Emotional labour occurs when people in organizational and occupational roles are
expected to display certain emotions, irrespective of their actual emotional feelings.
Hochschild (1983) argued that emotional labour is more likely in jobs where:
‘First, they require face-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public.
Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another
person - gratitude or fear for example. Third, they allow the employer,
through training and supervision to exercise a degree of control over the
emotional activities of employees (p. 147).’
A key idea for Hochschild (1983) is ‘feeling rules’. These comprise sets of shared
rules that enable people to identify the emotions they should feel in particular
situations and the degree they should be expressed. Hochschild (1983) suggests
that:
‘Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine
what is rightly owed in the currency of feeling, through them we tell what is
due in each relation, each role. We pay tribute to each other in the tribute of
the managing act. In the tribute we pay, overpay, underpay, play with paying,
acknowledge our due, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally
due another person (Hochschild 1983; p. 18).’
Through feeling rules therefore, emotional labour is linked to obligations and
responsibilities within clinical settings.
Hochschild draws on the work of Goffman and Stanislavski to describe people’s
experience of emotions and distinguishes between surface acting and deep acting.
She defines surface acting as the ability to ‘deceive ourselves about our true emotion
as much as we deceive others (Hochschild 1983; p 33)’. In surface acting, the person
merely paints on an effective display through various bodily gestures without
actually feeling them. In deep acting however, the person learns to believe in the
emotions they are expressing through ‘conscious mental work’ and modifies their
inner feelings to match the emotion behaviour required by the organization.
Underlying Hochschild’s work is the idea that emotions are exploited by
organizations so that they can make a profit. Hochschild’s (1983) research examined
the work of flight attendants in Delta Airlines and described how the company
recruited and trained staff to sell the company through a particular image. People
were selected for the company who could ‘project a warm personality’ and ‘convey a
spirit of enthusiasm (Hochschild 1983, p. 97)’. During training, flight attendants were
taught to treat passengers as though they were guests in their own home, learnt
that passengers were always right, and taught that they should always have an
agreeable manner, whatever people said to them. The underlying purpose of
emotional labour in these situations was to promote the company image, increase
sales and secure greater profit for the company. Emotions were thus seen as a
commodity and allowed the exploitation of people within the market economy
(Bone 2002).
Moreover Hochschild (1983) argues that emotional labour is linked to gender,
women’s work, status and power. She argues that women undertake more
emotional labour than men in the home because they offer it to men as a gift in
exchange for material support. Hochschild (1983) suggests that the comodification
of emotion leads to staff experiencing an emotional dissonance between their
‘real/true’ self and their ‘false self’ that has consequences for their perception of
authentic emotion. She argues that organizations subvert the employee’s true self
through techniques they learn within organizational training programs that may later
cause the employee difficulties.