It is often noted that doing social science research involves significant personal, emotional and identity work. As Coffey (1999: 1) observes, this ‘occurs both during and after fieldwork. In writing, remembering and representing our fieldwork experiences we are involved in processes of self-presentation and identity construction.’Research can thus have an emotional impact, not just on research participants, but also on researchers themselves. The emotional aspects of doing research have the potential to change us in significant ways, and it is impossible to know in advance of undertaking a research study the emotional effects this will have on researchers (Hallowell, Lawton and Gregory, 2005). Identity issues can be particularly complex in situations involving insider research (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007), where the researchers are studying a culture in which they are a participant. In these situations, it is not so much that the researchers come to know a particular social setting through studying it, but that they come to know it rather differently. In this chapter we treat the emotional aspects of fieldwork as ‘epistemologically productive in the analysis of fieldwork and the fieldworker self’(Coffey, 1999: 6). We begin by reviewing the treatment of negative emotions in organizational life and in accounts of the organizational research process. Next we explore the role of anger in research by drawing on vignettes that arose from our experiences relating to a PhD study of gendered organizational power relations in Saudi Arabia. We consider the role of powerful cultural norms in socialising researchers as gendered subjects and argue that anger provides a resource through which such identity threats may be resisted, reconfigured and reshaped. Through this we reflect on what can be lost when negative emotions are suppressed and what can be gained when they are expressed. By applying the notion of a feminist ethics of care in the context of the research apprenticeship, we suggest that anger can be empowering through enabling relational understanding and enhancing reflexivity.