Due Oct 4 - review and add to essay

The commodification of feelings can best be described as the reshaping of emotions to suit commercial interests. Feelings are commodified when the natural capacity of the individual to engage in emotion work is sold for a wage and bought by corporate or organizational interests to satisfy the profit motive among other interests. In the same way, physical labor may be sold to a factory that is in the line of making things, those working in the service industry often perform emotional labor as they give service to their clientele for the result hoped for is usually a smile, a feeling, a mood, or a relationship. Often, the service industry employees are detached from such feelings as they are required to produce in others (Appelrouth and Edles, 2011).

Not everyone experiences the commodification of feelings in the same manner. Class and gender relations shape emotion management to such an extent that women and middle-class workers are more vulnerable to the commodification of their emotive experiences. These experiences are transmuted, so to speak, from being private acts that are fully under the individual’s control to those which are publicly administered by supervisors. Companies in many instances, in fact, codify these emotive experiences in their policies and training manuals. One cannot be successful in the people professions without diligently controlling their emotions so that the most appropriate feeling state such as ambitious, caring, dedicated, and trustworthy that is associated with their occupation may be expressed at all times (Appelrouth and Edles, 2011).

The concept of emotional labor is closely tied to the commodification of feelings. People manufacture in themselves emotions that are appropriate for the job that they are paid for, but these emotions must not necessarily demonstrate their personal feelings. In short, only the emotions that are job-explicit may have a place at work. People may also work at jobs that require a lack of emotion or particular appropriate emotions be expressed in accordance to what is known as societal feeling rules in response to customers. It is the view that certain events ought to produce certain levels of joy or grief in some specific intensity and for a particular length of time that embody the social or collectivist conventions that are known as feeling rules. These then require that employees engage in some form of deep acting so that they can get a wage, in essence creating the commodification of feeling. With feeling rules, emotive experiences are socially patterned so that the standards used in emotional conversation can be defined to determine what various entities right owe or are owed in the currency of feeling (Hochschild, 2003).

When human feelings are commercialized, various consequences can be expected. For one, the relationship between the employee and the job is affected, and secondly, the individual is alienated from his or her self. Flight attendants are good examples of people from whom smiles and friendly attitudes are expected even in the face of increasingly hostile public. In this trade, negative feelings may not be exhibited by staff as anger, fear, or sadness are considered inappropriate and very likely to frighten nervous travelers. In fact, it is usually a plus, and in some places expected, that a flight attendant tries to ease the pain or discomfort of some of the more distressed passengers. Businesses have, however, progressively taken on the view that people are resources that can be deployed however they want, and this scenario has led to the dehumanization of the workforce in some circumstances (Davey, 2011).

In the case of an airline, competition for survival has led to having shorter layovers, a bigger workload on the crew as the staff is reduced, and for the those who manage to retain their jobs, increasingly arduous schedules can be expected. The quality of service has also been widely affected, with the once delicious meals being replaced with typical and tasteless food served in plastic utensils as opposed to the china, silver, and even flowers of times past. With such foreboding conditions, the staff is still expected to smile even when they do not feel like doing so. The job has, in essence, changed from eliciting genuine feelings of contentment and enjoyment which would then effortlessly result in genuine smiles and joy on the part of the crew. Instead, airline crews feel that they are always required to show these feelings, maintaining these outward personas at all costs, despite what they feel within themselves (Davey, 2011).

Emotional labor, which is key in the commodification of feelings, can have a heavy toll on employees that could result in anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic problems. For the flight attendant facing an angry and disgruntled public without any tools to use for the passengers’ comfort while also having to deal with wage and benefit cuts, psychiatric medication such as Prozac comes in handy. Such drugs are used to medicate away the natural emotional pain as it would be ruinous to express it in a public manner, given one’s job (Davey, 2011).

The teaching profession is also affected by the commodification of feelings. Teachers are expected to be helpful, and they must, therefore, be able to control their emotions and communicate properly or risk upsetting the feeling rules at play in their environment. Feeling rules are particularly useful in the classroom as they help determine what is acceptable as appropriate behavior as well as the emotional expressions of other people. A teacher who is relatively new to the profession may have a few problems settling in. She may, for instance, pick on some students more than others or attempt to make a few jokes that are not so nice at the expense of some poor kids. While one could attribute this to a lack of settling in, it also makes for an excellent example of someone that has not properly internalized the feeling rules that are essential for classroom interactions (Kelly, 2013).

It is crucial that a teacher is aware that teaching involves emotions. A kid that sees others being made fun of or being picked out as favorites is not likely to develop a healthy attitude about their teacher. Conversely, teachers are also expected to deal with tantrums, excitement, disobedience, and all manner of emotion that children are likely to exhibit. In all this, they must learn how to respond appropriately. Kelly (2013) rightly points out that teaching can be one of the most demanding professions around. Despite its importance, the job is also one of the most poorly paid and poorly mentored in the country too. The kind of training that teachers usually get from their colleges is mostly abstract, and this leaves new teachers to either sink or swim or their own. The commodification of feelings in the teaching profession comes in when teachers, in the face of all these bleak circumstances, are required to suppress their emotions or evoke certain emotions that they do not feel so that they can respond to situations that present themselves in their classrooms.

When students are rowdy or disobedient, teachers will not always feel like responding kindly or even calmly. The expectation, however, is that they do precisely that. In the Kelly (2013) text, one of the missteps that the teacher in question made was that of making fun of a child who was picking his nose. She asked the whole class to do “the Tommy” as she demonstrated by pretending to pick her nose. While the teacher may have honestly felt derision for the sort of behavior that Tommy had exhibited, her profession requires her to advocate for the development of the child through encouragement and respect. Treating some students as her pets or targets because that is what she felt like doing would be wrong. Her feelings, then, must be commodified if she is to last long in the profession. The teacher may not do what she emotionally feels compelled to do if it does not gel with the feeling rules of the situations that she finds herself in. Instead, she must not only teach the children but also handle their emotions in the process and as such, calm their fears when they are worried or scared, and share in their excitement when they are excited about something. It does not matter what her true feelings are in either of these scenarios because the teacher happens to be part of the people professions, and it is for dealing with people, responding to them in some specific emotional way, that she gets paid. It is the failure to respond in an emotionally appropriate way that could cost a teacher their job.

References

Appelrouth, S., & Edles, L.D. (2011). Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era. Pine Forge Press. E-book.