The Business of Being Angry: Anger Management in the Outrage Economy

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine anger management not as a therapeutic technique or individual coping strategy, but as a central problem of contemporary communication systems that actively produce, circulate, and stabilise anger as a social resource. Drawing on the concepts of ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, the article argues that anger has shifted from a personal moral challenge into a managed and engineered medium of power. Classical and modern approaches that frame anger as a matter of self-control or choice are reinterpreted in light of digital environments in which anger is repeatedly invited, rewarded, and prolonged. The analysis shows how anger operates simultaneously as permission, displacement, and misdirection: it legitimises actions that would otherwise require justification, redirects frustration away from structural causes, and sustains attention economies that profit from unresolved conflict. Organisational, managerial, and institutional contexts further illustrate how anger is not eliminated but formatted, channelled, and selectively validated according to its usefulness for stability, compliance, and symbolic governance. Rather than resolving injustice or restoring trust, contemporary anger management practices often neutralise anger’s disruptive potential while preserving the conditions that generate it. The article concludes that anger management has become less about calming emotions and more about regulating dissent, converting moral energy into predictable, non-transformative forms. In this sense, anger is no longer managed to restore communication but engineered to sustain miscommunication, preparing the ground for discommunication as a durable social condition.