The article argues that the emotional framing of interviews plays a major role in shaping the content of interviews. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin and Luce Irigaray, the article describes how interviews can be experienced as either conquest or communion. Qualitative researchers typically focus on the cognitively articulated aspects of the interview and elide the significance of their own and the interviewee’s, emotions. A reanalysis of two previous qualitative interview studies is used to illustrate the difference between interviews experienced as conquest or communion. The article argues that all interviews are emotional and embodied performances and that good interviewing is facilitated by a reflexive awareness of, and engagement with, the emotional, embodied, and performed dimensions of the interview.

Two central unresolved problems in labour process theory are the disjuncture between structure and agency and the problem of what constitutes `good' work. This paper argues that a hermeneutic conception of the self as constructed through narrative provides a resolution to these two issues. Hermeneutics conceptualises the self as neither a solitary entity impervious to the influence of others, nor as a mere reflection of objective structures or `discourses of power'. Rather, in the process of self-interpretation a person uses socially learnt cultural discourses to construct and reconstruct a coherent sense of narrative-identity. Substantive illustrations are drawn from labour process theory, recent developments in management theory, and some more general studies of the meaning of working.