In emotional labour, the emotional capacities and the ability of workers to manage emotions are made an instrument in a labour process. Feelings can be managed. These capacities and the possibility of their management – the possibility that they can be given determinate form within a labour process – are rendered as the instruments of the emotional labour process. The work of emotional labour is the production of value through the production of an embodied emotional state of comfort, ease, welcome, and care, within the customer. The worker’s emotions and their capacities to manage them are the primary tools utilised to achieve this intended aim of the labour process. That is, the worker’s emotions and his or her capacity to
1 Sigmund Freud. ‘Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Institutional Life’ in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989). 774.
2 Hochschild The Managed Heart 231
3 Hochschild The Managed Heart 17
4 Hochschild The Managed Heart 229
5 Hochschild The Managed Heart 233
6 Hochschild The Managed Heart 231 emphasis in original
7 Hochschild The Managed Heart 17
8 Hochschild The Managed Heart 228-232
manage them is made an instrument. The emotional labourer is mandated to produce and manage feeling in accordance with the design of the labour process, which is in turn driven by norms of capital accumulation; the provision of this character of so-called customer service is an integral part of the commodity “air travel”, for example. The buyer exchanges money for commodity in the expectation that the commodity “air travel” is inclusive of the production of these emotional states for the customer. The production of emotional states is an intrinsic part of the commodity. It is important to emphasise the complexity of these emotional interactions and modes of self-management. In their examination of emotional labour in beauty salons, Merran Toerien and Celia Kitzinger find that the worker’s responses within customer interactions are often ‘creative and multi-faceted, but the crucial element, is that she tailors all aspects of her response to the client’s concerns.’1 Thus, Hochschild builds on C. Wright Mills’
identification of the instrumentalisation of ‘personality’ in the labour process of the ‘new middle classes.’2 In White Collar, Wright Mills states that worker and customer ‘secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made; one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.’3 The customer makes an instrument of the worker, a phenomenon that Hochschild points to when examining the demands that customers make of the flight attendants in seeking what they regard as their rights to comfort, care, and safety. As one trainer at Delta Airlines puts it, ‘the passengers are just like children.’4 The worker makes an instrument of the customer by managing their demands within the exigencies of this particular form of commodity production. Of the greatest analytical importance to my purposes, workers manage customer demands by managing their own emotional responses and the form of the bodily display that the worker presents while doing this work. The worker’s ability to manage feeling is an intrinsic part of the commodity.
Feeling, for Hochschild, is mirrored in display. She argues that we often “act-out” our emotions. Hochschild offers as an example a professional sports player’s emotions after making an error in her play and notes how her emotions are reflected in the display she makes, including the reddening of the face, a stamping of her foot, and the hitting of a tennis net with her racket.5 Using this example, Hochschild states that ‘we infer other people’s viewpoints
1 Merran Toerien and Celia Kitzinger. ‘II. Emotional Labour in the Beauty Salon: Turn Design of Task-directed Talk’, Feminism and Psychology 17:2 (2007). 166.
2 Hochschild The Managed Heart ix; C. Wright Mills. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002). xvi-xvii.
3 Cf. Hochschild The Managed Heart 24
4 Cf. Hochschild The Managed Heart 110
5 Hochschild The Managed Heart 31. Hochschild also argues the gendered character of these displays of emotions here, noting the surprise at which the TV commentators at this competition survey the so-called becoming professionalism of women in the sport, indicating that male professionals desire to win and their frustration at mistakes in play is simply given.
from how they display feeling.’1 Furthermore, feeling is not simply an embodied response to external stimuli, but is ‘something we do by attending to inner sensations.’2 We shape and reshape our emotional responses to external stimuli with recourse to our expectations, of others and of the world, and our sense of self. We define situations in certain ways and manage our emotions through an internal process of mediating our relation to the world. Knowing that we can infer the viewpoints of others by the manner in which they display feeling, we also know that others can infer our viewpoints by the manner in which we display feeling. The distinction between processes of producing display, that is, surface acting, and the production of deep acting, occurs in the midst of these two co-productive tensions of a subjective awareness of the ability to infer feeling from display and our ability to attend to inner sensations.
In our private lives, Hochschild argues, ‘we are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not.’3 This is ‘surface acting’; we know that we do not feel the emotion that we are feigning, but we feign so that we might deceive others as to the true nature of our feelings. ‘In deep acting,’ Hochschild argues, ‘we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary.’4 We often engage in deep acting in our private lives when we wish to conform to social customs, such as feeling sad at funerals, happy at weddings, or to convince ourselves that we actually do love our romantic partners.5 Sensing that we do not feel the emotions we are expected to feel, either in particular or in terms of degree, we engage in deep acting when we invoke imaginaries or stir memories that may provoke feelings of sympathy or empathy with the situation that faces us in order to conform to the social expectations of feeling.6 We also undertake processes for the production of deep acting in order to protect ourselves from psychological harm that might be caused by feelings we feel but wish we did not, for example, unrequited love.7 This ‘double pretending’ can, however, lead to psychological harm.
Hochschild states that to pretend to oneself that one feels a certain feeling and to pretend this feeling to others requires the constant maintenance of what sort of feelings should be consciously recognised, and what feelings should be repressed.8 Unsurprisingly, this often results in what one college student reports as a ‘secret nervous breakdown.’9 In work, we often call this “burn-out”. To examine the distinction between surface and deep acting further, and to develop Hochschild’s conception of public and private life, it is important to examine the
1 Hochschild The Managed Heart 32
2 Hochschild The Managed Heart 27. Emphasis in original.
3 Hochschild The Managed Heart 33
4 Hochschild The Managed Heart 33
5 Hochschild The Managed Heart 39, 59-63, 45
6 Hochschild The Managed Heart 42-3
7 Hochschild The Managed Heart 43-4
8 Hochschild The Managed Heart 45
9 Hochschild The Managed Heart 45
process that Hochschild claims mediates the passage of emotion management through these two spheres: the process of “transmutation”.
In wage-labour, the instrumentalisation of emotions and the capacity to manage them proceed from, according to Hochschild, a “transmutation” of feeling in the movement from their use in
‘private life’ to their commercialisation in ‘public life’. This passage of feeling management from private uses to its instrumentalisation in the public sphere, i.e., in wage-labour, is central to Hochschild’s understanding of emotional labour and to her critique of the human consequences of the ‘commercialisation of human feeling.’ The centrality of the relation between public and private uses of feeling management in Hochschild’s theory is indicated by her separation of The Managed Heart into two parts, the first titled ‘Public Life’, the second
‘Private Life’. The importance of this relation follows from the principles of Hochschild’s theory of emotion. As noted earlier, for Hochschild, emotion is a point of mediation between us and the world; through feeling we experience, in an embodied way, our viewpoint on the world. The transmutation of emotional capacity and management from public to private uses pertains across ‘three basic elements of emotional life: emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange.’1
First, emotion work is defined by Hochschild as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.’2 Hochschild makes a distinction between
‘emotion work’ and ‘emotional labour’ in accordance with Marx’s labour theory of value and the distinction made by Engels which I introduced at the beginning of this chapter. “Emotion work” is done in a private context and therefore she argues that these acts of emotion work
‘have use value... Emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange-value.’3 Thus, Hochschild implicates Marx’s category of commodity, and labour-power as a commodity, in order to define what emotional labour is.4 Emotion work undergoes a
‘transmutation’, Hochschild argues, from being a private practice in the production of use-value to becoming a ‘public act, bought on the one hand and sold on the other’ and therein becoming labour that produces value.5 Hochschild also explicitly introduces Braverman’s critique of the impact of Taylorisation upon the worker’s control of their own labour process, arguing that the worker is no longer in sole control of their own emotion management, which is
1 Hochschild The Managed Heart 118
2 Hochschild The Managed Heart 7fn.
3 Hochschild The Managed Heart 7fn. Emphasis in original.
4 Paul Brook. ‘In critical defence of “emotional labour”: refuting Bolton’s critique of Hochschild’s concept’, Work, Employment and Society 23:3 (2009). 538.
5 Hochschild The Managed Heart 118
instead directed by managers, trainers, and supervisors.’1 Second, “feeling rules” undergo transmutation in emotional labour. Feeling rules for the worker are not only decided by the capitalist, but are also published in training manuals and implied by marketing which ‘promises service that is “human” and personal’ and often sexualised.2 Furthermore, as argued by Steve Taylor and Melissa Tyler, emotional labour is most oftentimes within modes of ‘sexual difference, and the consolidation of gendered power relations, [that] are produced through historically-situated capitalist and gendered labour processes.’3 As such, the gendered and sexualised character of emotional labour is an important aspect of what it is, a dimension overlooked in Catherine Hakim’s relatively uncritical examination of what she calls ‘erotic capital’ in which the power relations of work and the capacity of the labour market to bear upon embodiment are unfortunately absent.4 For Hochschild, therefore, ‘feeling rules are no longer simply matters of personal discretion’ when the worker does emotional labour, but are exempt from interpersonal negotiation and decided by another, viz. the capitalist, and are made public.5 In the third element of Hochschild’s transmutation, “social exchange”, ‘there is much less room for individual navigation of the emotional waters’ of social exchange because workers’ capacities for emotion management are codified in a fixed set of feeling rules within the inequality of the wage-labour exchange and the inequality between service-giver and the receiver of services.6