reflective supervision and constructive feedback within their own workplace as much to sustain their ability to work with other professionals as to work with members of the public who may provoke anxiety.
Emotional Labour, support and supervision There are particular constellations of emotion involved with different kinds of work, and emotional responses are implicated even in work that involves minimal direct contact with other people. However, interacting with people who have „problems in living‟ (Szasz, 1974) of a social or psychological nature, requires resources of patience, attentiveness, empathy and understanding and demands that anxiety be contained and managed. The health and social care and psychotherapeutic professions have evolved models of supervision designed to help professionals deal with the anxiety generated by the work. In the best practice these go far beyond „support‟ although support is often needed in stressful situations. Although supervision often falls short of the ideal, it is designed to foster self-reflection, critical selfappraisal, and to provide a setting in which the often unconscious anxieties evoked by working with vulnerable people or challenging behaviour can be recognised and worked through. The purpose of this is to enhance self-management within the professional role. Where the practice of „clinical‟ supervision is well-embedded or becomes part of the culture of the workplace it improves the quality of „support‟ that workers are able to offer one another as well as helping to install an „internal supervisor‟ who can be invoked in the day – to-day processes of professional interaction as well as in situations of duress and crisis. Most of the museum staff in the Who Cares? projects were engaging in new and experimental work. During the process they had access to at most one or two colleagues in the workplace, who shared some involvement in the project. In more than one instance a staff member was carrying the project alone, with fairly remote managerial oversight. The Who Cares? network meetings offered a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences, but these only occurred quarterly. Many people affirmed that the self-evaluation design and feedback days were particularly helpful since these offered an in-depth and extended discussion of the particular dilemmas and opportunities of individual projects, and gave staff an opportunity to explore how they felt about them. They therefore fulfilled some of the functions of supervision, but they only occurred twice for each museum in the course of the programme. It seems essential if the intensive demands of this emotional labour are to be fulfilled, that the support and supervision needs of staff are thought through. Although a clinical model of supervision would be an excessive commitment for museums, embedded self-reflective evaluation processes and peer support in the style of a „critical friend‟, should systematically underpin relational work, especially when this is to occur with vulnerable or challenging groups.
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