Arlie Russell Hochschild is a pioneer of theory and research on ‘emotional labour’, in the process opening up a novel field of enquiry. Resisting any temptation to ‘reduce’ the emotions either to biological or social phenomena, she argues that they are uniquely related to both action and cognition. Emotions for her, as Simon Williams summarises it, ‘emerge when bodily sensations are joined with what we see or imagine – forged on the template of prior expectations – and it is on this basis that we discover our own particular view of the world and our readiness to act within it.’ Hers is a sociological account that aspires to incorporate the biological.
The notion of ‘emotion management’ figures largely in her work. It is an idea that invites a consideration beyond private acts. What might appear to be private acts are actually socially patterned in accordance with public ‘feeling rules’. And these feeling rules are responsive to, even reflect, the distribution of power in society. One of the principal themes in Hochschild’s work concerns the manner in which the private ways we use feelings are transmuted into use for commercial ends. It is in this context that she writes of the ‘managed heart’ in late, or as I prefer ‘high’, capitalism. She deploys the term ‘emotional labour’, which she defined as follows: ‘the management of feeling to create publicly observable facial and bodily display’, which is subsequently ‘sold for a wage and therefore has ‘exchange value’.’ Emotional labour can be contrasted with emotion management, in that while the former has exchange value, the latter refers to the same acts performed in a private context where they have ‘use value’.
As is well known, these concepts received empirical anchorage in Hochschild’s study of flight attendants, who in many respects comprise a paradigmatic case. This is because their jobs entail putting their ‘company hearts’ on open and conspicuous display. Indeed, this is an intimate part of the service they are offering: their smiles are part of the job. Hochschild here makes an interesting – Goffman-like – distinction between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting. With surface acting we consciously try to change how we appear to others by manipulating our body language. With deep acting on the other hand, what is required is a taking over of the ‘levers of feeling production’ with a view to actually altering what we feel (eg suppressing anger and substituting sympathy). Predictably, it is deep acting that most troubles Hochschild. Williams summarises: ‘emotion work can be done by the ‘self upon the self’, by the ‘self upon others’ or by ‘others upon oneself’.
Hochschild discerns three stances workers might take with reference to their work. First, they might over-identify with their work, in the process failing to develop effective depersonalising strategies. The risk here is of burnout. Second, they might make a distinction between themselves and their doing their job. This reduces the risk of burnout but can lead people to blame themselves for the very making of the distinction because it necessarily involves lacking sincerity. And third, they might make this same distinction between self and job, but without any associated self-blame: they see the job as involving precisely this capacity to act appropriately. The risk here is of creeping cynicism: the job requires selling illusions. In each of this trio of cases the risks are inversely related to work autonomy. Hochschild writes: ‘when deep gestures of exchange enter the market sector and are bought and sold as an aspect of their labour power, feelings are commoditized. When the manager gives the company his enthusiastic faith, when the airline stewardess gives her passengers her psyched-up but quasi-genuine reassuring warmth, what is sold as an aspect of labour power is deep acting.’
It should already be apparent that gender is a key and abiding social structure for Hochschild (albeit one which must be considered alongside other structures like class and race). This has led her to focus more recently on aspects of loving and caring. She writes of ‘global care chains’. Such chains ‘connect’ three types of worker: migrating mothers who care for the offspring of professional mothers in the first or high-income ‘developed’ world; those who care for the migrants’ children back at home; and those who care for the children of the women who care for the migrants’ children. Hochschild writes: ‘poorer women raise children for wealthier women while still poorer – or older or more rural – women raise their children.’ She goes on the distinguish between four main types of care to be found in the USA:
- Traditional model – eg the homemaker mother;
- Postmodern model – eg the working mother who ‘does it all’ with little or no help;
- Cold modern model – eg impersonal institutional care for the very young (and very old);
- Warm modern model – eg a mix of private and institutional care for the very young (and very old).
Each type presents a model of what care is, who should give it and how much is good enough. Her account here as elsewhere presciently insists on a global framework.
Emotions are involved in how we see ourselves, how we take our decisions and act, and how others see us. They are the cement in the interstices of life. But they can also be mobilised for or against us (Hochschild makes much, for example, of recipes of feelings calculatingly aroused in the service of ideology, as well as of the bureaucratisation and commodification of the emotions more generally in contemporary capitalism). What Hochschild has done is open up the emotions to sociological investigation. And she accomplishes this in a broad sweep from the day-to-day micro-investigations associated with interactionism and the macro-studies around social order and social change associated with what is sometimes now characterised as classic or ‘big sociology’.
Reference
Simon Williams (2017) Arlie Russell Hochschild. In Ed Rob Stones: ‘Key Sociological Thinkers’ (3rd Edition). London; Palgrave McMillan.