Emotional Labour PDF

Emotional labour  The term ‘emotional labour’ was coined by Arlie Hochschild (1979; 1983; 2003) in her ground-breaking dramaturgical perspective on the emotional interchange between Definition flight attendants and passe...

Emotional labour  The term ‘emotional labour’ was coined by Arlie Hochschild (1979; 1983; 2003) in her ground-breaking dramaturgical perspective on the emotional interchange between Definition flight attendants and passengers. Emotional labour is the “management of feelings to create publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage  face-to-face or voice contact with the public it requires the worker to produce an emotional state in another and it allows the employer to regulate Characteristi a degree of control over the emotional cs of activities of workers through training and supervision emotional most jobs and functions, whether labour classified as paid or unpaid labour, have emotional labour requirements as Examples of jobs that require emotional labour: waitressing; petrol attendant  Emotional labour can occur within paid work and unpaid work Emotional labour has an exchange value Paid and. This paid work is what Hochschild calls emotion work. She uses the unpaid synonymous terms 'emotion work' or 'emotion management' to refer to emotional these acts which are done in the private context where they have use labour value Emotion work in this context is defined as the process of managing and presenting emotions in the private sphere  Feeling rules, as defined by Hochschild (2003: 68), are “a set of shared albeit often latent, rules” or situational guidelines that help match the expected emotion of a particular situation in carrying out emotion work These feeling rules may be explicit or Feeling informal in nature rules feeling rules” are used by organisations as a discipline measure to ensure that adequate service is given to clients. Eg “ don’t bring your problems to work” Batho pele  Hochschild (2003) argues that service employees perform emotional labour in trying to meet organisational demands in one of two ways: surface acting and SURFACE deep acting. First, he or she (the emotional labourer) ACTING must comply with display rules through AND surface acting. Surface acting involves managing the DEEP expression behaviour rather than ACTING feelings, and by this is meant managing facial expressions and bodily displays that may give away the true feelings of the labourer rather than the feeling they intend to foster in the other.  This is accomplished by the careful presentation of verbal and non- verbal cues such as facial SURFACE expressions, gestures and tone of voice in such a way that the ACTING customer/person knows that AND employees are only acting The second means of complying with DEEP display rules is through deep acting, ACTING where the actor attempts to experience the emotion displayed. PT2 This is when an individual uses their imagination in experiencing the desired emotion.  Hochschild (2003) discusses two methods for deep acting: firstly, through exhorting feeling, whereby one actively SURFACE attempts to evoke or suppress an emotion and secondly through trained ACTING imagination, whereby one actively invokes thoughts, images, and AND memories to induce the associated DEEP emotion (for example, thinking of a death to make you feel sad). ACTING The distinguishing feature of these two approaches is that one is directly PT3 exhorting feelings while the other is making indirect use of trained imagination.  managers are faced with the problem of reducing these uncertainties to secure continued profitability These managerial control strategies are intended to manipulate emotions displayed towards organisational interests such as increasing productivity, profitability, and performance. Commerciali The Labour process theory highlights some zed labour constant control and surveillance by management of the work process and worker When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep acting and surface acting are forms of labour sold  Marx - labour not only produces commodities, it produces itself and the worker as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in Emotional general labour and commodification– whereby labour commodificat power in the form of one’s emotions ion is sold for wages in the public sphere – emotions come under the control of the purchaser the process of the work of labourers being sold to management is termed “transmutation”  “The commercialisation of emotions is dependent on three elements according to Hochschild (2003:118): 1 emotion work- emotion work is no longer a private act but a public act, which is Commercializa bought and sold. tion of 2. feeling rules - emotion work is managed and directed by managerial manuals and emotional staff handbooks that employees are taught labor during entry into the organisation. feeling rules are no longer simply matters of personal discretion, negotiated with another person in private, but are spelt out publicly in training programmes and in the discourse of supervisors at all leve  3. social exchange-When feeling rules are not negotiated by private partners, but are instead negotiated Commercializa through company manuals within tion of the public domain of work this emotional affects worker. labor The cost, however, of the commercialisation is on the workers’ identity. The cost-alienation  Hochschild (2003) makes an important comparison between emotional labour and physical labour with the analogy of Marx’s young boy working in the factory and the contemporary flight attendant. The comparison is on the physical effort deployed by the factory worker in Alienation undertaking his work and emotional manipulation that the flight attendant utilises in performing her job. Whilst this comparison reflects opposite ends of the labour spectrum irrespective of the type of labour, the work that workers engage in – be it physical or emotional – is plagued by a form of estrangement from the self.  The gendered nature of nursing – involving women doing a ‘woman’s job’ by carrying out ‘women’s work’ – has been widely reported Gender This dates back to the gendering of emotion and the role that women play in and work the domestic sphere.. Characteristics such loving, nurturing, and sentimentality and kindness form the basis emotional of what it is to be a woman in the domestic sphere and form the basis for private labour reproductive labour. these ’feminine’ emotional attributes are often seen as desirable, appropriate and demonstrating a women’s capacity for emotional sensitivity and caring for others”