Swedish judiciary, we propose that the emotion work involved is a type …
Observing judicial work and emotions: Using Two Researchers
Observation is an important component of research to examine complex social settings and is well-established for studying courtroom dynamics and judicial behaviour. However, the many activities occurring at once and the multiple participants, lay and professional, make it impossible for a sole researcher to observe and understand everything occurring in the courtroom. This article reports on the use of two researchers to undertake court observati…
Power and status in court
Chapter 5 examines judges’ and prosecutors’ background emotions and emotion management from a power and status perspective. How do the dynamics of power and status in the courtroom influence emotions and emotion management strategies? How do judges and prosecutors deal with power in their work roles? How do professional power and status shape judges’ and prosecutors’ interactions with other professionals and with lay people? Increasing workloads …
Why emotions in court?
The aim of the project Emotions in Court (2012–2016), on which this book is based, was to study emotions and emotion management in Swedish courts. Departing from the theoretical distinction between background and foreground emotions, we wanted to find out not whether, but in which ways, emotions are active and acted upon in legal practice. In this chapter, we first present the background and the overall argument of this book, along with its theor…
Background emotions in legal professional life
Chapter 2 presents an overview of the professional profiles of judges and prosecutors. These profiles are the outcome of judges’ and prosecutors’ different functions and work tasks in the legal system and of how they are selected for their respective careers. These partly shared profession-specific circumstances to generate emotive-cognitive dispositions and challenges. Uniting features are professional pride, a highly valued independence, and a …
Concluding discussion
Chapter 7 presents a summary of the book’s empirical results and thereafter develops and discusses the theoretical implications relating to its main concepts: the emotive-cognitive judicial frame, emotional profiles, and background emotions. We conclude that the emotive-cognitive judicial frame lacks workable concepts for disentangling and evaluating emotional information. The judicial frame thus serves a disciplining and performative function by…
The dramaturgy of court emotions
Chapter 4 focuses on the drama of the court ritual; how emotions and emotion management are silenced by the entire dramaturgy of the legal setting. We demonstrate how the performance of the different legal roles, nevertheless, relies on skilled empathic engagement in, and management of, the emotions of the lay people in court. The concerted performance of objective justice furthermore requires the professionals to communicate emotions between the…
Objectivity work as situated emotion management
Chapter 6 scrutinizes the core of a legitimate rule of law and power usage: objectivity. The emotive-cognitive judicial frame holds positivist objectivity to be static, something one ‘is’. Furthermore, objectivity is assumed to be unemotional, because emotion, as opposed to instrumental pure reason, carries social bonds and affiliations, and morality (good and bad, likes and dislikes). We challenge this notion of objectivity by showing, first, th…
Organizational emotion management
Chapter 3 examines the joint and divided hardships, to which the legal professionals submit in order to prove their worth in the group of judges and prosecutors, by presenting how emotion management is embedded in the organisations of the courts and the prosecution offices. We first demonstrate how neoliberal management ideology organizes emotion, pushing a less personalized and more detached relation to cases. We then proceed to demonstrate the …
Professional Emotions in Court: A Sociological Perspective
Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants 'backstage' - whether at the office or at lunch - in order…
Introducing an Interdisciplinary Frontier to Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work
This special issue of Oñati Socio-legal Series, titled Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work, is the result of presentations and discussions during an interdisciplinary workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) held in May 2018. This issue builds on the growing critique of the dispassionate ideal of judicial work, combining original theoretical insights with imaginative empirical analyses to extend the understanding of e…
The Emotional Interaction of Judicial Objectivity
Like other Western legal systems, the Swedish legal system constructs objectivity as an unemotional state of being. We argue that the enactment of objectivity in situ relies on objectivity work including emotion management and empathy. Building on qualitative interviews and observations in Swedish district courts, we analyse courtroom interaction through a dramaturgical lens, highlighting tacit signals and interprofessional emotional communicatio…
Different roads to empathy: Stage actors and judges as polar cases
Using judges and stage actors as instructive polar types this article elucidates factors that influence the inclination to empathise. Both come in close contact with dramatic life stories on an everyday basis but approach empathy from contrasting vantage points: emotional distance versus emotional engagement. Similarities between these polar types can thus disentangle some of the factors that influence professional empathic perspective taking in …
Comparing culturally embedded frames of judicial dispassion
The aim of this chapter is to outline a theoretical framework for the comparative study of emotions in Western legal systems of different countries. Our focus is on the legal actors, and our primary interest is how internal legal culture - conceptualized as ‘the emotive-cognitive judicial frame’ - is embedded in a broader context of a socio-culturally specific emotional regime. The emotive-cognitive judicial frame combines national emotion norms …
Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts
The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confi…
Expanding emotional capital in court
This article develops the concept of emotional capital by exposing its operation in proceedings between legal elite professionals. We argue that (a) the micro-structural restraints of the interaction order among the participants have to be accounted for in order to understand the dynamics of emotional capital, and; (b) the emotional processes at play have to be expanded beyond feelings of care showing how emotions can be employed to reproduce sta…
(Dis)passionate law stories: The emotional processes of encoding narratives in court
In this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers’ transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: demarcation , fragmentatio…
Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication
This article analyzes rational decision-making in court as an emotive-cognitive process formed in and through social interaction. Current theoretical perspectives have shown how emotion and thought are intertwined in the workings of the human brain but have seldom elaborated on the contextual and structural features of rational-emotional decision-making. I propose a model that maps emotional processes and emotional management demands to the tempo…
Artificial intelligence and real decisions: Predictive systems and generative AI vs. emotive-cognitive legal deliberations
The use of artificial intelligence in law represents one of the biggest challenges across different legal systems. Supporters of predictive systems believe that decisionmaking could be more efficient, consistent and predictable by using AI. European legislation and legal scholars, however, identify areas where AI developments are at high risk or too dangerous to be used in judicial proceedings. In this article, we contribute to this debate by pro…
Navigating uncertainty and negotiating trust in judicial deliberations
Autonomy and independence are key features of legal decision-making. Yet, decision-making in court is fundamentally interactional and collective, both during the information gathering phase of hearings, and in evaluations during deliberations. Depending on legal system and type of court, deliberations can include different constellations of lay judges, jurors, or judge panels. In this article, we explore the collective dynamic of knowledge acquis…
Beyond a reasonable doubt: The emotive-cognitive evaluation of intent and credibility
Credibility and intent are important but imprecise legal categories that need to be assessed in criminal trials as neither common nor civil legal systems provide decision-makers with clear rules on how to evaluate them in practice. In this article, drawing on ethnographic data from trials and deliberations in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluations of credib…
Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law in Society and Culture (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Legal Education and Practice Innovations (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)