Emotions have a place in the social work profession: they are "considered, controlled, and managed" to limit their manifestations in the relationship between the professional and the service user. Emotions tend to disappear in the scientific (research) or political (analysis of social policies) manifestation of the discipline. The advent of new managerial practices (Bellot, Bresson & Jetté, 2013) has further sidelined the role of emotions, as decision-making processes are built upon a rationale that promotes objectivity, neutrality and egalitarianism towards service users. Our article raises several questions with regards to the place of emotions: How is social workers’ ability to act limited or affected by the lack of recognition of emotions? Are we facing a possible paradigm shift where technobureaucracy as the field of application of political decisions has reached one of its limits in the field of social intervention? Based on practice examples from three surveys conducted by the authors where the question of emotions was central to the interventions, but could not be taken into account, we will see how emotions in social intervention come up against professional and managerial norms.