The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
TL;DR: In this article, Hochschild examined two groups of public contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors, and found that roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor.
Abstract: In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work?In search of the answer, Arlie Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural" The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural" Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated it cost to those who do it for a livingLike a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness) This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us On the basis of this book, Hochschild was featured in "Key Sociological Thinkers", edited by Rob Stones This book was also the winner of the Charles Cooley Award in 1983, awarded by the American Sociological Association and received an honorable mention for the C Wright Mills Award
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: This article found that people can use varying degrees of their selves, physically, cognitively, and emotionally, in work role performances, which has implications for both their performance and their wellbeing.
Abstract: This study began with the premise that people can use varying degrees of their selves, physically, cognitively, and emotionally, in work role performances, which has implications for both their wor...
7,647Â citations
Cites background from "The Managed Heart: Commercializatio..."
..." Norms regulate emotional as well as physical labor (Hochschild, 1983)....
[...]
...The premise is that employing and expressing the self in tasks requiring emotional labor takes a certain level of emotionality that personally disengaging does not (Hochschild, 1983)....
[...]
...I combined that perspective with those focusing on the interpersonal (Bennis, Schein, Berlew, & Steele, 1964; Rogers, 1958), group (Bion, 1961; Smith & Berg, 1987), intergroup (Alderfer, 1985a), and organizational (Hochschild, 1983) contexts that enhance or undermine peoDecember 694...
[...]
...Such unemployment of the self underlies task behaviors researchers have called automatic or robotic (Hochschild, 1983), burned out (Maslach, 1982), apathetic or detached (Goffman, 1961a), or effortless (Hackman & Oldham, 1980)....
[...]
...That tapping occurred when people felt as if they fit in some way with those with whom they interacted and when people treated one another not as role occupants but as people who happened to occupy roles (Hochschild, 1983)....
[...]
TL;DR: The authors argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them.
Abstract: In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodie...
5,562Â citations
TL;DR: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, which influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior.
Abstract: At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.
4,585Â citations
TL;DR: Reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation, suggesting that these 2 emotion regulatory processes may have different adaptive consequences.
Abstract: Using a process model of emotion, a distinction between antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation is proposed. To test this distinction, 120 participants were shown a disgusting film while their experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses were recorded. Participants were told to either (a) think about the film in such a way that they would feel nothing (reappraisal, a form of antecedent-focused emotion regulation), (b) behave in such a way that someone watching them would not know they were feeling anything (suppression, a form of response-focused emotion regulation), or (c) watch the film (a control condition). Compared with the control condition, both reappraisal and suppression were effective in reducing emotion-expressive behavior. However, reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation. These results suggest that these 2 emotion regulatory processes may have different adaptive consequences.
3,778Â citations
TL;DR: Results suggest that psychological job characteristics are more similar across national boundaries than across occupations.
Abstract: This article consists of three parts. Part 1 discusses the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ), designed to measure scales assessing psychological demands, decision latitude, social support, physical demands, and job insecurity. Part 2 reports the cross-national validity, for men and women, of the JCQ scales in six broadly representative populations from four advanced industrial societies: the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan. JCQ scale means, standard deviations, reliabilities and correlations are compared. Part 3 reviews comparison of the intercountry and interoccupation differences in the scales, discusses specific scales issues and discusses the implications of the study for interpretation of psychosocial job asessment questionnaires.
3,571Â citations