Emotional labour Flashcards
What is the feeling management?
- management of emotions in everyday life
- i.e. trying to feel grateful, trying not to feel unhappy etc
- emotions: a mixture of the natural and the artificial
What is the transition from emotion management to ‘emotional labour’?
- the management of internal feelings and the vibe display of these feelings in the face and body
- emotional labour involves both managing one’s own feelings and managing the feelings of others (perhaps at the same time)
What is the transition from private to commercial uses of feelings?
“What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play upon a range of feelings for private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations” (Hochschild)
What are the three characteristics of jobs that involve emotional labour?
- Require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public
- Require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person
- Allow the employer (through training and supervision) to exercise control over the emotional activities of employees
What is the demise of factory production and rise of service sector?
“The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society” (Daniel Bell, The coming of the post-industrial society)
What is ‘customer experience’?
An intangible products produced and consumed during human interactions
“The emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself (Hochschild)
Many genuinely enjoy their customer service work. Service workers emphasised the importance of being a ‘people person’ and using communication skills, such as listening, and acting in the course of their work (Anderson et al 2002)
Are emotions at work genuinely felt, or are they feigned?
‘Surface acting’ (mere body language) vs ‘deep acting’ (a real, self-induced feeling)
What sort of labour is required of flight attendants?
physical, mental and emotional
How are flight attendants required to manage their emotions?
- “The [training] manual suggests that facial expressions should be ‘sincere’ and ‘unaffected’. One should have a ‘modest but friendly smile’ and be ‘generally alert, attentive, not overly aggressive, but not reticent either’ … It is suggested that a successful candidate must be ‘outgoing but not effusive’, ‘enthusiastic with calm and poise’, and ‘vivacious but not effervescent’
- flight attendants must both invoke feelings (in themselves and others) as well as suppress them
What is the importance of authentic smiles, not ‘painted smiles’?
“for the flight attendant, the smiles are part her work, a part that requires her to coordinate herself and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly…and the product passenger contentment — would be damaged.” (Hochschild)
What is the link between emotional labor and sexuality?
“the smile can be sexualized, as in ‘We really move our tails for you to make your every wish come true’ (Continental), or ‘Fly me, you’ll like it’ (National) … So the sexualized and burdens the flight attendant with another task, beyond being unfailingly help and open requests: she must respond to the sexual fantasies of passengers” (Hochschild)
What is an example of flight attendants being sexualized?
- ‘We believe the company intentionally does this to make us look a bit sexier and to let the passenger see more’, a union representative said.
- ‘Some of the Marco Polo members think they can do things to us because they are privileged and we somehow allow it. That is very bad … They think it is part of the their privilege … Afterwards, they believe they can apologise and everything is settled’
- Increase in incidents of sexual harassment at work, which stewardesses face at least once in every 10 flights
What is the link between labour and debt collectors?
Debt collectors
- deflate the customer’s status through hostility and humiliation
- use of aggressive legal threats
- treat the customer with skepticism and suspicion
Felling rules devised by management
- “My boss comes into my office and says, ‘Can’t you get madder than that?’. ‘Create alarm!’ — that’s what my boss says” — that’s what my boss
Less strenuous form of emotional labor?
- “I’d rather do eight hours of [debt] collection than four hours of telephone sales. In telephone sales you’ve got to be nice no matter what, and losts of times I don’t feel like being nice. To act enthusiastic is hard work for me” (interview with debt collector; in Hochschild)
What is emotion Dissoance?
When expressed emotions are in an organizationally desired form (conform to ‘display rules’) but are incongruent with those felt
“A separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods … Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce strain by pulling the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign” (Hochschild)
What are some example of occupations that require emotional labour?
flight attendants, Disneyland employees, bus drivers, firefighters, police, paramedics, funeral directors, call centre workers, barristers, university lectures
