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The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
In private life we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotional work," just as we manage our outer expressions through surface acting. But what happens when this system of adjusting emotions is adapted to commercial purposes? Hochschild examines the cost of this kind of "emotional labor." She vividly describes from a humanist and feminist perspective the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an "occupational hazard" for one-third of America's workforce.
330 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1983
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5649 people want to read
About the author
Arlie Russell Hochschild
36 books650 followersArlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Outsourced Self, The Time Bind, Global Woman, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.
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October 14, 2013
Hochschild perfectly captures the perils of emotional labor in this book. Reading this in my college class, I was able to perform some empirical research inspired by Hochschild's work and realized, as a retail employee myself, how much corporations and companies can commercialize off your emotions. The comparisons between male and female workers were not shocking, but very intriguing, and surprised me when I experienced them face-to-face while researching. Even as an employee who utilizes emotional work daily, as a customer, I never thought about the employees I come into contact with and how much their job demands from them. Loved the references she makes to Erving Goffman--the perfect balance between psychology and sociology in this book, great for anyone fascinated by gender studies and/or minority classes within the workplace.
December 18, 2020
My first question is: what is the purpose of distinguishing between emotion management and performance done in our private lives from emotion management and performance done for commercial use? To imagine that this distinction is real, and that there is a world where our emotions are untainted from capitalism and patriarchal racism, is to dismiss the way that what Hochschild refers to as "feeling rules" for our private lives are determined by the state, and the fact that, for example, many people enter into romantic relationships for social or economic reasons. I appreciate Hochschild's contribution of “emotional labor” as a term, but this work felt very limited and seemed to overlook/fail to understand the experiences of Black, racialized, and poor communities, and especially sex workers, caregivers, and people who work in the home.
Did not finish
November 18, 2016Downloaded this book by mistake for a buddy read.
Nothing wrong with this book.
Please enjoy but it was not the book I was looking for.
Nothing wrong with this book.
Please enjoy but it was not the book I was looking for.
January 15, 2022
Because I am a huge snob and have a chip on my shoulder about vague use (and misuse) of jargon in activist spaces/social justice discourse, I lobbied one of my book clubs to read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, the book that coined the term “emotional labor.” What is “emotional labor” specifically? How does it differ from terms like “emotion work” or “feelings management” that have not become omnipresent buzzwords? What does the book have to say about emotional labor in the workplace, the realm that the term was coined to talk about?
Despite my pettiness of motivation, I did end up quite genuinely enjoying the book–it was fairly slow going to read, but that’s because I kept stopping to think about things, not because it was particularly difficult. As someone who is not naturally inclined toward fantastic social skills and therefore has a long history of reading advice columns and human sciences textbooks and other stuff that tries to put messy human things in nerd-friendly terms, I have strong opinions at this point about what is woolly vague talking about feelings and what is useful explanatory talking about feelings, and this is pretty squarely the latter. Hochschild walks us through the basics of feelings management in private life, drawing on and critiquing a wealth of earlier social scientists, and then explores what happens–and how it happens–when “feelings rules” are moved into the corporate realm, and someone’s feelings become a product. Her main case study here is Delta flight attendants in the early ‘80s, in part because Delta was consistently one of the highest ranked airlines for customer service, and in part because it was nonunion. (Not-so-fun fact: Delta’s flight attendants are STILL non-union! But they are attempting to unionize: deltaafa.org.) She also does some surveys of college students and, in one particularly interesting chapter, examines the work lives of bill collectors, for whom the particular emotions demanded are far different than those demanded of flight attendants–bill collectors are encouraged to be suspicious, impatient, and angry, so that they can be properly aggressive and disdainful of their debtors.
I’m definitely looking forward to talking about the book although I am somewhat less looking forward to having to draw up some really good meaty questions (I will try, though). One thing I don’t really want to do is summarize the book because I think one of my main takeaways here is oh, everyone on the left (or “left”) who wants to complain about emotional labor really, really should take the time to sit down and read the whole thing; it’ll absolutely give you multiple tools for thinking specifically and concretely about how and why you’re so exhausted and miserable in a way that repeating a phrase you’ve seen on social media ad nauseum absolutely won’t. What is the role of emotion vs. the role of surface behavior in the various aspects of your life? How are the people around you reflecting and enforcing “feelings rules,” and why? Why do some forms of “people telling you what to feel” piss you off so badly, and why do some of them not, and why do people keep trying to tell you your own feelings anyway? When is emotion management “authentic” and when is it not, and why are we so obsessed with “authenticity” anyway? What does putting your feelings at the service of your employer do to your mental health? While reading this book I did a lot of thinking about emotion rules and expectations in social justice spaces, where people are very explicitly trying to challenge and rewrite them to be something less oppressive–and not everyone has quite the same ideas about what that means. For example, I have heard some writers of color despair at the sort of “eat your vegetables” tone in which their books are sometimes recommended to white people–they’d rather people read their books for all the normal reasons one wants to read a book, not because it’s a moral obligation to Read More Authors Of Color, or even because the thing you do actually want to do is Diversify Your Reading.
One thing that really comes through is the continuous expansion of corporations out of their lane, so to speak, to try and continually capture marketing-that-doesn’t-feel-like-marketing, ramping up expectations in their quest to always exceed expectations, generally destroying everything they touch like a fart in search of fresh air. Once it has become expected for service staff to always smile, customers know that they’re supposed to smile, so they become expected to smile extra warmly and sincerely, to surpass the customer-service smile and achieve some other kind of less commercial-seeming smile in the commercial transactions they conduct. It’s enough to make you want to demand openly grumpy flight attendants just to reset things. (On second thought, this line of reaction seems to be what’s driving the “vulnerability porn” phenomenon on various influencer-laden platforms, where audiences now want to be reassured that our influences are just as fucked up and miserable as we are, for authenticity.) Anyway, while the takeaway of the book is certainly not “emotional labor is bad,” which many people seem to think it is, and it is even more certainly not “feelings management is bad,” which many people who think “emotional labor” is just a fancy term for “feelings management” also seem to think it is, one takeaway certainly is that the profit motive is a fucked-up thing to have running our emotional lives, and unfortunately the inevitable capitalist growth imperative does not show any more signs of stopping its inexorable takeover in this realm than it does it any other.
Anyway I am SUPER excited for this discussion! I love to talk about feelings but only in a ruthlessly academic way! No touchy feely stuff, only analysis! Anyway, this is why I have a job where I sit at home and fuck around with documents instead of doing anything client-facing.
Originally posted at The marketplace of feelings.
Despite my pettiness of motivation, I did end up quite genuinely enjoying the book–it was fairly slow going to read, but that’s because I kept stopping to think about things, not because it was particularly difficult. As someone who is not naturally inclined toward fantastic social skills and therefore has a long history of reading advice columns and human sciences textbooks and other stuff that tries to put messy human things in nerd-friendly terms, I have strong opinions at this point about what is woolly vague talking about feelings and what is useful explanatory talking about feelings, and this is pretty squarely the latter. Hochschild walks us through the basics of feelings management in private life, drawing on and critiquing a wealth of earlier social scientists, and then explores what happens–and how it happens–when “feelings rules” are moved into the corporate realm, and someone’s feelings become a product. Her main case study here is Delta flight attendants in the early ‘80s, in part because Delta was consistently one of the highest ranked airlines for customer service, and in part because it was nonunion. (Not-so-fun fact: Delta’s flight attendants are STILL non-union! But they are attempting to unionize: deltaafa.org.) She also does some surveys of college students and, in one particularly interesting chapter, examines the work lives of bill collectors, for whom the particular emotions demanded are far different than those demanded of flight attendants–bill collectors are encouraged to be suspicious, impatient, and angry, so that they can be properly aggressive and disdainful of their debtors.
I’m definitely looking forward to talking about the book although I am somewhat less looking forward to having to draw up some really good meaty questions (I will try, though). One thing I don’t really want to do is summarize the book because I think one of my main takeaways here is oh, everyone on the left (or “left”) who wants to complain about emotional labor really, really should take the time to sit down and read the whole thing; it’ll absolutely give you multiple tools for thinking specifically and concretely about how and why you’re so exhausted and miserable in a way that repeating a phrase you’ve seen on social media ad nauseum absolutely won’t. What is the role of emotion vs. the role of surface behavior in the various aspects of your life? How are the people around you reflecting and enforcing “feelings rules,” and why? Why do some forms of “people telling you what to feel” piss you off so badly, and why do some of them not, and why do people keep trying to tell you your own feelings anyway? When is emotion management “authentic” and when is it not, and why are we so obsessed with “authenticity” anyway? What does putting your feelings at the service of your employer do to your mental health? While reading this book I did a lot of thinking about emotion rules and expectations in social justice spaces, where people are very explicitly trying to challenge and rewrite them to be something less oppressive–and not everyone has quite the same ideas about what that means. For example, I have heard some writers of color despair at the sort of “eat your vegetables” tone in which their books are sometimes recommended to white people–they’d rather people read their books for all the normal reasons one wants to read a book, not because it’s a moral obligation to Read More Authors Of Color, or even because the thing you do actually want to do is Diversify Your Reading.
One thing that really comes through is the continuous expansion of corporations out of their lane, so to speak, to try and continually capture marketing-that-doesn’t-feel-like-marketing, ramping up expectations in their quest to always exceed expectations, generally destroying everything they touch like a fart in search of fresh air. Once it has become expected for service staff to always smile, customers know that they’re supposed to smile, so they become expected to smile extra warmly and sincerely, to surpass the customer-service smile and achieve some other kind of less commercial-seeming smile in the commercial transactions they conduct. It’s enough to make you want to demand openly grumpy flight attendants just to reset things. (On second thought, this line of reaction seems to be what’s driving the “vulnerability porn” phenomenon on various influencer-laden platforms, where audiences now want to be reassured that our influences are just as fucked up and miserable as we are, for authenticity.) Anyway, while the takeaway of the book is certainly not “emotional labor is bad,” which many people seem to think it is, and it is even more certainly not “feelings management is bad,” which many people who think “emotional labor” is just a fancy term for “feelings management” also seem to think it is, one takeaway certainly is that the profit motive is a fucked-up thing to have running our emotional lives, and unfortunately the inevitable capitalist growth imperative does not show any more signs of stopping its inexorable takeover in this realm than it does it any other.
Anyway I am SUPER excited for this discussion! I love to talk about feelings but only in a ruthlessly academic way! No touchy feely stuff, only analysis! Anyway, this is why I have a job where I sit at home and fuck around with documents instead of doing anything client-facing.
Originally posted at The marketplace of feelings.
October 15, 2020
Арлі Хохшильд у «Керованому серці» вперше (у 1983 році) вводить поняття емоційної роботи в сенсі «викликати або пригнічувати почуття, щоб здаватися зовнішньо спокійною — для потрібного настрою в інших». Щоб виточити цей термін, вона звертається серед іншого до методики Станіславського викликання потрібного почуття в актора і показує, що тренінги для стюардес використовують цю ж методику, щоб працівниці викликали в себе певні почуття («бути господинею в домі» — про салон літака) або ж, навпаки, їх пригнічували (в основному гнів, коли їх ображають пасажири). Такий розрив зі справжніми почуттями й викликання тих, що вигідні компанії, приводить або до відсторонення працівниці від своїх почуттів і нерозуміння, як тепер їх інтерпретувати, або ж до вигорання. Поруч із цим Хохшильд згадує, що в сучасних психотерапіях робота націлена саме на перебування в контакті зі своїми почуттями — і що це саме наслідок дедалі більшої комерціалізації почуттів, розширення сфери послуг.
У моєму читацькому досвіді «емоційна робота» існує більше як означення уважності, турботи про почуття в особистих стосунках (з феміністичної перспективи), яка нерівно розподілена між жінками й чоловіками. У сенсі ж трудовому (турбота про тебе від працівниць сфери послуг — перукарок, офіціанток, а ще є медсестри, сурогатні матері й т. д.) — значно менше. Ця ж книжка врешті зводить докупи невидимість цієї праці, глобалізацію, збільшення ринку сфери послуг, нерівність у ставленні до почуттів людей залежно від їхнього статусу, класу, гендеру.
У моєму читацькому досвіді «емоційна робота» існує більше як означення уважності, турботи про почуття в особистих стосунках (з феміністичної перспективи), яка нерівно розподілена між жінками й чоловіками. У сенсі ж трудовому (турбота про тебе від працівниць сфери послуг — перукарок, офіціанток, а ще є медсестри, сурогатні матері й т. д.) — значно менше. Ця ж книжка врешті зводить докупи невидимість цієї праці, глобалізацію, збільшення ринку сфери послуг, нерівність у ставленні до почуттів людей залежно від їхнього статусу, класу, гендеру.
December 20, 2018
Reads like an academic study of flight attendants that was turned into a book. That's not a complaint. The author uses flight attendants to explain the book's core concept: "emotional labor."
The idea here is that, in Marx's day, laborers were alienated from their work physically as they trudged through repetitive task (the author notes that even Adam Smith found that this was an unappealing aspect of the division of labor). The author's perspective on today's work shows a different kind of alienation in our service economy: an alienation from our emotions. Think about how a flight attendant needs to smile and be subservient all the time. This affects their core personality in a way that factory laborers didn't need to "put on a good face" while working on the factory floor. For service workers, it is hard to "turn off" their artificial personality and become whoever they're supposed to be outside of their jobs.
That's the core of the book. The author explores different themes around it, e.g., differences in emotional labor for men and women, differences between poor and middle class, etc. She focuses largely on jobs where emotional labor is a large part of the job. She briefly mentions that, within the higher realm of the corporate rat race, a large part of a senior executive's career can be determined by the personality that they create as their face within the company. That reminded me of a favorite business book, Moral Mazes, and an article from The Onion, "Woman Can't Wait To Get Home and Take Off Uncomfortable Persona." Or that scene in "The Graduate" where Dustin Hoffman's character is expected to be enthusiastic about a career in plastics.
In the book's afterword, the author writes about how flight attendants and other workers have told them that they appreciate that she has put a name ("emotional labor") to something that they all think about. That's probably the biggest value to the book. You don't need to read the entire book to understand that concept. But if you're curious about a deeper exploration into how the emotional parts of your job can affect your personality (and your co-workers' personalities), go ahead and read the whole thing.
The idea here is that, in Marx's day, laborers were alienated from their work physically as they trudged through repetitive task (the author notes that even Adam Smith found that this was an unappealing aspect of the division of labor). The author's perspective on today's work shows a different kind of alienation in our service economy: an alienation from our emotions. Think about how a flight attendant needs to smile and be subservient all the time. This affects their core personality in a way that factory laborers didn't need to "put on a good face" while working on the factory floor. For service workers, it is hard to "turn off" their artificial personality and become whoever they're supposed to be outside of their jobs.
That's the core of the book. The author explores different themes around it, e.g., differences in emotional labor for men and women, differences between poor and middle class, etc. She focuses largely on jobs where emotional labor is a large part of the job. She briefly mentions that, within the higher realm of the corporate rat race, a large part of a senior executive's career can be determined by the personality that they create as their face within the company. That reminded me of a favorite business book, Moral Mazes, and an article from The Onion, "Woman Can't Wait To Get Home and Take Off Uncomfortable Persona." Or that scene in "The Graduate" where Dustin Hoffman's character is expected to be enthusiastic about a career in plastics.
In the book's afterword, the author writes about how flight attendants and other workers have told them that they appreciate that she has put a name ("emotional labor") to something that they all think about. That's probably the biggest value to the book. You don't need to read the entire book to understand that concept. But if you're curious about a deeper exploration into how the emotional parts of your job can affect your personality (and your co-workers' personalities), go ahead and read the whole thing.
October 24, 2016
There were some important takeaways for anyone working in a service-driven field. When customer service is treated as a commodity and not the genuine culture of an organization, there is a toll exacted on employees. I have saved some of the passages to continue examining the toll of customer service work as burnout can be common in my industry and education on customer service isn't a standard part of graduate school education for library science.
Read
June 19, 2020This is the book that first mentions the term 'emotional labour' and lays the groundwork to describe emotion management in a variety of different contexts and professions. The first part of the book deals with how feelings are managed, how people act in various ways to cope with emotions (deep acting, surface acting), and what feeling rules are. Additionally, in this part, Hochschild also goes into how emotions become a way for us to define a real and a false self. In the second part, then, she focuses more on the commercial aspect of this management of emotions, wherein she is writing about the profession of the flight attendant and the requirements of that job. She also provides a cultural response to the rise of the service sector (and therefore of management of feelings), and suggests what can be done to mitigate it.
I read this book in order to get a better understanding of what emotional labour is (since that term is thrown around a lot!), and I got what I wanted. Of course, since the book was written in 1983, it is somewhat dated but a lot of what she writes might be still relevant today. She does not go into complications of race as she writes about the issue, and I would even say she does the same with class (although that comes up at many points). But I am sure that there are other books that deal with that in reference to this specific foundation that Hochschild has laid. All in all, somewhat of an essential feminist read.
I read this book in order to get a better understanding of what emotional labour is (since that term is thrown around a lot!), and I got what I wanted. Of course, since the book was written in 1983, it is somewhat dated but a lot of what she writes might be still relevant today. She does not go into complications of race as she writes about the issue, and I would even say she does the same with class (although that comes up at many points). But I am sure that there are other books that deal with that in reference to this specific foundation that Hochschild has laid. All in all, somewhat of an essential feminist read.
May 1, 2019
I hadn't really heard people mention this as an iconic feminist classic (Hochschild coined the term "emotional labor"), but it definitely should be considered as one I think. Extremely readable and interesting. The things that flight attendants were expected to do!! The levels of sexual harassment that the companies brushed off as being "part of public-facing work" makes my blood boil. Although this focuses on the case study of flight attendants, it really applies to all of us.
November 1, 2025
Honestly, the book itself, the way it is written, is one star but I gave an extra star for the author inventing the term/concept emotional labor. Hochschild is attempting to explain something new and does not do a great job at it. Her word choice, sentence structure, writing style, etc are rather obtuse and hard to follow. It reminded me how much skill it takes to define a term simply and eloquently.
emotional labor - requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others
I know more now about flight attendants(stewardesses here in this 1983 book) than I ever desired to know. At times I felt more like I was reading a history of Delta and it's employee training that about emotional labor in general. I eventually started skimming some of the details because honestly, what was the point? To show how much research the author did? I get it. Hochschild spent a lot of time on research. I understand the author's deserve to not have it "go to waste" and thus include it all in the writing. However, the book would have benefited from a tighter focus.
I did appreciate her linking the method style of acting with the concept of emotional labor. About how this comparison shows the ways in which people can choose what emotions to feel. It also reminded me of the concept of mindfulness and how we can choose what to attend to. We are in control of our thoughts and emotions in the sense that we can choose how to perceive them. If humans had no control over our emotions then the concept of emotional labor would be moot.
If we conceive of feeling not aa an abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be.
Feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically in either deep acting or surface acting. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene —either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one.
This book focuses on emotional labor in the work field and less at home, which is where I more commonly read about it happening. The workplace in the USA has changed dramatically in the last 40+ years and even more jobs now are service jobs which entail emotional labor. Physical labor like working in a factory is less an issue for the current workforce and emotional labor like working in retail or healthcare has greatly increased.
Hochschild focuses mainly on class and gender in emotional labor and doesn't go much into race. It would have been interesting to read about how a nonmajority race emotionally copes with being surrounded by another race. How your have to monitor your emotions in order to stay safe. I also would have preferred reading more about emotional labor within the family and not just how it relates to women in the workforce.
Unless you are a psychologist or a social worker or have a special interest in how the concept of emotional labor was developed, I would skip this. There are better more recent books out there that cover the topic. I'm glad this was a library book and one I did not purchase.
A few quotes to help me recall what I read:
We could start with the eldest daughter who cares for her younger siblings in a Philippine village while her mother travels to Manila to a weekday job as a nanny to a better-off family. How does the girl feel being the "little mother" of her siblings when others her age play? And her mother, caring for the children of a better-off family, how does she feel? And the female employer of the Manila nanny, may leave her children in the care of husband and nanny to migrate for years at a time to a job caring for an American child. Such are the links in a global care chain, with different experiences of emotional labor at every link. This was an excellent example of how each person deals with the emotional labor of their job. And the American woman with the nanny, what about her emotional labor at work. Most likely at her job she is also putting on an emotional labor mask.
The party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for a funeral. Each offers up feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good...we moderns spend more mental time on the question "What, in this situation, should I be feeling?" Emotional labor is everywhere, not just the job or the family.
Periods of rapid change induce both status anxiety and anxiety about what the feeling rules are. Authorities on how a situation ought to be viewed are also authorities on how we should feel. Ooooh, is this part of the rationale for the rise in authoritarianism?
"Poor communication" and misunderstanding sometimes boils down to conflicting notions about what feelings are owed to another. It is psychologically analogous to disagreeing on the exchange rate of dollars to pesos.
If we cannot manage to enjoy or feel grateful, we may at least manage to feel guilty for not feeling.
Guilt functions as a promissory note.Guilt upholds feeling rules from the inside: it is an internal acknowledgment of an unpaid psychological debt. Even "I should feel guilty" is a nod in the direction of guilt,a weaker confirmation of what is owed.
when one person has higher status than another, it becomes acceptable to both parties for the bottom dog to contribute more. Indeed, to have higher status is to have a stronger claim to rewards, including emotional rewards.
A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work.
Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. Basically, masking leads to burnout.
emotional labor - requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others
I know more now about flight attendants(stewardesses here in this 1983 book) than I ever desired to know. At times I felt more like I was reading a history of Delta and it's employee training that about emotional labor in general. I eventually started skimming some of the details because honestly, what was the point? To show how much research the author did? I get it. Hochschild spent a lot of time on research. I understand the author's deserve to not have it "go to waste" and thus include it all in the writing. However, the book would have benefited from a tighter focus.
I did appreciate her linking the method style of acting with the concept of emotional labor. About how this comparison shows the ways in which people can choose what emotions to feel. It also reminded me of the concept of mindfulness and how we can choose what to attend to. We are in control of our thoughts and emotions in the sense that we can choose how to perceive them. If humans had no control over our emotions then the concept of emotional labor would be moot.
If we conceive of feeling not aa an abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be.
Feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically in either deep acting or surface acting. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene —either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one.
This book focuses on emotional labor in the work field and less at home, which is where I more commonly read about it happening. The workplace in the USA has changed dramatically in the last 40+ years and even more jobs now are service jobs which entail emotional labor. Physical labor like working in a factory is less an issue for the current workforce and emotional labor like working in retail or healthcare has greatly increased.
Hochschild focuses mainly on class and gender in emotional labor and doesn't go much into race. It would have been interesting to read about how a nonmajority race emotionally copes with being surrounded by another race. How your have to monitor your emotions in order to stay safe. I also would have preferred reading more about emotional labor within the family and not just how it relates to women in the workforce.
Unless you are a psychologist or a social worker or have a special interest in how the concept of emotional labor was developed, I would skip this. There are better more recent books out there that cover the topic. I'm glad this was a library book and one I did not purchase.
A few quotes to help me recall what I read:
We could start with the eldest daughter who cares for her younger siblings in a Philippine village while her mother travels to Manila to a weekday job as a nanny to a better-off family. How does the girl feel being the "little mother" of her siblings when others her age play? And her mother, caring for the children of a better-off family, how does she feel? And the female employer of the Manila nanny, may leave her children in the care of husband and nanny to migrate for years at a time to a job caring for an American child. Such are the links in a global care chain, with different experiences of emotional labor at every link. This was an excellent example of how each person deals with the emotional labor of their job. And the American woman with the nanny, what about her emotional labor at work. Most likely at her job she is also putting on an emotional labor mask.
The party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for a funeral. Each offers up feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good...we moderns spend more mental time on the question "What, in this situation, should I be feeling?" Emotional labor is everywhere, not just the job or the family.
Periods of rapid change induce both status anxiety and anxiety about what the feeling rules are. Authorities on how a situation ought to be viewed are also authorities on how we should feel. Ooooh, is this part of the rationale for the rise in authoritarianism?
"Poor communication" and misunderstanding sometimes boils down to conflicting notions about what feelings are owed to another. It is psychologically analogous to disagreeing on the exchange rate of dollars to pesos.
If we cannot manage to enjoy or feel grateful, we may at least manage to feel guilty for not feeling.
Guilt functions as a promissory note.Guilt upholds feeling rules from the inside: it is an internal acknowledgment of an unpaid psychological debt. Even "I should feel guilty" is a nod in the direction of guilt,a weaker confirmation of what is owed.
when one person has higher status than another, it becomes acceptable to both parties for the bottom dog to contribute more. Indeed, to have higher status is to have a stronger claim to rewards, including emotional rewards.
A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work.
Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. Basically, masking leads to burnout.
June 14, 2017
A great read and a diligent effort to understand how emotional work has been commercialized. It remains remarkably relevant even though the decades since its publication have seen the study of emotional labor expand greatly and the continued evolution of work has gone in unexpected if not unimagined directions. Reading it from the perspective of a union organizer, and more generally as an advocate for social justice, the book illuminated important but overlooked ways that power and control are exercised at work.
April 7, 2024
Read this book for my independent study and it has such fascinating research pertaining to emotional labor & our management of feelings. The study is slightly dated (late 70s into 80s), yet I am intrigued by how this concept perpetuates today. Now to begin my own research 🤪
January 19, 2026
Kursbok. Jag gillade boken! Bra skriven, fick mig till och med att uppskatta det engelska språket vilket är en bedrift i sig. Öppnar för många andra intressanta studier. Kapitel 8: Gender, Status and Feeling var 5/5. Borde ses som en feministisk klassiker
January 13, 2019
Duygusal emek kavramını literatüre ilk defa sokan kitap. Bu konuda yazacaklar ilk bu kitaba bakar.
June 6, 2020
The Managed Heart is the seminal sociological work for the term "emotional labour", which Hochschild coined for "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display, sold for a wage and therefor has exchange value" (while "emotional work" is the unpaid form). The book is in 2 parts: (1) workings of an emotional system in private life, and (2) what happens when feelings become commodities (in public life).
In the first part of the book, she dives into models of emotions, surface acting vs deep acting & "feeling rules" (standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling), based on Erving Goffman and other psychological/sociological theories of emotions. She explores misfitting feelings, misinterpreted relations and inappropriate feelings, and interpersonal exchanges with many real-life examples of relationships, funerals, etc, about trying to feel/pretending to feel, among other misfitting/inappropriate feelings.
In the second part of the book, she explores the commercialization of human feelings through the study of Delta flight attendants (primarily, but also bill collectors), & related gender and class patterns. Her ethnographic study of FAs outlines their training in (what is said to be) the subterranean work of emotion management, and the idea of "transmutation of an emotional system" - the move from the private realm to the public realm & commercialization of emotive offerings for the profit motive. Despite flight attending being a female dominated field, she posits that female FAs are expected to "take it" better & deal with the displaced anger and frustration of passengers, a result of women as "a subordinate social stratum" and assumption of male authority. She suggests the costs of the social engineering of emotional labour - burnout, estrangement of self and feeling.
I'm sure the book was groundbreaking in 1983 when it was first published - I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "emotional labour" and was directed to TMH - but some parts of the book does feel a little stale. Though, I like that the preface to the 2012 edition gives some context to how this book is relevant in light of current trends in emotional labour in a profit-seeking, globalized world - especially with the phenomena of the global care chain, where women from third world countries migrate to first world countries for domestic work, not solely as a 'personal choice', but pressured by the growing gap between rich and poor (she explains this in her essay Love & Gold).
In the first part of the book, she dives into models of emotions, surface acting vs deep acting & "feeling rules" (standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling), based on Erving Goffman and other psychological/sociological theories of emotions. She explores misfitting feelings, misinterpreted relations and inappropriate feelings, and interpersonal exchanges with many real-life examples of relationships, funerals, etc, about trying to feel/pretending to feel, among other misfitting/inappropriate feelings.
In the second part of the book, she explores the commercialization of human feelings through the study of Delta flight attendants (primarily, but also bill collectors), & related gender and class patterns. Her ethnographic study of FAs outlines their training in (what is said to be) the subterranean work of emotion management, and the idea of "transmutation of an emotional system" - the move from the private realm to the public realm & commercialization of emotive offerings for the profit motive. Despite flight attending being a female dominated field, she posits that female FAs are expected to "take it" better & deal with the displaced anger and frustration of passengers, a result of women as "a subordinate social stratum" and assumption of male authority. She suggests the costs of the social engineering of emotional labour - burnout, estrangement of self and feeling.
I'm sure the book was groundbreaking in 1983 when it was first published - I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "emotional labour" and was directed to TMH - but some parts of the book does feel a little stale. Though, I like that the preface to the 2012 edition gives some context to how this book is relevant in light of current trends in emotional labour in a profit-seeking, globalized world - especially with the phenomena of the global care chain, where women from third world countries migrate to first world countries for domestic work, not solely as a 'personal choice', but pressured by the growing gap between rich and poor (she explains this in her essay Love & Gold).
March 22, 2026
Once upon a time, I was doing a joint major in anthropology and sociology. I think there’s a version of me who went down that path instead of switching majors. I was always deeply fascinated and curious about everything I was learning and it wasn’t for lack of interest that I changed. Anyway, I read an excerpt of this book for one of my classes and wanted to learn more about the concept of emotional labor at work and its impact on people who were expected to bring emotion to their jobs (often customer facing roles, often disproportionately roles filled by women, but not always). I had this book gathering dust for ages after a false start but finally got around to reading it through this time.
This is research, so it is dense and sometimes dry, but filled with stories and excerpts that resonate still, over 40 years later. The contrast between the warmth and cheer expected from flight attendants and the stern and assertive nature expected was interesting. Glad I finally finished this!
This is research, so it is dense and sometimes dry, but filled with stories and excerpts that resonate still, over 40 years later. The contrast between the warmth and cheer expected from flight attendants and the stern and assertive nature expected was interesting. Glad I finally finished this!
January 28, 2023
3,5 starsss
En bok om känslor och om hur vi i arbetslivet gått från att erbjudit fysisk arbetskraft (fabriksjobb) till mer känslomässig arbetskraft (service). Boken är baserad på flygvärdinnor och deras historier, hur deras jobb inte är att servera kaffe utan i någon mening servera sig själva, antingen som den omhändertagande modern eller som ett sexuellt objekt, alltid med ett leende på läpparna. Att känna på ett visst sätt och uppträda på ett visst sätt är en del av arbetsuppgifterna vilket gör att man tappar identiteten och det egna känslolivet.
Känsloprostitution om man får säga så?? Någon form av deep acting och vad de ger för konsekvenser (dåliga) för individen som hör och häpna ofta är kvinna!! 😄 Men kvinna är ju känslosam och ska därför utföra detta känsloarbete som män inte vågar/kan in i evigheten XD
En bok om känslor och om hur vi i arbetslivet gått från att erbjudit fysisk arbetskraft (fabriksjobb) till mer känslomässig arbetskraft (service). Boken är baserad på flygvärdinnor och deras historier, hur deras jobb inte är att servera kaffe utan i någon mening servera sig själva, antingen som den omhändertagande modern eller som ett sexuellt objekt, alltid med ett leende på läpparna. Att känna på ett visst sätt och uppträda på ett visst sätt är en del av arbetsuppgifterna vilket gör att man tappar identiteten och det egna känslolivet.
Känsloprostitution om man får säga så?? Någon form av deep acting och vad de ger för konsekvenser (dåliga) för individen som hör och häpna ofta är kvinna!! 😄 Men kvinna är ju känslosam och ska därför utföra detta känsloarbete som män inte vågar/kan in i evigheten XD
Read
May 7, 2024Essential feminist reading. Nice to have a broader understanding of popularized concepts like "emotional work" as they sometimes get distorted or diluted in everyday discussions.
While some aspects may feel outdated in Russell's work (thanks to the success of feminist struggles over the past decades), her core argument about the unequal distribution of emotional labor across class, gender, and race (the category most overlooked in the book) remains pertinent.
It's worth noting the intersection between "emotional labor" and what socialist feminists define as reproductive labor, which encompasses activities that sustain societal structures, that weave the social fabric. Recognizing this connection can address a critique of the book, namely its uncritical acceptance of the division between private and public spheres.
While some aspects may feel outdated in Russell's work (thanks to the success of feminist struggles over the past decades), her core argument about the unequal distribution of emotional labor across class, gender, and race (the category most overlooked in the book) remains pertinent.
It's worth noting the intersection between "emotional labor" and what socialist feminists define as reproductive labor, which encompasses activities that sustain societal structures, that weave the social fabric. Recognizing this connection can address a critique of the book, namely its uncritical acceptance of the division between private and public spheres.
March 25, 2021
I enjoyed reading this a lot. The use of feeling for one’s job is widespread, and the author analyses the consequences greatly: What does it mean when it is sold that you are not only smiling but that you “actually mean it”? – Not just the body (as the person who feeds the machine in a factory) is cashed in on, but also the very emotions of the person working. This does not only apply to friendly feelings; debt collectors also are valued for “actually meaning it”.
March 4, 2025
my girllll you are forever goated for coining the term emotional labor
July 4, 2023
It sounds like a capitalist’s dream come true, monetizing your feelings. Except it's already come true. There are many jobs that include emotional labor.
Sociologist, Arlie Hochschild was perhaps the first to write, back in 1983, about emotional labor in her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In her book, she used the example of flight attendants. Your flight attendant doesn’t get paid just to push that cart up and down the aisle. Nor is she paid only to give the safety demonstration no one watches. Her job is to maintain safety during flights by keeping the passengers calm. She does this by laboring to keep herself calm, even when she can look out the window and see an engine burst into flames.
There are many other jobs known for their emotional labor. My own profession, psychotherapist, is one of them. You expect your shrink to be interested in what you’re saying and suspend disdain. If he’s not interested, he should at least pretend to be. It’s the pretending that counts as emotional labor. If he’d feel that way anyway, it shouldn’t count as work.
Providing emotional labor is costly. It’s stressful to deny your feelings and put on the required face. I’m tired after a day of shrinking heads even though all I did was sit there and listen to people pour their guts out. But the worst of it is how alienated I could get from my own feelings. I might not know how I feel anymore because I must feel a certain way for a living.
There are two ways of laboring emotionally. The first is to look as though you’re feeling a certain feeling, even when you’re not feeling it. A good waitress greets all customers warmly, with a smile, even when they’re a bad tipper and she wishes they sat in someone else’s station. Under the fake smile, she’s seething.
The second way is for the waitress to convince herself she’s really happy to see the bad tipper, even when she has no reason to be. This may require some deliberate self-talk on her part. She’ll tell herself that she’s not waiting tables just for the money, she also likes people and is getting plenty of exercise. She’ll console herself that the bad comes along with the good. She didn’t exalt when a good tipper comes in, so she shouldn’t frown when a bad one does. She’ll find a way to believe that a bad tipper is only that way because of strained financial circumstances and, if you accounted for a low income, he’s really more generous than most good tippers. Or, like a method actor, she’ll imagine she’s greeting a long lost friend and channel that friendliness into a genuine smile.
It turns out that the second way is less stressful for the employee. When the server doesn’t believe the feeling she’s trying to portray, she’ll get burned out faster than when she does. Talking herself into authenticity also has the added benefit of giving the server a more sincere looking smile.
This is bad news for those who depend on feelings to navigate their way around the world. The feeling of dread the server gets when the bad tipper sits in her station is a functional, necessary feeling. Additionally, getting bad service is something bad tippers should expect. Maybe they’ll learn their lesson. Similarly, you should be ashamed of an inferior product if you’re a salesperson. If you’re a flight attendant, you should be annoyed at the drunk who’s causing a ruckus on your flight. When I’m providing psychotherapy for a child molester, I shouldn’t forget that what he’s doing is harmful, no matter how non-judgmental I must seem to get him to talk. It’s important to be in touch with your true feelings because feelings are like the idiot lights in a car. They inform you of the state of things. If you cover the idiot lights with duct tape, you won’t get a warning before the engine blows up and you’ll be the real idiot.
Emotional labor has become a feminist’s issue because it’s most easily seen in occupations that are stereotypically female: flight attendant, food server, childcare, nursing, receptionist, cashier, and therapist. Employers naturally turn to women to fill those roles, partly because the jobs are labor intensive and female workers are cheaper, but also because we expect women to be more empathetic and have greater emotional intelligence than men. All this is true, and women should be paid as well as men, but emotional labor is not just a women’s issue. It’s found in every occupation in which workers are called upon to do something they shouldn’t want to do.
A soldier has every reason to be terrified when people are coming to kill him. He must act brave, anyway. That’s emotional labor. A surgeon must overcome inhibitions before he can stick a knife into a patient and dismiss his disgust with what comes out. That’s emotional labor, even though the surgeon may have a poor bedside manner when the patient is awake. When I was a construction worker, I couldn’t pay attention to how hot it was, how tired I was, or how much I was hurting. These feelings would get in the way of getting the job done. Instead, I told myself how strong and dedicated I was to finishing what I had promised to do.
Traditionally, there’s a division of labor when it comes to emotional labor. Women are called to be warm, friendly, and empathetic when they are not. Men are called to be brave, tough, and rational when they are not. Both require labor and both extract a cost. We make a grave mistake when we recognize one without the other. Emotional labor is not only a feminist’s issue, it’s a worker’s issue. Come to think of it, it’s even more than a worker’s issue. Emotional labor is the work every superego does to help you conform to the norms of society.
I’m convinced that the troubles of a huge portion of my caseload can be traced back to the emotional labor they must do. It’s obvious when people say they hate their jobs. They loathe the rude customers, the tyrannical bosses, the punishing working conditions, and the unethical demands. Mostly they hate having to pretend they like them. They rarely do anything about their jobs, though. They often don’t believe they have a choice. They are so accustomed to the bullshit, they have been so brainwashed, or they have been so oppressed for so long they believe they can’t negotiate with their workplace. Consequently, when they start to fall apart, they blame themselves and reach for a pill or a psychological hack to make them feel better. These methods will make them feel better when nothing is better. They just turn them into willing sheep to be slaughtered for profit.
The worse effect of emotional labor is the hidden one that accrues to those who cut themselves off from their true feelings. This is what’s behind the woman who can’t say no and the man who can’t cry. It’s why men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The inability men and women have to talk to one another can be attributed to the particular type of emotional labor each is called to do. When we accuse the patriarchy of instituting emotional labor, we allow capitalism and colonialism to escape without blame.
I don’t want to leave the superego off the hook either. You may remember from undergrad psychology class that the superego is the part of you that tries to control the id, the animal within you, including your feelings. The superego is supposed to be a reasonable check on the worse your irrationalities can offer, but for many people the superego is as cruel, inflexible, and punctilious as the id is unruly. A third part is needed, called the ego, to mediate between the two.
This arrangement between the superego, id, and ego can give us a clue about how to manage the demands of emotional labor. When the waitress buries her resentment and smiles at the bad tipper, she’s let her superego take over. Her righteous impulses to penalize the bad tipper are thrown in a dungeon and locked up. This is what is known as being out of touch with her feelings. Locked in the dungeon long enough, her feelings will fester till they get a chance to escape. This is what we call burn out.
On the other hand, if she gives vent to every feeling, she will not last long in her job. The answer is to develop a part of her that can monitor the situation for when the demands of the workplace become unreasonable. This part, the ego, rather than bury the impulses of the id under a cloak of denial, should acknowledge them and, if it’s necessary to keep her job, set them aside in some place in her mind where she doesn’t act on them, but doesn’t forget them, either. She looks for times when the ego can mediate between the two or come up with a solution that can satisfy them both. Ideally, she’ll advocate that her employer pay her better, so she’s not so dependent on tips. Less than ideally, she’ll smile at the bad tipper and spit in his food.
My own ego gets involved in my work, too. I’ve survived thirty-five some years as a shrink without getting burned out and without losing touch of my own feelings by calling upon a healthy ego. If I have a boring client, for instance, I will often let her go on as if I was interested for a while. She might even believe I am interested, if only because boring people fail to pick up on the cues of others. However, I won’t repress my boredom. I’ll examine it to see if my boredom is really more about me than it is about anything she’s doing. I’ll talk about it with trusted colleagues to get their help in getting to the bottom of my boredom. Sometimes, what I call boredom has more to do with my own insecurities and need for attention. However, if she really is boring, I’ll set my observation aside to be used later. I’ll wait for a moment when I can bring it up in a way she can profitably hear. The fact that I am bored may have a lot to do with her troubles. She probably bores others, also; so, they stop listening to her. She probably bores herself, and so is stuck in a rut she has barely identified.
They actually teach this method in shrink school. It’s called using your countertransference. Far from laboring to control or dismiss a feeling, it’s a method of taking my feelings seriously, but not letting them run the show. It still takes work, though, so I guess you can still call it emotional labor, but it’s productive labor, so, at the end of the day, both I and the client are better off than if I had just rejected the difficult feeling.
It’s probably a good thing when a flight attendant can project calmness in an emergency. But at other times, like when a passenger has become a belligerent drunk, she should do something other than smile pretty. She can use her homegrown annoyance to tell him to be quiet. Letting him know she means business.
Keith R Wilson is a therapist in private practice, who has written widely on mental health and relationships"
Sociologist, Arlie Hochschild was perhaps the first to write, back in 1983, about emotional labor in her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In her book, she used the example of flight attendants. Your flight attendant doesn’t get paid just to push that cart up and down the aisle. Nor is she paid only to give the safety demonstration no one watches. Her job is to maintain safety during flights by keeping the passengers calm. She does this by laboring to keep herself calm, even when she can look out the window and see an engine burst into flames.
There are many other jobs known for their emotional labor. My own profession, psychotherapist, is one of them. You expect your shrink to be interested in what you’re saying and suspend disdain. If he’s not interested, he should at least pretend to be. It’s the pretending that counts as emotional labor. If he’d feel that way anyway, it shouldn’t count as work.
Providing emotional labor is costly. It’s stressful to deny your feelings and put on the required face. I’m tired after a day of shrinking heads even though all I did was sit there and listen to people pour their guts out. But the worst of it is how alienated I could get from my own feelings. I might not know how I feel anymore because I must feel a certain way for a living.
There are two ways of laboring emotionally. The first is to look as though you’re feeling a certain feeling, even when you’re not feeling it. A good waitress greets all customers warmly, with a smile, even when they’re a bad tipper and she wishes they sat in someone else’s station. Under the fake smile, she’s seething.
The second way is for the waitress to convince herself she’s really happy to see the bad tipper, even when she has no reason to be. This may require some deliberate self-talk on her part. She’ll tell herself that she’s not waiting tables just for the money, she also likes people and is getting plenty of exercise. She’ll console herself that the bad comes along with the good. She didn’t exalt when a good tipper comes in, so she shouldn’t frown when a bad one does. She’ll find a way to believe that a bad tipper is only that way because of strained financial circumstances and, if you accounted for a low income, he’s really more generous than most good tippers. Or, like a method actor, she’ll imagine she’s greeting a long lost friend and channel that friendliness into a genuine smile.
It turns out that the second way is less stressful for the employee. When the server doesn’t believe the feeling she’s trying to portray, she’ll get burned out faster than when she does. Talking herself into authenticity also has the added benefit of giving the server a more sincere looking smile.
This is bad news for those who depend on feelings to navigate their way around the world. The feeling of dread the server gets when the bad tipper sits in her station is a functional, necessary feeling. Additionally, getting bad service is something bad tippers should expect. Maybe they’ll learn their lesson. Similarly, you should be ashamed of an inferior product if you’re a salesperson. If you’re a flight attendant, you should be annoyed at the drunk who’s causing a ruckus on your flight. When I’m providing psychotherapy for a child molester, I shouldn’t forget that what he’s doing is harmful, no matter how non-judgmental I must seem to get him to talk. It’s important to be in touch with your true feelings because feelings are like the idiot lights in a car. They inform you of the state of things. If you cover the idiot lights with duct tape, you won’t get a warning before the engine blows up and you’ll be the real idiot.
Emotional labor has become a feminist’s issue because it’s most easily seen in occupations that are stereotypically female: flight attendant, food server, childcare, nursing, receptionist, cashier, and therapist. Employers naturally turn to women to fill those roles, partly because the jobs are labor intensive and female workers are cheaper, but also because we expect women to be more empathetic and have greater emotional intelligence than men. All this is true, and women should be paid as well as men, but emotional labor is not just a women’s issue. It’s found in every occupation in which workers are called upon to do something they shouldn’t want to do.
A soldier has every reason to be terrified when people are coming to kill him. He must act brave, anyway. That’s emotional labor. A surgeon must overcome inhibitions before he can stick a knife into a patient and dismiss his disgust with what comes out. That’s emotional labor, even though the surgeon may have a poor bedside manner when the patient is awake. When I was a construction worker, I couldn’t pay attention to how hot it was, how tired I was, or how much I was hurting. These feelings would get in the way of getting the job done. Instead, I told myself how strong and dedicated I was to finishing what I had promised to do.
Traditionally, there’s a division of labor when it comes to emotional labor. Women are called to be warm, friendly, and empathetic when they are not. Men are called to be brave, tough, and rational when they are not. Both require labor and both extract a cost. We make a grave mistake when we recognize one without the other. Emotional labor is not only a feminist’s issue, it’s a worker’s issue. Come to think of it, it’s even more than a worker’s issue. Emotional labor is the work every superego does to help you conform to the norms of society.
I’m convinced that the troubles of a huge portion of my caseload can be traced back to the emotional labor they must do. It’s obvious when people say they hate their jobs. They loathe the rude customers, the tyrannical bosses, the punishing working conditions, and the unethical demands. Mostly they hate having to pretend they like them. They rarely do anything about their jobs, though. They often don’t believe they have a choice. They are so accustomed to the bullshit, they have been so brainwashed, or they have been so oppressed for so long they believe they can’t negotiate with their workplace. Consequently, when they start to fall apart, they blame themselves and reach for a pill or a psychological hack to make them feel better. These methods will make them feel better when nothing is better. They just turn them into willing sheep to be slaughtered for profit.
The worse effect of emotional labor is the hidden one that accrues to those who cut themselves off from their true feelings. This is what’s behind the woman who can’t say no and the man who can’t cry. It’s why men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The inability men and women have to talk to one another can be attributed to the particular type of emotional labor each is called to do. When we accuse the patriarchy of instituting emotional labor, we allow capitalism and colonialism to escape without blame.
I don’t want to leave the superego off the hook either. You may remember from undergrad psychology class that the superego is the part of you that tries to control the id, the animal within you, including your feelings. The superego is supposed to be a reasonable check on the worse your irrationalities can offer, but for many people the superego is as cruel, inflexible, and punctilious as the id is unruly. A third part is needed, called the ego, to mediate between the two.
This arrangement between the superego, id, and ego can give us a clue about how to manage the demands of emotional labor. When the waitress buries her resentment and smiles at the bad tipper, she’s let her superego take over. Her righteous impulses to penalize the bad tipper are thrown in a dungeon and locked up. This is what is known as being out of touch with her feelings. Locked in the dungeon long enough, her feelings will fester till they get a chance to escape. This is what we call burn out.
On the other hand, if she gives vent to every feeling, she will not last long in her job. The answer is to develop a part of her that can monitor the situation for when the demands of the workplace become unreasonable. This part, the ego, rather than bury the impulses of the id under a cloak of denial, should acknowledge them and, if it’s necessary to keep her job, set them aside in some place in her mind where she doesn’t act on them, but doesn’t forget them, either. She looks for times when the ego can mediate between the two or come up with a solution that can satisfy them both. Ideally, she’ll advocate that her employer pay her better, so she’s not so dependent on tips. Less than ideally, she’ll smile at the bad tipper and spit in his food.
My own ego gets involved in my work, too. I’ve survived thirty-five some years as a shrink without getting burned out and without losing touch of my own feelings by calling upon a healthy ego. If I have a boring client, for instance, I will often let her go on as if I was interested for a while. She might even believe I am interested, if only because boring people fail to pick up on the cues of others. However, I won’t repress my boredom. I’ll examine it to see if my boredom is really more about me than it is about anything she’s doing. I’ll talk about it with trusted colleagues to get their help in getting to the bottom of my boredom. Sometimes, what I call boredom has more to do with my own insecurities and need for attention. However, if she really is boring, I’ll set my observation aside to be used later. I’ll wait for a moment when I can bring it up in a way she can profitably hear. The fact that I am bored may have a lot to do with her troubles. She probably bores others, also; so, they stop listening to her. She probably bores herself, and so is stuck in a rut she has barely identified.
They actually teach this method in shrink school. It’s called using your countertransference. Far from laboring to control or dismiss a feeling, it’s a method of taking my feelings seriously, but not letting them run the show. It still takes work, though, so I guess you can still call it emotional labor, but it’s productive labor, so, at the end of the day, both I and the client are better off than if I had just rejected the difficult feeling.
It’s probably a good thing when a flight attendant can project calmness in an emergency. But at other times, like when a passenger has become a belligerent drunk, she should do something other than smile pretty. She can use her homegrown annoyance to tell him to be quiet. Letting him know she means business.
Keith R Wilson is a therapist in private practice, who has written widely on mental health and relationships"
September 14, 2024
Loved every page of this book.
September 3, 2017
I read this book as part of group assignment.
This is a phenomenal book in the way it explores various and numerous linkages between work life and personal life.
In the first part of the book she explores what emotions are and how they constitute an intrinsically precious part of one’s identity. What I feel in a particular context tells me how to understand an event in my life and how to respond to it, in addition to helping me understand better the context that I find myself in. Emotions, seen in this way, are something that originate inside the body naturally, but also include the human work done on them, to change them according to a particular situation and institution. All of us, in our private lives, do this tempering with our emotions according to the institutions governing. So naturally, how much tempering you do or have to do, depends largely on power you enjoy in such institution. For example, in a patriarchal situation, women who enjoy less power would have to control their emotions much more than men have to do and girl child may be most of all. Hochschild calls it emotion work, done towards paying emotional dues to the collective resources of the institutions. We can do this via outer acting and deep acting. In the former, we know what we feel, but we portray otherwise, which leads one to realize the inferior position they enjoy, if not totally removing emotions from the equation. In deep acting, we mold our emotions in order to conform to what we are doing, sort of relaxing that tension between false self and true self. But this also leads to a situation where are unable to distinguish what we feel truly. Regardless of what option we choose, there is a heavy cost to be paid in terms of loss of identity in the form of emotions.
She argues that when our emotions become part of what we sell as labour, this boundary between work life and private life becomes arbitrary, and serves to play the role of ignoring emotional labour, which is tempering with emotions in order to be able to work properly, to display what is required of the job.
She supports her claims with the help of ethnographies that she did with flight attendants and bill collectors. Flight attendants, most of the women, are systematically taught and trained about how to control their emotions, so that the costumer is always happy with the experience. So sexual advances are to be taken as a token of desirability, particularly ‘irate’ customer is to be taken as a child etc. They are supposed to be completely hospitable. Most of them are women because their upbringing in patriarchal setup has made them learn emotion tempering from a very early age. Men flight attendants are supposed to step up whenever situation gets out of control of women. Ticket collectors are supposed to be rude and demeaning to the defaulters and most of them are men. In a way, work situation becomes a derivative of private situation inside our homes, both reinforcing each other. Similar arguments can be given for class dimensions of work life.
In the service economy we are living in, face-to-face interactions become synonymous with controlling emotions. Everyone working has to do it, some more than others. Still, in work life or in our employment contracts, there is no mention of it at all. Managers are allowed to vent and employees are supposed to let it go. On the part of customer as well, there develops a tendency to calculate genuine emotions mandated by job and what is actually meant for themselves. In doing this, we start ignoring emotions in our daily lives, which form a very basic sense of what constitutes us.
A word or two about unmanaged heart. In a society, where we know everyone is tempering with emotions, displaying something that they are not feeling, we also begin to glorify the ability of not doing it. This obfuscates the fact that not everyone has power to do that, with differential access to this unsold heart being highly hierarchical according caste, class and gender etc. We tend to ignore people on the margins, because they are being nice to us as it is part of their job, which relieves us from having to acknowledge their emotions like greetings. They become background noise, which we learn to ignore.
This is a phenomenal book in the way it explores various and numerous linkages between work life and personal life.
In the first part of the book she explores what emotions are and how they constitute an intrinsically precious part of one’s identity. What I feel in a particular context tells me how to understand an event in my life and how to respond to it, in addition to helping me understand better the context that I find myself in. Emotions, seen in this way, are something that originate inside the body naturally, but also include the human work done on them, to change them according to a particular situation and institution. All of us, in our private lives, do this tempering with our emotions according to the institutions governing. So naturally, how much tempering you do or have to do, depends largely on power you enjoy in such institution. For example, in a patriarchal situation, women who enjoy less power would have to control their emotions much more than men have to do and girl child may be most of all. Hochschild calls it emotion work, done towards paying emotional dues to the collective resources of the institutions. We can do this via outer acting and deep acting. In the former, we know what we feel, but we portray otherwise, which leads one to realize the inferior position they enjoy, if not totally removing emotions from the equation. In deep acting, we mold our emotions in order to conform to what we are doing, sort of relaxing that tension between false self and true self. But this also leads to a situation where are unable to distinguish what we feel truly. Regardless of what option we choose, there is a heavy cost to be paid in terms of loss of identity in the form of emotions.
She argues that when our emotions become part of what we sell as labour, this boundary between work life and private life becomes arbitrary, and serves to play the role of ignoring emotional labour, which is tempering with emotions in order to be able to work properly, to display what is required of the job.
She supports her claims with the help of ethnographies that she did with flight attendants and bill collectors. Flight attendants, most of the women, are systematically taught and trained about how to control their emotions, so that the costumer is always happy with the experience. So sexual advances are to be taken as a token of desirability, particularly ‘irate’ customer is to be taken as a child etc. They are supposed to be completely hospitable. Most of them are women because their upbringing in patriarchal setup has made them learn emotion tempering from a very early age. Men flight attendants are supposed to step up whenever situation gets out of control of women. Ticket collectors are supposed to be rude and demeaning to the defaulters and most of them are men. In a way, work situation becomes a derivative of private situation inside our homes, both reinforcing each other. Similar arguments can be given for class dimensions of work life.
In the service economy we are living in, face-to-face interactions become synonymous with controlling emotions. Everyone working has to do it, some more than others. Still, in work life or in our employment contracts, there is no mention of it at all. Managers are allowed to vent and employees are supposed to let it go. On the part of customer as well, there develops a tendency to calculate genuine emotions mandated by job and what is actually meant for themselves. In doing this, we start ignoring emotions in our daily lives, which form a very basic sense of what constitutes us.
A word or two about unmanaged heart. In a society, where we know everyone is tempering with emotions, displaying something that they are not feeling, we also begin to glorify the ability of not doing it. This obfuscates the fact that not everyone has power to do that, with differential access to this unsold heart being highly hierarchical according caste, class and gender etc. We tend to ignore people on the margins, because they are being nice to us as it is part of their job, which relieves us from having to acknowledge their emotions like greetings. They become background noise, which we learn to ignore.
January 29, 2023
Published in 1979 “The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling” by Arlie Hochschild contains the first use of the phrase “emotional labour”. Nevertheless, how it is often used today is very different to what Hochschild originally meant by it (she comments herself more on it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/ar...).
While the concept of “emotional labour” and the modern day usage are important topics to discuss, there is a much broader and complete argument that Hochschild makes in the book.
The book is broken down into three parts: firstly, emotions in private life, secondly, emotions in commercial-working life and thirdly, concluding remarks on the overall societal impact of commercialisation of human feeling.
The main question Hochschild is trying to answer is this: How does the commercial production and management of human feeling impact on society at large and on individuals? Before tackling this question about the relationship between capitalist production and human emotions she considers a number of related questions. How do people manage and relate to their emotions in private life? How do workers manage their emotions at work? Businesses operate to sell you a product or service, for many this service includes a certain demonstration of feeling. How do the workers who carry out this “emotional labour” relate to their work? How does this impact their feelings and their own sense of self in their private lives?
To begin with Hochschild discusses the question of what a feeling is. Her view is that feelings are kind of sense in the same way we have a sense of hearing or sight. However, as a sense, emotions link very closely to our understanding of ourselves and they have the capacity to be managed in a different way from hearing and sight.
Hochschild´s overarching argument (writing in 1979) is that, in the context of American capitalism, commercial businesses are in a position to evoke and manage emotion both with regards to its workers and following on from that to society as a whole who interact with these commercial businesses. Hochschild argues that there has been shift in the production of human feelings as a way to make profit and as a result of the change in the commercial production and management of human feeling there has been an overall cultural shift in how we relate to sincerity, spontaneity and our own sense of self with regards to these two things.
To demonstrate the shift in how feelings are “produced” on a commercial basis she focuses on two different professions flight attendants and debt collectors. She argues that in both these professions not only are the workers carrying out a service but included in that service is a demonstration of particular emotions in order to create a certain state of mind in the customer. In the case of flight attendants it is, friendliness and politeness regardless of the behaviour of the passengers. In the case of debt collectors it is distrust, suspicion and hiding feelings of empathy towards debtors. Flight attendants are expected to be constantly friendly regardless of any verbal disrespect or abuse they receive from passengers. Debt collectors are expected to show suspicion and, depending on the case, outright hostility regardless of whether they actually feel sympathy with the person they are supposed to collecting debt from. Hochschild argues that the suppression of anger of flight attendants and the suppression of empathy by debt collectors are as much a form of labour as safety demonstrations or serving meals by flight attentants or phone calls and registering payments by debt collectors. This is what she refers to as emotional labour.
Nowadays “emotional labour” is often used for any number of things that may be emotionally taxing e.g. supporting a friend through a break up or giving care and attention to a child. Hochschild distinguishes these things as “emotion work” because they are done in the private sphere (as opposed to a commercial enterprise) and they are not something that is supervised by a manager or spelled out in codes of practice manual for private commercial ends. This does not mean to that there is not a lot of societal pressure to do emotion work and the burden disproportionately falls on women. Hochschild agrees that it does and in fact emphasises that companies draw on these gendered roles when it comes to recruitment, training, etc.
Hochschild argues that a number of jobs now include a large degree emotional labour (around one third, see appendix 3 of the book), this emotional labour is commercially managed and supervised, As a result world of curated emotions and curated behaviour impact on both workers and on the public that comes into contact with this emotional labour. Hochschild argues that the impact of the commercialisation of feeling is to such an extent that there is now a lack of “authenticity” and “spontaneity”. Because emotions are now curated to such a large extent people are suspicious of whether people are showing their authentic emotions and for people whose work involves a substantial amount of emotional labour this creates an enstrangement from their own self and distorts what they understand as their “real” emotions. This enstrangement comes about because workers, in order to manage their emotions and to stay in their jobs, have to either do surface level performing of an emotion or they in fact try to convince themself they are feeling the emotion they are expected to feel on the job.
For historical context Hochschild argues that this shift in cultural relation to authenticity and spontaneity is similar to a shift in culturual relation to sincerity in the 18th and 19th century. The shift in sincerity, argues Hochschild, was a result of social mobility in urban areas and the extent to which being duplicitous and deceitful could serve people to be socially mobile. Hence, any display of sincerity or honesty was regarded with suspicion.
Hochschild goes on to make some further comments on the rise of different types of therapy and the self-help genre as well as how we should relate to these two things. Her view is that both of these things are not something that should be dismissed and simply criticised as ways for individuals to feel personally responsible for issues in their lives that are structural (although she does agree with this critique). Therapy and self-help on the whole are genuinely useful things that help people grow, learn and support themselves.
There were a few things lacking for me in this book as an account of how emotions and our relation to them have changed since the World War 2. Firstly, my biggest criticism is that while Hochschild gives an interesting and compelling account of how emotion is “produced” and managed for commercial ends, she makes little if any reference to how much more socially liberal society has become as a whole, particularly with regards to sexuality and the role of women in society. She also does not discuss how (in a good way) people´s emotions were becoming and are nowadays taken much more seriously than in the past. These trends run to some degree counter to what the commercial management of feeling pushes. However, little reference or consideration is made about them. Secondly, not much is said about the growth of cities, the organisation and commercialisation of many social spaces (this has become more acute since the 90s) and the fact that people work for a wage – these bare significantly on how people interact with each other, and it seems to me Hochschild gives too much emphasis to work with large amounts of emotional labour as being responsible for changes in cultural attitude to spontaneity and authenticity. For example, a lack of social spaces that cannot be used for free means that access to social spaces is dependent on monetary exchange, this changes how relate to these spaces, who can access them etc. Thirdly, while Hochschild gave a good account of the problem (in particular for workers who carry out emotional labour) there seemed to be little discussion of solutions beyond stating that workers need to be in unions. Of course this will depend very much on the job, nevertheless, I thought she could have said more about what struggles of emotional labour could look like. Fourthly, she could have done more to differentiate between emotional labour we want and don´t want. Some emotional labour is carried out purely for profit and in addition reinforces gendered or racialised stereotypes and roles. However, emotional labour has a lot of value for society – the ability for people to manage their emotions in emergency services, in education and other sectors is incredibly important and something we would want to keep. Fifthly, and this is something quite specific, I think the book would have benefitted from a discussion of how emotional management is used by activists. Organising a strike, discussing in meetings, having difficult one-to-one conversations all require management of emotions and a production of some kind of feeling. How should we discuss these things as activists? Is it better not to say your demoralised and keep it to yourself in a meeting or is it better to be honest about it in meetings?
Having said all that however, the book is very worth reading. I would especially think it good to read as part of a reading group or in discussions in union or political study groups. Although it has a lot of the marks of an academic work and is quite jargony in some places, for the most part it is very readable.
While the concept of “emotional labour” and the modern day usage are important topics to discuss, there is a much broader and complete argument that Hochschild makes in the book.
The book is broken down into three parts: firstly, emotions in private life, secondly, emotions in commercial-working life and thirdly, concluding remarks on the overall societal impact of commercialisation of human feeling.
The main question Hochschild is trying to answer is this: How does the commercial production and management of human feeling impact on society at large and on individuals? Before tackling this question about the relationship between capitalist production and human emotions she considers a number of related questions. How do people manage and relate to their emotions in private life? How do workers manage their emotions at work? Businesses operate to sell you a product or service, for many this service includes a certain demonstration of feeling. How do the workers who carry out this “emotional labour” relate to their work? How does this impact their feelings and their own sense of self in their private lives?
To begin with Hochschild discusses the question of what a feeling is. Her view is that feelings are kind of sense in the same way we have a sense of hearing or sight. However, as a sense, emotions link very closely to our understanding of ourselves and they have the capacity to be managed in a different way from hearing and sight.
Hochschild´s overarching argument (writing in 1979) is that, in the context of American capitalism, commercial businesses are in a position to evoke and manage emotion both with regards to its workers and following on from that to society as a whole who interact with these commercial businesses. Hochschild argues that there has been shift in the production of human feelings as a way to make profit and as a result of the change in the commercial production and management of human feeling there has been an overall cultural shift in how we relate to sincerity, spontaneity and our own sense of self with regards to these two things.
To demonstrate the shift in how feelings are “produced” on a commercial basis she focuses on two different professions flight attendants and debt collectors. She argues that in both these professions not only are the workers carrying out a service but included in that service is a demonstration of particular emotions in order to create a certain state of mind in the customer. In the case of flight attendants it is, friendliness and politeness regardless of the behaviour of the passengers. In the case of debt collectors it is distrust, suspicion and hiding feelings of empathy towards debtors. Flight attendants are expected to be constantly friendly regardless of any verbal disrespect or abuse they receive from passengers. Debt collectors are expected to show suspicion and, depending on the case, outright hostility regardless of whether they actually feel sympathy with the person they are supposed to collecting debt from. Hochschild argues that the suppression of anger of flight attendants and the suppression of empathy by debt collectors are as much a form of labour as safety demonstrations or serving meals by flight attentants or phone calls and registering payments by debt collectors. This is what she refers to as emotional labour.
Nowadays “emotional labour” is often used for any number of things that may be emotionally taxing e.g. supporting a friend through a break up or giving care and attention to a child. Hochschild distinguishes these things as “emotion work” because they are done in the private sphere (as opposed to a commercial enterprise) and they are not something that is supervised by a manager or spelled out in codes of practice manual for private commercial ends. This does not mean to that there is not a lot of societal pressure to do emotion work and the burden disproportionately falls on women. Hochschild agrees that it does and in fact emphasises that companies draw on these gendered roles when it comes to recruitment, training, etc.
Hochschild argues that a number of jobs now include a large degree emotional labour (around one third, see appendix 3 of the book), this emotional labour is commercially managed and supervised, As a result world of curated emotions and curated behaviour impact on both workers and on the public that comes into contact with this emotional labour. Hochschild argues that the impact of the commercialisation of feeling is to such an extent that there is now a lack of “authenticity” and “spontaneity”. Because emotions are now curated to such a large extent people are suspicious of whether people are showing their authentic emotions and for people whose work involves a substantial amount of emotional labour this creates an enstrangement from their own self and distorts what they understand as their “real” emotions. This enstrangement comes about because workers, in order to manage their emotions and to stay in their jobs, have to either do surface level performing of an emotion or they in fact try to convince themself they are feeling the emotion they are expected to feel on the job.
For historical context Hochschild argues that this shift in cultural relation to authenticity and spontaneity is similar to a shift in culturual relation to sincerity in the 18th and 19th century. The shift in sincerity, argues Hochschild, was a result of social mobility in urban areas and the extent to which being duplicitous and deceitful could serve people to be socially mobile. Hence, any display of sincerity or honesty was regarded with suspicion.
Hochschild goes on to make some further comments on the rise of different types of therapy and the self-help genre as well as how we should relate to these two things. Her view is that both of these things are not something that should be dismissed and simply criticised as ways for individuals to feel personally responsible for issues in their lives that are structural (although she does agree with this critique). Therapy and self-help on the whole are genuinely useful things that help people grow, learn and support themselves.
There were a few things lacking for me in this book as an account of how emotions and our relation to them have changed since the World War 2. Firstly, my biggest criticism is that while Hochschild gives an interesting and compelling account of how emotion is “produced” and managed for commercial ends, she makes little if any reference to how much more socially liberal society has become as a whole, particularly with regards to sexuality and the role of women in society. She also does not discuss how (in a good way) people´s emotions were becoming and are nowadays taken much more seriously than in the past. These trends run to some degree counter to what the commercial management of feeling pushes. However, little reference or consideration is made about them. Secondly, not much is said about the growth of cities, the organisation and commercialisation of many social spaces (this has become more acute since the 90s) and the fact that people work for a wage – these bare significantly on how people interact with each other, and it seems to me Hochschild gives too much emphasis to work with large amounts of emotional labour as being responsible for changes in cultural attitude to spontaneity and authenticity. For example, a lack of social spaces that cannot be used for free means that access to social spaces is dependent on monetary exchange, this changes how relate to these spaces, who can access them etc. Thirdly, while Hochschild gave a good account of the problem (in particular for workers who carry out emotional labour) there seemed to be little discussion of solutions beyond stating that workers need to be in unions. Of course this will depend very much on the job, nevertheless, I thought she could have said more about what struggles of emotional labour could look like. Fourthly, she could have done more to differentiate between emotional labour we want and don´t want. Some emotional labour is carried out purely for profit and in addition reinforces gendered or racialised stereotypes and roles. However, emotional labour has a lot of value for society – the ability for people to manage their emotions in emergency services, in education and other sectors is incredibly important and something we would want to keep. Fifthly, and this is something quite specific, I think the book would have benefitted from a discussion of how emotional management is used by activists. Organising a strike, discussing in meetings, having difficult one-to-one conversations all require management of emotions and a production of some kind of feeling. How should we discuss these things as activists? Is it better not to say your demoralised and keep it to yourself in a meeting or is it better to be honest about it in meetings?
Having said all that however, the book is very worth reading. I would especially think it good to read as part of a reading group or in discussions in union or political study groups. Although it has a lot of the marks of an academic work and is quite jargony in some places, for the most part it is very readable.
June 12, 2020
One of the better sociological texts I’ve read in awhile (also I’m glad to be getting back into reading sociology texts after the post college burn out period). Even though emotional labor as a concept has been diluted to the point of absolute meaninglessness, in its original Marxist formulation in this book it is really fantastic for diagnosing the state of labor and gender in the neoliberal service economy. I think Hocshchild chose a fanatic research site and absolutely nailed her description and analysis of what she saw during her time with Delta flight attendants. This book resonated to my time working in retail and when I’ve shared sections with my family everyone has said that it hits the nail on the head about the everyday experience of working in this service economy. It’s a great piece of social science that raises really pertinent questions about labor and control.
June 23, 2017
Phenomenal book that really resonated with me.
Hochschild talks about the how commercial enterprises have put a value on emotions and how people have learned to detach themselves from their emotions, smiles, etc. in order to achieve a company objective.
She calls this sot of work emotional labor, a source of work that falls primarily on women in occupations such as secretary or flight attendant whom are expected to always have a cheerful smile written across their faces. A cheerful smile - the hallmark of a friendly flight attendant, but who's really smiling? Is it the natural self, or a fake self that we put on?
Not only has emotion management fall under the umbrella of commercialization, but it has also come under scrutiny in out private lives. How often do we engage in surface or deep acting in order to convey a feeling that we might not really feel? Grief at a funeral. Joy at a celebration. Hochschild looks into the gap between how we actually feel and how we think we should feel.
Hochschild talks about the how commercial enterprises have put a value on emotions and how people have learned to detach themselves from their emotions, smiles, etc. in order to achieve a company objective.
She calls this sot of work emotional labor, a source of work that falls primarily on women in occupations such as secretary or flight attendant whom are expected to always have a cheerful smile written across their faces. A cheerful smile - the hallmark of a friendly flight attendant, but who's really smiling? Is it the natural self, or a fake self that we put on?
Not only has emotion management fall under the umbrella of commercialization, but it has also come under scrutiny in out private lives. How often do we engage in surface or deep acting in order to convey a feeling that we might not really feel? Grief at a funeral. Joy at a celebration. Hochschild looks into the gap between how we actually feel and how we think we should feel.
March 10, 2017
I found this book to be a helpful tool in learning about Emotional Labor. As a woman in the business world, I've spent/wasted much of my time managing other people's feelings. It was good to take some time to consider how and why I've been doing some of the things I have been doing.
December 25, 2018
This book articulates one of those vague things you think about in the back of your mind but never put roger there. It’s an extremely smart look at the service economy, and a depressing one as not much has changed 40 years later. Minus one star for organization that could have been tightened up.
February 8, 2022
May be a sociological classic, but a little out of date I think in this age of incivility. I did enjoy the descriptions of flight attendant training and also bill collector demeanor.
March 23, 2023
Lots of thoughts here and I had to write a report so I might as well share it here.
Originally published in 1983, Hochschild work situates itself coming out of the height of the materialist feminism movement at the end of the 1970s, a movement that highlighted capitalism and patriarchy as central to women’s oppression. At the end of this decade, we see feminist activism moving toward what some historians label a movement of feminist difference, a decade where equality of work between men and women was emphasized. In The Managed Heart, the authors argument sits at the intersection of these two movements, highlighting the gendered differences that occur when emotion becomes a form of commodity for institutions to capitalize off of.
More specifically, Hochschild surveys the experiences of flight attendants at Delta Airlines at the Delta Training Center, the recruiting process of flight attendants done by Pan American Airways in San Francisco, and the role of bill collectors on the more corporate side of Delta, to map how emotional language functions in each given situation. In the 1980’s, Delta was ranked the #1 major U.S. airline for customer service by the department of transportation. This title, however, was the result of training employees to act a certain way. The flight attendant’s job was to deliver a service and create further demand for it, ultimately enhancing the status of the customer. The bill collector’s job was to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer. The former does so by being nicer than the perceived norm while the latter does so by being nastier. Women were/are disproportionately called upon to navigate these roles due to the gendered power dynamics of hegemonic society. While the theorization of performance and spectacle has been discussed for decades with theorists spanning from Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and Erving Goffman, to more current performance scholarship like that of Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten.
While Hochschild’s work lacks a good amount of representation, this book is profound when we think about the fact that it was the first time the term “emotional labor” was defined and put into writing. For Hochschild,
“emotional labor [is] labor that requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others- in this case the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place” (7)
The book is split into two parts: private life and public life. Part one of the book explores how “emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange makeup our private emotional system” (76). The author dives into the social construction of rules that impacts the way we understand how we “should” act and feel in a given scenario and how emotion dictates the success of interaction by how well a certain emotion or interaction aligns with expectations. Through acting (stage, deep, method and otherwise) we perform our realities to create a spectacle of what should be in place of what is.
In part two, Hochschild focuses more specifically on how emotion has been commodified in such a way that it is profitable. Particularly of interest in service work, specifically by women, emotion becomes a mandatory skill to navigate, making it more difficult to separate ones “true” self from ones work persona. The intersection of the two can be exhausting, all-encompassing or numbing. The inflation of the institutionalization of this skill has made it so that,
“as a culture we have begun to place an unprecedented value on spontaneous, ‘natural’ feeling. We are intrigued by the unmanaged heart and what it can tell us” (190).
Since the original publication of her work, many scholars have expanded the original conversations surrounding emotional labor. Concepts like shadow work, invisible labor, and the second shift (from Hochschild herself) became more colloquial. One weak point of Hochschild’s original book is her failure to acknowledge diversity beyond gender. Here, identity markers like race and socioeconomic status play a huge role in relation to emotion expectations. ESPECIALLY when discussing service work in the 80s and who was primarily exploited in those roles. and the history prior to this point? There really isn't an excuse to leave such a crucial variable out. She addresses this very briefly in her additional “Afterword” provided in 2012 but it still leaves a lot lost. While I can appreciate what this book did at its time, reading it in our present era feels empty without being put in conjunction with more recent thought on the matter, especially after the pandemic.
Originally published in 1983, Hochschild work situates itself coming out of the height of the materialist feminism movement at the end of the 1970s, a movement that highlighted capitalism and patriarchy as central to women’s oppression. At the end of this decade, we see feminist activism moving toward what some historians label a movement of feminist difference, a decade where equality of work between men and women was emphasized. In The Managed Heart, the authors argument sits at the intersection of these two movements, highlighting the gendered differences that occur when emotion becomes a form of commodity for institutions to capitalize off of.
More specifically, Hochschild surveys the experiences of flight attendants at Delta Airlines at the Delta Training Center, the recruiting process of flight attendants done by Pan American Airways in San Francisco, and the role of bill collectors on the more corporate side of Delta, to map how emotional language functions in each given situation. In the 1980’s, Delta was ranked the #1 major U.S. airline for customer service by the department of transportation. This title, however, was the result of training employees to act a certain way. The flight attendant’s job was to deliver a service and create further demand for it, ultimately enhancing the status of the customer. The bill collector’s job was to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer. The former does so by being nicer than the perceived norm while the latter does so by being nastier. Women were/are disproportionately called upon to navigate these roles due to the gendered power dynamics of hegemonic society. While the theorization of performance and spectacle has been discussed for decades with theorists spanning from Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and Erving Goffman, to more current performance scholarship like that of Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten.
While Hochschild’s work lacks a good amount of representation, this book is profound when we think about the fact that it was the first time the term “emotional labor” was defined and put into writing. For Hochschild,
“emotional labor [is] labor that requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others- in this case the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place” (7)
The book is split into two parts: private life and public life. Part one of the book explores how “emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange makeup our private emotional system” (76). The author dives into the social construction of rules that impacts the way we understand how we “should” act and feel in a given scenario and how emotion dictates the success of interaction by how well a certain emotion or interaction aligns with expectations. Through acting (stage, deep, method and otherwise) we perform our realities to create a spectacle of what should be in place of what is.
In part two, Hochschild focuses more specifically on how emotion has been commodified in such a way that it is profitable. Particularly of interest in service work, specifically by women, emotion becomes a mandatory skill to navigate, making it more difficult to separate ones “true” self from ones work persona. The intersection of the two can be exhausting, all-encompassing or numbing. The inflation of the institutionalization of this skill has made it so that,
“as a culture we have begun to place an unprecedented value on spontaneous, ‘natural’ feeling. We are intrigued by the unmanaged heart and what it can tell us” (190).
Since the original publication of her work, many scholars have expanded the original conversations surrounding emotional labor. Concepts like shadow work, invisible labor, and the second shift (from Hochschild herself) became more colloquial. One weak point of Hochschild’s original book is her failure to acknowledge diversity beyond gender. Here, identity markers like race and socioeconomic status play a huge role in relation to emotion expectations. ESPECIALLY when discussing service work in the 80s and who was primarily exploited in those roles. and the history prior to this point? There really isn't an excuse to leave such a crucial variable out. She addresses this very briefly in her additional “Afterword” provided in 2012 but it still leaves a lot lost. While I can appreciate what this book did at its time, reading it in our present era feels empty without being put in conjunction with more recent thought on the matter, especially after the pandemic.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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