Emotional capitalism and digitalization

Digital feedback platforms on which consumers evaluate and the rate the performance of service delivery has exploded in recent years in the virtual world and has received growing interest in the online accounting literature (Jeacle, 2017; Lowe et al., 2012; Van den Bussche & Dambrin, 2021). These digital platforms can be perceived as extended surveillance and control spaces (Martinez, 2011; Brivot & Gendron, 2011). Known as Amazon or TripAdvisor, they have become central in an increasing number of sectors and have started to enter highly regulated industries such as health (Bez et al., 2023) Thanks to its digital properties, digital feedback platform has facilitated information sharing and transparency as organizations and professionals are being held accountable. Thus, there is concern that the virtual world will ultimately lead to a new age based on digital technologies for measurement and surveillance, enabling evaluation, ratings, and rankings aimed at rendering professionals' conduct knowable. Within the healthcare sector, strengthening accountability is one of the highest priorities in order to enhance patient satisfaction and improve physicians' quality of care. However, the rising importance of this new form of accountability suggests that the medical work's modalities of evaluation are evolving, which in turn gives rise to different concerns for the future of medicine (Patel et al., 2015; Turk et al., 2020). The potential of online patient evaluation as a driver of substantial transformations has been highlighted in prior literature and has given rise to different concerns for doctors about how this will impact them, their practice, and their patients (James et al., 2017). Against this backdrop, the accounting literature is turning its attention to the critical implications of the impact of this new form of accountability on organizations and professions (Agostino et al., 2022; Chua et al., 2022; Nørreklit & Trenca, 2021; Scott & Orlikowski, 2012) as "new information and control possibilities are created as more customer, employee and stakeholder interactions happen digitally" (Arnaboldi et al., 2017, p. 763). Indeed, the move to take into account evaluations done by these feedback platform is raising important questions about how evaluations are changing and what outcomes are being generated for the organizations and professionals being evaluated (Orlikowski & Scott, 2014). The development of this mode of evaluation highlights the intensification of the consumer culture in the twentieth century and gives rise to unprecedented ways of evaluating physicians' behavior, creating conditions for a powerful new web of control processes (Lyon, 2001). However, thus far, scholarly understanding of the way online evaluation reshapes the mechanism of accountability for professionals in the context of emotional capitalism remains limited. In particular, little is known about how patient feedback platform may alter how medical expertise is evaluated and valued.