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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
This book coined "emotional labor". It is the reassurance, empathy, and cheerfulness performed by flight attendants, nurses, retail salespeople, customer service, etc.
Those workers might do surface acting (which can make them feel phony), or deep acting / method acting (which can detach them from their real feelings).
Companies often demand this acting. Instead of explicitly paying for emotional labor (e.g. "you get another $2/hour to smile a lot"), they use indoctrination.
The company will use emotional labor as a selling point in marketing. They present their flight attendants as eager to please, positive, friendly, and never complaining or getting angry.
In our society, higher-status people are allowed to rage and be irrational and still get good jobs, e.g. Brett Kavanagh. By buying a plane ticket, customers are buying the ability to act unreasonable, and the flight attendant is not allowed to respond in kind. The plane ticket buys the flight attendant's acquiescence and putting up with temper tantrums.
When people do emotional labor before they have matured, it can hamper them from exploring that part of their personality. They are so used to acting that they don't know how they truly feel about anger or flirtation, etc.
Those workers might do surface acting (which can make them feel phony), or deep acting / method acting (which can detach them from their real feelings).
Companies often demand this acting. Instead of explicitly paying for emotional labor (e.g. "you get another $2/hour to smile a lot"), they use indoctrination.
The company will use emotional labor as a selling point in marketing. They present their flight attendants as eager to please, positive, friendly, and never complaining or getting angry.
In our society, higher-status people are allowed to rage and be irrational and still get good jobs, e.g. Brett Kavanagh. By buying a plane ticket, customers are buying the ability to act unreasonable, and the flight attendant is not allowed to respond in kind. The plane ticket buys the flight attendant's acquiescence and putting up with temper tantrums.
When people do emotional labor before they have matured, it can hamper them from exploring that part of their personality. They are so used to acting that they don't know how they truly feel about anger or flirtation, etc.
informative
slow-paced
I don't know who this book is for because it shifts from very technical to self-help anecdotical which makes me doubt the generalizations made in this theory. There are some good points it touches upon and it is an in-depth ethnography, but at times I found it relied on stereotypes or assumed mutual understanding of values to get to the conclusions.
Good for her on raising the issue of commodified emotion tho, I can see how it paved some more modern studies.
Good for her on raising the issue of commodified emotion tho, I can see how it paved some more modern studies.
Content Warnings
Minor: Fatphobia, Misogyny, Racism
I realize that The Managed Heart isn't perfect (it mainly focuses on white people and heterosexual relationships) and that I don't know enough about sociology or psychology to properly place this work in a larger academic landscape, but the book had various ideas that I found intriguing. I like the discussion of emotion management, emotion rules, and emotional labor leading up to the main thesis of the book: another damning aspect of capitalism is the exploitation of emotional labor. Companies push emotion management that ultimately numbs the feelings of the workers. Even emotional labor is exploited to gain profits for companies.
Overall, The Managed Heart is a fascinating read. I'll have to read more books in this vein.
Overall, The Managed Heart is a fascinating read. I'll have to read more books in this vein.
Classic sociological study. Hochschild argues that emotions are socially constructed, rather than innate (as we often think of them being). Her in-depth ethnographic research yielded rich data which, when combined with interviews, made this book a deeply engrossing sociological narrative.
This is the seminal sociological work that coined the term "emotional labor," now widely used to identify the unique psychological burdens placed on women and (often female) service workers. Hochschild locates emotions not just as naturally or spontaneously occurring, but as social objects that are socially mediated, and can be coaxed into different forms. She illustrates the ways that "emotional gift exchange" functions in our personal social lives, as well as the emotional machinery of "deep acting" used to transmute one feeling state into another for the sake of social appropriateness. Through investigation of the corporate training expectations placed on the flight attendant--the epitome of the feminized laborer--she then shows how the "feelings rules" workers must adhere to are explicitly articulated and imposed from higher up a corporate bureaucracy. The techniques of neutralizing anger at an abusive customer, for example, are enforced by management not for the sake of their workers' mental health but for the sake of securing a unflappably docile and "nice" worker whose service will earn them profit. The book includes a much-needed analysis of the way that hierarchy and inequality replicate themselves in the form of unbalanced reciprocity of emotional labor. Women in particular are socialized to do behind-the-scenes work to enhance the feelings of status and well-being in men, something that men come to expect from women, while also masking this work to appear as natural. In the case of the wage worker, this unbalanced reciprocity is codified in the nature of the labor contract. The Managed Heart is a game-changer, definitely a work I'll be referencing often from here on out.
I read this book for my sociology of Emotions class. If you have ever worked any kind of customer service job or a job where you regularly interact with people then you will definitely relate to Hochschild's ideas about emotional labor and how draining it can be.
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.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
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.