Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power
by Rose Hackman · 27 Mar 2023
class prejudice. It uncovers the singular form of extractive emotional capitalism propped up by these systems. It points out the unequal—and unfair—distribution of emotional labor, its systemic misvaluing, and the consequences of the chronic protection of men’s experiences over women’s, and dominant groups’ experiences over nondominant groups.
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that when placed in our present context demands nothing short of a total rethinking of our collective moral principles and our attitude toward work itself. * * * Emotional Labor is the product of seven years of inquiry, five of which were spent in intense reading, research, reflection, and confrontation, including through hundreds of interviews
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in shared memories, in seamless togetherness, in family bonds and love, without having to worry about outside factors, including money—she would be shouldering the emotional labor necessary to conceive and produce the event. On the Thursday before the gathering, her ever-accelerating juggling of logistics, accommodating of other people’s concerns
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shit down,” I say to her during one of those moments. “Yeah. I hold shit down,” she answers, her face suddenly lightening up. * * * Performing emotional labor—identifying or anticipating other people’s emotions, adapting yours in consequence, and then managing to positively affect other people’s emotions—can often look like
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was up and then coaching Shawn through his emotions to get him to communicate and find a solution is a straightforward example of emotional labor. But in other circumstances, emotional labor is hidden just below the surface. Instead of prioritizing her private grieving, Jennifer adapted to broader family members’ needs and wishes. She
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that also intersect with women: economically disenfranchised people, Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, people with precarious immigration statuses, among other groups.14 Contextualizing emotional labor as a performance doesn’t just help validate an experience that is real, then—its relation to power offers an extraordinary insight into ongoing forms
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sweet-toothed family member may be a domestic task, but if it is done to alleviate sadness, its execution is also a form of emotional labor. And because emotional labor is the act of putting other people’s feelings before one’s own, it can also provoke the taking on of essential tasks other
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that have been common in masculine industries, such as manufacturing, since the 1930s. This economic arrangement is heavily reliant on the belief that feminized emotional labor is an expression of diminished status that deserves little in exchange for its performance. Dianne Avery, a professor emerita at the University of Buffalo School
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the shepherding and secure attachment that will help ground them in those essential human emotions of belonging, connection, and love. Engaging in this kind of emotional labor with children nurtures their emotional literacy—their ability to identify and express emotions—which helps them then create meaning and understanding within themselves and relate
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it harder. It makes finding slim moments for recovery imperative but stressful, especially as she manages her own romantic and familial relationships. As excellent at emotional labor as Anna is, burnout feels just around the corner. * * * The mostly female legion of formal caregivers—from nannies to home health-care aids, nursing
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addiction—these are all factors that make the soothing work of love and the nurturing involved in sustaining communities even more indispensable. The erasure of emotional labor concerns from the private emotional landscapes of less privileged women doesn’t just help further dehumanize them. Treating the topic as exclusively elitist helps ingrain
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serious repercussion—in the form of social penalties like angry parents, economic penalties like job loss, or physical penalties like violence—is emotional labor. It is not only emotional labor; it is emotional labor with the threat of a slap on the wrist or more if you don’t do it. When performed in public, before
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those doing it. As an active expression of a submissive, nonconfrontational status, it also presents the power status quo as inevitable, paralyzing those doing emotional labor in place. Detecting how thoroughly and actively enforced these processes are helps lift the curtain on the ways in which persistent forms of inequality are
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life. I have used my body, my identity, myself as a teaching tool by my own volition, but still appreciating that that requires emotional labor and work.” But this emotional labor deployed for the benefit of others, for the benefit of pushing culture forward, building empathy, and enacting progress, as needed as it is
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fight for a world where mutuality and consent rule, and people are brave enough to free her of that kind of survival emotional labor. I want her to think of emotional labor not as something she deploys out of desperation to conserve herself at a low, almost undetectable frequency, but instead as a valuable
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men by requiring domination. But this domination is paradoxically an extraordinarily destructive force—for the people around them as well as for the men themselves. Emotional labor occupies a very special position here. When interpreted as the act of caring for others, of being emotionally expressive and communicative, of putting others’
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I was talking about. He then proudly made another firm assertion. “I am not an emotional person, so I do not need emotional labor!” As Jeff expressed the thought that emotional labor was irrelevant to him, I realized our interview would not last very long. I initially thought the interview would go into the
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bringing in more money to claim infinite, unregulated access to feminine labor, including coercive or near-coercive sex. Unstated boundaries around feminine labor, and the emotional labor expectation that one party should put the experiences of the other party first, can make it seem bottomless and beyond consent. * * * In a new
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wondered silently whether she saw the irony in preemptively adapting to a husband’s opinion and feelings—catering to his emotions—after an interview on emotional labor, which centered around their relationship. Even her transgression carried modulation. * * * Regardless, her remark was enough for me to anonymize her immediately. I once interviewed
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and sharing that with a partner was key not only because it helped fulfill that need but also because it decreased a key component of emotional labor: constant preemptive thoughtfulness. “We are supporting decreasing anticipating one another’s behavior,” Johnson said, as constant projection into the future causes anxiety. This exercise
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with thirty-five couples. Her article used the term “cognitive labor” to describe what is often in nonacademic terms described as the mental load or emotional labor. Daminger divides the four components of this kind of labor as entailing: anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress.
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more painstaking, less tangible tasks of anticipating needs and monitoring progress. Johnson’s suggested interventions—inviting women to abstain from the nonreciprocal forms of emotional labor, insisting on everyone taking charge of their own needs—work in a situation where both parties are willing to have a self-reflective conversation on
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-based public speaking coach Erin Rodgers captured the sentiment of giving emotional labor rightful worth and visibility in relationships when she tweeted, “I want the term ‘gold digger’ to include dudes who look for a woman who will do tons of emotional labour for them.” I loved the tweet, not just because it
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resonated with so many of the frustrated accounts people had entrusted me with—of coaching male partners through feelings, tempers, deciphering their sadnesses and joys. I loved the tweet because it clearly pointed to the emotional labor plundering that
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beyond tweets—however clever those may be—of shining a light on what is being emotionally as well as materially gained by men in nonreciprocal emotional labor relationships. An extraordinarily grim academic article3 from 2009 looked at the marital outcome of 515 patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, observing groups battling
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* * * The emotional weight women do carry in relationships has measurable health and well-being impacts even in less extreme situations. Surface acting, the kind of emotional labor that involves changing the appearance of emotions rather than the actual emotions internally felt, is consistently found to cause burnout, increased stress, and even insomnia
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.5 But unequal distribution of emotional labor among other forms of domestic work also enhances burnout. A 2004 study6 in Australia surveying 102 parents of young children found that women’s psychological
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Johnson, the psychotherapist, said such inequalities could affect the broader quality of a relationship, including intimacy. “One thing I am noticing is the ways that emotional labor impedes the libido, impedes continued sexual connection between partners,” she warned. “When it’s a couple and they are both breadwinners, I find it becomes
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heartening in that he shows what the research confirms: that empathy can be acquired with practice, motivation, and unflinching exposure. Empathy in action becomes emotional labor. But Rory’s third identified reason for growth—one that I am grateful he so honestly shared—points to the difficulties in relinquishing traditional masculinity
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privilege as it currently is—and individuals will not always see visibility as a lesson in independently stepping up and flattening the unequal distribution of emotional labor; quite the contrary. * * * Luis Alejandro Tapia, a social impact equity and transformative justice consultant in New York City who works with private, nonprofit, and
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identities, power, and forced inauthenticity, the day’s activities were clearly beseeching participants to become aware of the ways in which they were either performing emotional labor for others or perpetually expecting it to be performed for them. Luis, who identifies as a Black, Afro-Latino, cisgendered, fat, gap-toothed, bearded
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a disregard for future consequences, is associated with psychopathy rather than good governance.21 While we have become accustomed to, and have indeed enforced, essential emotional labor being the work of subordinate groups, it turns out it should be the work of leaders. Ironically, this makes subordinate groups arguably far better
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opposed to each other? Not necessarily. But we need to spell out what authenticity really means, how it interacts with privilege and gender, and how emotional labor modulates this. Authenticity as the consistent expression of one’s true self, personality, and sets of values, uninfluenced by outside pressures or expectations, holds
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sense. Back at the Guggenheim, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s comments had pivoted to a solutions-based approach in societies beyond the workplace, priming respect and emotional labor over alleged authenticity. “In the future, altruistic societies will outperform more rational societies. Altruistic societies will be able to adapt and accommodate diversity, whereas
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prosocial, community-driven, and communal skills would lift up health, life outcomes, and peaceful living on the local, national, and international levels. A world where emotional labor is acknowledged and then valued is a revolutionary concept that would address some of the clearest, deepest causes for gender inequality and inequality of all
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are currently taught that dollars are the only way to confirm that a performance is valued, but rendering emotional labor visible only reveals that every dollar created exists in part because of emotional labor. If emotional labor is the ultimate enabler of work and dollar creation, it is hard to deny it as a source
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toward it being value. It is arguably not a source of value, but the source of value. Beyond seeing the value of emotional labor, understanding the ways in which emotional labor is currently extracted for free or at a discount forces a reckoning that must go to the very roots of our social organization
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that: hearts have already been monetized, and not recognizing this only allows for further invisibility, an obscuring of exchanges, and therefore more fruitful exploitation. Admitting emotional labor’s transformative, earth-shaping role in remunerated settings will only help recognize its role in unremunerated ones, and vice versa. It needn’t be either
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respected their choice, but it is worth noting that not all women who have names that sound white are, in fact, white. ONE: WHAT IS EMOTIONAL LABOR, EXACTLY? 1. Tattwamasi Paltasingh and Lakshmi Lingam, “‘Production’ and ‘Reproduction’ in Feminism: Ideas, Perspectives and Concepts,” IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review 3, no. 1 (
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did find that men who identified as more expressive in terms of their personalities—more emotionally astute, more attuned to others, and gentler—did more emotional labor than their traditionally more masculine male counterparts—who identified as more assertive, confident, and driven—she found that all women, regardless of their personality
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accumulation of wealth depend,” wrote Silvia Federici, one of the thinkers behind the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign. Of course, “reproductive labor”—including the emotional labor of constant care, sustenance, and support—is not just happening in unpaid circumstances, even if within our imaginings it has come to encapsulate the idea
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online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. CONTENTS TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT NOTICE DEDICATION EPIGRAPHS INTRODUCTION ONE What Is Emotional Labor, Exactly? TWO Domesticity at Work THREE The History of Extraction FOUR Disciplined into Obedience FIVE The Constant Threat of Violence SIX What About the Men
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? SEVEN The Reality of Emotional Capitalism EIGHT Abolishing Imbalance NINE Radical Love in a New World CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT EMOTIONAL LABOR. Copyright © 2023 by Rose Hackman. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271. www.flatironbooks.com Cover design
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Kelly Gatesman Cover art: abstract pattern © Nicetoseeya/Shutterstock.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Hackman, Rose, author. Title: Emotional labor: the invisible work shaping our lives and how to claim our power / Rose Hackman. Description: First edition. | New York: Flatiron Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical
Mattering: The Secret to Building a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose
by Jennifer Breheny Wallace · 13 Jan 2026 · 206pp · 68,830 words
, has been blamed on many factors, such as polarized politics, rapid technological advances, social media, and culture wars. Caregivers are overwhelmed by the mental and emotional labor of holding their families together, often while working fulltime. Men are no longer sure where or how they fit into society. Workplaces are more demanding
Ancestral Night
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Mar 2019 · 596pp · 163,351 words
else around here and maybe they could be reverse-engineered. I laughed at the comment, though; trust Singer to show up and start doing the emotional labor. Then I stopped laughing. I opened my mouth to say something, closed it again, and twisted two wires together. A lot of the stuff in
Machine: A White Space Novel
by Elizabeth Bear · 5 Oct 2020 · 537pp · 146,610 words
its thing. I wasn’t physically tired, but an entire shift of drawing somebody out of their shell is exhausting. But no matter how much emotional labor I’d done, I wasn’t going to make Tsosie pry his still faintly blue-tinged fingers from his hot chocolate mug. I stood up
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sat down. Helen still, with programmed concern, steadied me. She’d been ready. I wondered what it was to be an AI programmed entirely for emotional labor. For taking care of humans and our needs. It sounded really boring, and I wanted to do something to take care of Helen in return
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. I said, “This hospital is what I want my legacy to be. What if we lose it all?” I was asking a sick plant for emotional labor so that I could find the courage to ask them things I knew would hurt them greatly. But I was a sick mammal, so I
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possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for
Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion
by Dean Burnett · 10 Jan 2023 · 536pp · 126,051 words
often be so weird and confusing: sometimes, they’re not actually our emotions at all. It makes you wonder: how do we get anything done? Emotional labour: emotions in the workplace Work gets a bad rap. We call it ‘the daily grind’, describe ourselves as ‘living for the weekend’, espouse the merits
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days off a week I had, I was so exhausted I could hardly get out of bed. I asked Carys about the unique form of emotional labour required in her profession, performing heart-rending or emotionally brutal scenes, where she had to convey a range of powerful negative emotions, on command, for
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’, Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, 2006, 37(1): pp. 9–18. 73 Wagner, D.T., C.M. Barnes, and B.A. Scott, ‘Driving it home: how workplace emotional labor harms employee home life’, Personnel Psychology, 2014, 67(2): pp. 487–516. 74 Impett, E.A., et al., ‘Suppression sours sacrifice: emotional and relational costs
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emotions: DB’s imagined scenario 1, 2, 3; negative consequences of 1; in science fiction 1, 2, 3, 4 acting work: actor/character relationship 1; emotional labour 1 action representation network (brain) 1 adolescence and early adulthood: brain development 1; crushes 1, 2; intense emotions 1; nightmare frequency 1, 2; safe exposure
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at work 1; DB’s job embalming cadavers 1, 2, 3(fn); emotional aspects of medical work 1; emotional detachment/suppression 1, 2, 3, 4; emotional labour of acting work 1; mental health problems caused by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; performance appraisals 1, 2; wellbeing initiatives 1, 2 working memory
The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm · 11 Apr 2022 · 172pp · 50,777 words
Work (Holt Paperbacks, 2001 [1997]); see also this interview with Hochschild: Julie Beck, ‘The Concept Creep of “Emotional Labour”’, Atlantic, 26 November 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/ 34. Alice Hancock and Philip Georgiadis, ‘We Don’t Know How Many People Will Choose to
Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation
by Hannah Gadsby · 15 Mar 2022 · 373pp · 132,377 words
at all comprehend why, but now, as an adult, I can see the immense pressure she must have been under. Essentially, when it came to emotional labor and decision-making, Mum was operating as a single mother of six (five children and one adult man). But whenever things went wrong, which they
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and all their knitting, quilting, stitching, solving, caring and healing. Woven throughout Nanette is my best effort at my own atypical appreciation for all the emotional labour so many people have invested in me, but that which I am often too slow to process until much, much later. With my freshly baked
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild · 1 Nov 1983
Gift Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 76 PART TWO/PUBLIC LIFE 6 Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 89 7 Between the Toe and the Heel: Jobs and Emotional Labor .................................... 137 8 Gender, Status, and Feeling .................... 162 9 The Search for Authenticity ................... 185 Mterword to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition .................................... 199 Preface to the 2012 Edition
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real chance of experiencing pain or loss of their own: soldiers, firefighters, high-rise window-washers, and professional football players, for example. Other forms of emotional labor require that a person manage a wide range of feeling. The poor salesclerk working in an elite clothing boutique manages envy. The Wall Street stocktrader
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competitive advantage, and by labor unions as a cause of burnout, deserving of financial compensation. So where should we look to understand current trends in emotional labor? To the most powerful economic trends of our time, I believe: the profit-seeking drive xii Preface to the 2012 Edition for efficiency, the
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downsizing of public services, the growing gap between rich and poor, and globalization. Each of these trends fosters situations which call for emotional labor. Speaking of modern American hospitals, one commentator observed, “Most hospitals used to be community-based and non-profit. Over the last three decades, the
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the 2012 Edition xv NOTES 1. Grandey, Alicia, Jim Deifendorff, and Deborah Rupp, eds. Forthcoming 2012. Chapter 1, figure 1, “Search for ‘emotional labor or labour’ using GoogleScholar.” In Emotional Labor in the Twenty-first Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work. London: Routledge, Psychology Press. The authors searched in business, social science
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, and medicine databases for journal articles with “emotional labor” or ”labour” anywhere in the paper. 2. Cross, R., W. Baker, and A. Parker. 2003. “What Creates Energy in Organizations?” Sloan Management Review 44:
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Interview with elder care manager, for Hochshild, Arlie Russell, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, forthcoming 2012. 10. Hochshild, Arlie Russell. 2009. “Can Emotional Labor Be Fun?” Work, Organization and Emotion 3 (2). 11. Sherman, Rachel. 2007. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press
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minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth - all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate, roughly one-third of American workers today have jobs that subject them to
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morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends on the actual distribution of many kinds of profits - money, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. SOURCES AND METHOD In describing the
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feeling. When it collapsed, workers came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated, and susceptible to damage. BEHIND THE DEMAND FOR ACTING "A market for emotional labor" is not a phrase that company employees use. Upper management talks about getting the best market share of the flying public. Advertising personnel talk about
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process moves up the company hierarchy, leavingjobs deskilled and workers devalued. 3 Braverman applies this thesis to physical and mental labor, but it applies to emotional labor as well. At Delta Airlines, for example, twenty-four men work as "method analysts" in the Standard Practices Division of the company. Their job
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FAILED When an industry speed-up drastically shortens the time available for contact between flight attendants and passengers, it can become virtually impossible to deliver emotional labor. In that event, the transmutation of emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange will fail. Company claims about offering a smile "from the inside
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as well as airline workers-find the system stressful. Management, however, sees no escape from the contradictory policy of trying to meet the demand for emotional labor while promoting conditions that cut off the supply. The companies worry that competitors may produce more personal service than they do, and so they continue
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company officials, Pan Am wants them "for their language skills." According to union members, it wants them for their reputed submissiveness, their willingness to perform emotional labor: "They would love nothing better than to get rid of us\and fill the plane with loving, submissive Japanese women. But for one thing, regulations
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doing this, not a source of estrangement. But when commercialization of feeling as a general process collapses into its separate elements, display becomes hollow and emotional labor is withdrawn. The task becomes one of disguising the failed transmutation. In either case, whether proudly or resentfully, face and feelings have been used as
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from the private domain and placed in a public one, where they are processed, standardized, and subjected to hierarchical control. Taken as a whole, these emotional laborers make possible a public life in which millions of people daily have fairly trusting and pleasant transactions with total or nearly total strangers. Were our
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offerings of civility or empathy not so widely spread out and our feelings not professionalized, surely public life would be profoundly different. SOCIAL CLASS AND EMOTIONAL LABOR There are jobs at every socioeconomic level that place emotional burdens on the worker, but these burdens may have little to do with the performance
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of frustration, anger, or fear-and often to suppress feelings of any sort. This can be a terrible burden, but it is not in itself emotional labor. Factory workers, truck drivers, farmers and fishermen, forklift operators, plumbers and bricklayers, chambermaids in transient hotels, and backroom laundry workers do not on the
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status shield against abuse is worth struggling over. Schooled in emotion management at home, women have entered in disproportionate numbers those jobs that call for emotional labor outside the home. Once they enter the marketplace, a certain social logic unfolds. Because of the division of labor in the society at large,
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researcher's notebook. On the scholarly front, I was also gratified to see my ideas applied, refined, and richly developed by other researchers. Scholars studied emotional labor among such employees as social workers, retail sales clerks, Disneyland ride operators, waitresses, receptionists, youth shelter workers, telemarketers, personal trainers, nursing home caregivers, professors, policemen
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workers were well-paid professionals, others were part of what Carmen Siriani and Cameron Macdonald call the "emotional proletariat."2 In their excellent 1999 essay, "Emotional Labor Since The Managed Heart," Ronnie Steinberg and Deborah Figart note the questions Afterword 201 various researchers have pursued - how much do we work on our
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another group of studies have focused on the consequences - burn out, stress, physical collapse - and the recognition and financial compensation given to those who do emotional labor and risk these effects. In a comparable worth study for the State of New York, Ronnie Steinberg and Jerry Jacobs found that jobs that involved
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management itself. For acts of extreme Afterword 203 emotion management can alert us to contradictions in the wider society which create strains which call for emotional labor in daily life. Where are these contradictions? At work, at home, and increasingly, I believe, within the realm "in between" home and work. Since
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for professional and technical occupations, for clerical occupations, and for service-sector jobs as well. Table 2 examines fifteen occupations that involve substantial amounts of emotional labor, selected from the twenty-seven different occupations grouped as Professional, Technical, or Kindred by the U.S. Census. It computes the proportion of all
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of the Experienced Civilian Labor Force and Employed Persons by Sex (Washington nt:.: C.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), pp. 718-724. 247 Jobs and Emotional Labor TABLE 2. Detailed Occupational Analysis of Selected Professional, Technical, and Kindred Workers, 1970 Occupation Lawyers and judges Librarians Personnel and labor relations Registered nurses Therapists
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attendants Postal clerks Receptionists Secretaries Stenographers Teachers aides Telegraph operators Telephone operators Ticket agents Percentage of all clerical and kindred jobs involving substantial amounts of emotional labor 52.1 25.0 44.9 250 AppendixC TABLE 4. Detailed Occupational Analysis of Selected Service Workers, Except Private Household, 1970 Occupation Bartenders Food counter
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number of persons employed in all service worker occupations except private household Percentage of all service sector occupations, except private household, involving substantial amounts of emotional labor Fl'male 4,424,030 81.3 Mall' 3,640,487 37.6 Total 8,064,517 61.6 aIncludes dental assistants; health aides, except
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assistants. 12. Ad found on the Internet, courtesy of Bonnie Kwan. Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition Ashforth, Blake E. and Ronald H. Humphrey 1993 "Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity," Academy oj Management Review V18 (Nl):88-115. Barton, D.PJ 1991 "Continuous Emotional Support During Labor," JAMA
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Advanced Nursing V32 (N3) :580-586. Braverman, Harry 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brotheridge, C.M. and AA Grandey 2002 "Emotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of '''People Work,'" Journal oj Vocational BehaviorV60(Nl) :17-39. Burton, Clare 1991 The Promise and the Price: The Struggle
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1994 "The Gendered Valuation of Occupations and Skills: Earnings in 1980 Census Occupations," Social Forces 73(1):65-99. Erickson, Rebecca]. and C. Ritter 2001 "Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Inauthenticity: Does Gender Matter?" Social Psychology Quarterly V64(N2):146-163. Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition 279 Exley, C. and G. Letherby
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Doing Gender by Giving 'Good Service,'" Work and Occupations 20(4):452-7l. Hall, Stuart, Michael Rustin, Doreen Massey and Pam Smith (eds.) 1999 Soundings: Emotional Labor Issue II [September], London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hochschild, Arlie Russell 1979 "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure," AmericanJournal oJSociology 85(3):551-75. 1981
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York State Comparable Worth Study," Social Forces 69 (2) :439-68. James, Nicky 1989 "Emotional Labour: Skill and work in the Social Regulation of Feelings," Sociological Review 37(1): 15-42. Karabanow,]. 1999 "When Caring is Not Enough: Emotional Labor and Youth Shelter Workers," Social Service Review V73(N3):340-357. Kennell,]., S. McGrath
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Gender & Society 5(2) :154-77. 1993 Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999 "Emotional Labor in Service Work," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science V562:81-95. Lively, Kathryn]. 1993 Discussant comments for the panel on
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Trainers and Emotional Service Labor," Sociology of Sport JournalV18 (N4) :379-402. Martin,]., K Knopoff, and C. Beckman 1998 "An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality and Emotion Labor: Bounded Emotionality at The Body Shop," Administrative Science Quarterly V43 (N2) :429-469. Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition 283 Martin, S.E. 1999 "Police
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Force or Police Service? Gender and Emotional Labor," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science V561: 111-126. Morris,]. Andrew and Daniel C. Feldman 1996 "The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences
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of Emotional Labor," Academy of Management Review V21 (N4) :986-1010. O'Brien, Martin "The Managed Heart Revisited: Health and Social 1994 Control," Sociological Review 42(3) :
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Anat and M. Worline 2001 "Individual Emotion in Work Organizations," Social Science Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales V 40 (Nl):95-123. Sass,j.S. "Emotional Labor as Cultural Performance: The 2000 Communication of Caregiving in a Nonprofit Nursing Home," Western Journal of Communication V64-N3) :330-358. Schaubroeck, john M. andJ
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.R.jones 2000 "Antecedents of Workplace Emotional Labor Dimensions and Moderators of Their Effects on Physical Symptoms," Journal of Organizational Behavior V21 (SI):163-183. Seery, B.L. and M.S. Crowley 2000
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Management and the Process of Building Father-Child Relationships," Journal of Family Issues V21 (Nl) :100-127. Smith, Pam "The Emotional Labor of Nursing," Nursing Times 1988 84:50-5l. 1992 The Emotional Labour of Nursing: How Nurses Care. Basingstoke, Macmillan. Steinberg, Ronnie J. 1990 "Social Construction of Skill: Gender, Power, and Comparable Worth
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," Work and Occupations 17 (4): 449-82. Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition 1999 285 "Emotional Labor Since The Managed Heart," Annals of the American
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of Gender, Diversity, and International Exchange. Washington, DC: Institute for Women's Policy Research. Stenross, Barbara and Sherryl Kleinman 1989 "The Highs and Lows of Emotional Labor: Detectives' Encounters with Criminals and Victims," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 17 (4) :435-52. Sutton, Robert I. 1991 "Maintaining Norms About Expressed Emotions: The Case
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S. 1993 "The Affective Consequences of Service Work: Managing Emotions on the Job," Work and Occupations 20(2):205-32. 1999 "The Psychosocial Consequences of Emotional Labor," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceV561:158-176. Wharton, Amy S. and Rebecca]. Erickson 1993 "Managing Emotions on the Job and
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190,192- 193,194, 255n.2 (Ch. 5), 264n.9; and status, 84-85,155, 156-159,167,171-175, 260-261n.12. See also Emotional labor; Emotion management; Exchanges, interpersonal; Feeling rules; Interactional model of emotion; Organismic model of emotion Emotion work. See Emotion management Emotive dissonance, 90 Emotive gestures, 207
Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels
by Rachel Sherman · 18 Dec 2006 · 380pp · 153,701 words
by the worker is a key part of what is being bought and sold. To describe this aspect of the product, Hochschild coined the term emotional labor, which refers to the paid worker’s managing her own feelings in order to create a certain state of mind in the customer.32 The
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work has tended to concentrate less on structure and class than on selfhood, interaction, and gender. First, scholars debate the effects that the performance of emotional labor has on workers who operate in what C. Wright Mills called “the personality market.”34 Hochschild drew on the Marxist notion of alienation to suggest
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that emotional laborers can be estranged from their emotions; subsequent work has looked at the pros and cons of emotional labor for workers in different settings.35 At a theoretical level, some analysts have discussed the broader social
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and cultural effects of commodifying and routinizing emotional labor, especially the possible loss of authenticity in human interaction generally.36 Despite research
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showing that emotional labor is not alienating for workers in all work situations, an implicit opposition between an “authentic,” agentic self
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antithetical to workers’ interests. Partly this assumption has to do with the potential for individual customers to treat workers badly and with the belief that emotional labor has negative effects on workers, but these links are not often theoretically elaborated.47 In her ethnographic study of domestic servants and employers, Judith Rollins
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of guests’ needs; unlimited available physical labor; and a deferential, sincere demeanor on the part of workers. Interactive luxury service entails more than broadly conceived “emotional labor,” which Hochschild defines as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” that is sold for a wage.3 It
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the tangibility of the product. Workers in the front of the house provide most of the elements of interactive service, which consists mainly of intangible emotional labor (personalization, needs anticipation and compliance, and deference) as well as visible physical labor. Workers in the back of the house, in contrast, primarily produce the
…
appointments create extra work for housekeepers not found in nonluxury hotels; they change the covers of High Low (high at front door) High Low Low Emotional labor Physical labor Discretion Routinization Monitoring cleaner, turndown attendant, laundry worker. Some High Some Low High High Higher wage, some commissions (reservations) Low in reservations and
…
guests by name, anticipate their needs, chat with them, and provide deference and legitimation. Front desk workers and concierges especially remember guest preferences and offer emotional labor. Front door workers not only make conversation and personalize interactions but also carry bags, open doors, and retrieve cars, exerting physical labor on the guest
…
nearby dry cleaner because he was “too cheap” to pay for it to be cleaned in the hotel. Less wealthy people also sometimes demanded more emotional labor. As one Luxury Garden manager put it, “Their expectations are disproportionate to the rate they are paying,” increasing the likelihood of complaints.16 Second, the
…
who must deal with the problem, they are preventing that worker both from controlling her relations with guests and from avoiding the performance of deferential emotional labor. (Workers in the back of the house complained about front of house workers occasionally too, though less often; but these gripes were mostly about information
…
telling long personal stories that required the worker to appear interested even if she was not. Sometimes guests who apologized for their demands created more emotional labor. I wrote in my field notes: “Some people are actually aware that they are taking up a lot of the workers’ time, but then you
…
effort, workers acted in ways that reversed their invisibility without being obvious enough to attract the notice of guests or managers. First, they sometimes withheld emotional labor. For example, Sarah at the Royal Court mentioned repeatedly when she was training me that she was not especially friendly to people who were not
…
was so rude, I’m not going to be all like, [in a deferential tone] ‘Here’s your key, ma’am.’” Here Lupe withheld her emotional labor and deference as a way of punishing the woman for not paying attention to her but without being overtly disrespectful. Another way workers withheld
…
emotional labor was to become more performative, as other authors have noted.20 Hans, an assistant manager UC_Sherman (O).qxd 200 10/3/2006 2:01
…
job, so unlike employers of domestic servants (whose job description does not officially include deferential emotion work), hotel guests usually do not need to elicit emotional labor through subtle or overt means (though as I have shown, they will do this interactively when they have to). Thus, secure in the knowledge that
…
the possibility for “real” friendship to exist between workers and clients.45 The imputed antagonism between workers and customers is reflected in the assumption that emotional labor in service work settings is inherently inauthentic, stressful, and potentially damaging to workers’ sense of self. These luxury hotel cases show that antagonism, instrumentality, and
…
these rules is also to accept the relations in which they are embedded, including unequal distribution of material resources and asymmetrical entitlement to physical and emotional labor. These findings illustrate the “incomplete commodification” of emotion work, rather than a dichotomy between commodified and uncommodified relations.49 Tips have long been considered to
…
with looking the part indicates another way in which the hotel required work of its guests. They felt obliged not only to offer workers reciprocal emotional labor, as we have seen, but also to expend effort in trying to fit in. Here we see a particular performance of self as an element
…
men, so they were called housemen, while at the Luxury Garden there were female runners. I use the term runners throughout. 54. Housekeepers also do emotional labor in that they have to suppress certain aspects of themselves to remain unobtrusive, as Dan Wilk points out (personal communication). However, given their extremely limited
…
contact with guests, emotional labor is not as significant a part of the service they produce as it is for interactive workers. 55. See Adler and Adler (2004) for similar
…
for significant wage increases and a contract expiration of 2007 (Veiga 2005). 25. See Fantasia and Voss (2004). 26. Stephanie Ruby (personal communication). 27. The emotional labor workers are required to perform can be a subject of union activity to a certain extent, but customer behavior cannot be. 28. Gramsci (1971: 330
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Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes toward an Investigation.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Review Editions. Ashforth, Blake, and Marc A. Tomiuk. 2000. “Emotional Labour and Authenticity: Views from Service Agents.” In Emotion in Organizations, ed. Stephen Fineman, 184–203. London: Sage. Baltzell, E. Digby. [1958] 1971. Philadelphia Gentlemen: The
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at the Ritz.” Harvard Business Review (June): 50–62. Henson, Kevin. 1996. Just a Temp. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Himmelweit, Susan. 1999. “Caring Labor.” In Emotional Labor in the Service Economy: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, ed. Ronnie Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart, 27–38. Thousand Oaks
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: Lessons from McDonald’s.” In Working in the Service Society, ed. Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1999. “Emotional Labor in the Service Sector.” In Emotional Labor in the Service Economy: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, ed. Ronnie Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart. Thousand Oaks
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, Craig, and Graeme Salaman. 1982. “Bravermania and Beyond: Recent Theories of the Labour Process.” Sociology 16 (2): 251–69. Lively, Kathryn. 2002. “Client Contact and Emotional Labor.” Work and Occupations 29 (2): 198–225. Lopez, Steve. 1996. “The Politics of Service Production: Route Sales Work in the Potato-Chip Industry.” In Working
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, David. 1980. “Class Struggle and the Transformation of the Labor Process.” Theory and Society 9: 89–130. Steinberg, Ronnie, and Deborah M. Figart, eds. 1999. Emotional Labor in the Service Economy: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Periodicals Press. Stenross, Barbara, and Sherryl Kleinman
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. 1989. “The Highs and Lows of Emotional Labor: Detectives’ Encounters with Criminals and Victims.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 17: 435–52. Stepick, Alex, and Guillermo Grenier. 1994. “The View from the Back of
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Occupations 20 (2): 205–32. UC_Sherman (O).qxd 338 10/3/2006 2:02 PM Page 338 References ———. 1999. “The Psychosocial Consequences of Emotional Labor.” In Emotional Labor in the Service Economy: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, ed. Ronnie Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart, 158–76. Thousand Oaks
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, 21, 25–26, 38, 46–47, 48, 319n12; needs fulfillment, 36, 47; pampering, 38–44, 231–32; sincere, 45. See also anticipation of guest needs; emotional labor; empathy UC_Sherman (O).qxd 10/3/2006 2:02 PM Page 343 index cars: “gypsy limos,” 313n32; Luxury Garden chauffeur-driven house car, 65
…
labor, 44, 50; pampering, 38–44, 231–32; speed of service, 38, 41, 113–23, 136, 151. See also caring labor/ care work; effort, worker; emotional labor; physical labor; unlimited labor; visible labor UC_Sherman (O).qxd 346 10/3/2006 2:02 PM Page 346 index dispositions: constituted in the hotel
…
, 233, 241. See also consent by workers; displays of labor; performance; physical labor; unlimited labor elder care work, 47 elevator operators, 40 Eloise (Thompson), 24 emotional labor, 8–9, 10, 303n48; defined, 25; “deskilling” of, 123; front of house workers, 56; housekeepers’, 304n54; “incomplete commodification” of, 219–20; intangible, 49; reciprocity and
…
, 234, 245–46; and guest performance of self, 244; guests relying on workers to initiate, 245; workers praising guests for, 249, 318n42. See also civility; emotional labor; revenge; rewards empathy: of workers with guests, 162–66, 174, 177, 179–81, 213, 232–33, 247, 249. See also sympathy employee satisfaction survey, Luxury
…
hotel organization, 287, 288fig, 289fig. See also organizational characteristics house car, Luxury Garden, 65 housekeepers, 21, 49, 50–53, 310n5; awareness of structural inequality, 58; emotional labor, 304n54; ethnographic shadowing of, 13, 14, 274, 275, 280, 300n58, 323n1; fear of guest complaints, 52–53; vs. fictional versions, 305–6n66; front of house
…
, 54, 58; voluntary appearance of, 44, 112, 118, 125, 132, 186, 198, 209, 212–13, 220, 221, 233, 241. See also consent by workers; demographics; emotional labor; front of house workers; games, worker; positive interactions; relationship; reservationists; selfhood; skill; sociology of work; speed of service; subordination; telephone operators intern: at Luxury Garden
…
_Sherman (O).qxd 354 10/3/2006 2:02 PM Page 354 index luxury standards of service (continued) deference; discretion by workers; displays of labor; emotional labor; recognition of guests; sincerity, worker; speed of service; standardization Maid in Manhattan, 154, 242, 305n66, 320n15 “making out” games, 146, 152; manufacturing work, 16, 111
…
/”doing class,” 12, 20, 244, 246, 254, 259–60; deep acting, 9, 75, 78, 94–95, 298n41; mystery shoppers rating, 84; tip strategy, 128; withholding emotional labor, 199–200. See also criticism; feedback; games, worker; monitoring of workers; self-subordination of workers to guests; service theater perks: Luxury Garden, 67, 73, 157
…
; speed, 41, 115; technology, 54; tips, 50, 130, 132–33, 292table, 294table. See also semivisible workers routinization, 9; discretion and, 52, 54, 64, 79; of emotional labor, 8; and games, 111, 151– 52; interactive vs. noninteractive work, 21, 54, 57; McDonald’s, 9, 54, 55, 224, 225; semivisible work, 54–56, 58
How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett · 6 Mar 2017
half of the United States). All this mental effort taxes a judge’s body budget. The judge’s life is one of intense and continual emotional labor under the fiction of equanimity.56 Nevertheless, the law continues to hold dear the fiction of the dispassionate judge, even at the highest levels. When
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L. 2014. After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Anleu, Sharyn Roach, and Kathy Mack. 2005. “Magistrates’ Everyday Work and Emotional Labour.” Journal of Law and Society 32 (4): 590–614. Ansell, Emily B., Kenneth Rando, Keri Tuit, Joseph Guarnaccia, and Rajita Sinha. 2012. “Cumulative Adversity and
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. “David Souter,” last modified March 30, 2016, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Souter. under the fiction of equanimity: The sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls it “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983). [back] 57. sentencing portion of criminal cases: In 1972, the Supreme Court decreed that “any decision to impose the death sentence be, and
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