Emotional labor

About: Emotional labor is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3948 publications have been published within this topic receiving 112110 citations. The topic is also known as: emotional labour.

The Managed Heart Revisited: Health and Social Control:

Abstract: In this paper I investigate emotional labour in the field of nursing. I show how new ideologies of health promotion have become attached to the prior agenda and already-embedded relationships which...

Invisible Household Labor and Ramifications for Adjustment: Mothers as Captains of Households

Abstract: We address the issue of invisible labor in the home by examining how the distribution of the mental and emotional labor inherent in managing the household between spouses may be linked with women’s well-being, including their satisfaction with life, partner satisfaction, feelings of emptiness, and experiencing role overload. In a sample of 393 U.S. married/partnered mothers, mostly of upper-middle class backgrounds with dependent children at home, results showed that a majority of women reported that they alone assumed responsibility for household routines involving organizing schedules for the family and maintaining order in the home. Some aspects of responsibilities related to child adjustment were primarily handled by mothers, including being vigilant of children’s emotions, whereas other aspects were shared with partners, including instilling values in the children. Responsibility was largely shared for household finances. Regression analyses showed that after controlling for dimensions of emotional and physical intimacy, feeling disproportionately responsible for household management, especially child adjustment, was associated with strains on mothers’ personal well-being as well as lower satisfaction with the relationship. The implications of our work highlight the need to consider the burden of household management on mothers’ well-being and speak to mothers’ own needs for support and care as the primary managers of the household. In future research on division of labor, it will be useful to measure these critical but often neglected dimensions of who coordinates the household, given potential ramifications of this dimension for the quality of marriages and women’s personal well-being.

Learning emotion rules in service organizations socialization and training in the UK public-house sector

Abstract: This article discusses the way in which emotion rules are learned by service workers through an ethnographic study of employees in a chain of public houses. It reviews the findings of recent research based on studies of large firms in the service sector in order to discuss similarities and differences in the ways in which emotion rules are learned, internalized, controlled, and monitored in large firms and small units. It concludes that in contrast to large firms, small units are characterized by little formal training and few explicit rules for emotion management and display. Implicit rules for performing emotional labour are learned through informal socialization with colleagues, managers, and customers. The importance of competing informal social control mechanisms is highlighted, showing how service workers are expected to be skilled emotion managers negotiating the expectations of different stakeholders.