The Managed Heart
Arlie Hochschild examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us.
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- Many European cultures consider the inauthentic cheerfulness that is expected as part of emotional labor in Anglophone societies distasteful (I have been living in North America for many years, and still find it distasteful), and workers in those cultures rightly recognize these demands for emotional labor as being harmful to their mental health (see for example Hochschild's seminal The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling).
- Seems like HN could do well with an introduction to Arlie Hochschild and "The Managed Heart" http://www.amazon.com/The-Managed-Heart-Commercialization-Fe....
Here's a bit of the blurb from Amazon:
"In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart.
But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant’s job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector’s job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company’s commercial purpose."
- Hochschild's point in The Managed Heart was that many jobs place outsized demands on workers' emotional lives, beyond workplace names of politeness designed to reduce conflict. There is a massive difference between being asked not to be rude to your coworkers, which is a basic norm of politeness in our society, and having people pleasing become inextricably linked with one's ability to earn a living.
- Here you go: https://www.simplypsychology.org/emotional-labor.html
> Hochschild (1983) suggested that jobs requiring more emotional labor are performed primarily by women. These jobs typically involve creating feelings of well-being or affirmation in others – responsibilities usually assigned to women.
Hochschild, A. (1983). 1983 The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Perhaps to highlight efforts in some threads here, I'm reading The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild. Besides considering emotional work, she speaks of feeling rules. The latter provides a term for rules of engagement, so to speak, we bring to incidental, causal and serious interactions. Based upon the view that emotions are socially-resolved, not merely interally-resolved, we never escape either emotional work or related rules of engagement.
