journal entry#4

Sociological Social Psychology: Emotional Labour

Katherine Watson, PhD

Sociology 230

Emotional Life

• Emotion is profoundly social • Social object and a social force • Shaped by cultures, social structures and power • Emotional experience results from the meaning that individuals make of

social interactions. • The role of expectations in social interaction.

Social Regulation of Emotions

• Emotion norms also shape the way we experience and express emotion. • Feeling Rules: social norms that tell us how we should and shouldn’t feel in

particular situations. • Violation of feeling rules may be perceived as inappropriate and/or deviant. Many

people attempt to change their feelings to be consistent with social norms. • Display Rules: social norms that tell us how we should express our emotion.

• Violation of display rules are considered inappropriate or deviant expressions of emotions.

Emotion Management

• Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feelings

• Emotion work: management of feelings to create appropriate displays • Emotional labour: effort to bring about a feeling state (emotional

management) at work. “Selling your feelings”.

• Consider situation, frame and feeling • Evocation • Suppression

Emotion Management

• Surface Acting: • pretending to have feelings and displaying emotions that are not actually felt. Deceiving

others but not ourselves. • Deep Acting:

• Attempts to experience the emotions that are required to be displayed.

• Emotional Dissonance • discrepancies between expressed and felt emotions which can lead to estrangement

from actual feelings.

Emotional Labour

• Workplace • Emotions are a commodity and have exchange value

• Bhave and Glomb ( 2009) measured occupations in the U.S. that require highest amount of emotional labour. • degree of caring for others • Interacting with customers • Conflict • Dealing with angry or unpleasant people

Emotional Labour

• Working with the public; • and communicating with others outside the organization

• Top Jobs with High Levels of emotional labour • Lawyers • Correctional officers • Registered Nurse • Bill collectors • Law enforcement • Dispatchers • Social Workers • Public Transport

Emotional Labour

• Therapists • Receptionists • Retail Sales • Managers (PR) • Wait staff • Education (Teachers; Principals) • Counselors • Tourism

• Impact on workers not always recognized • Can be both positive and negative

Emotional Labour

• Characteristic emotions are associated with social role identities. These are normative states that individuals try to attain.

• For example: Nurses should be compassionate; Teachers should be caring; flight attendants should be happy

Emotional Labour

• Status Shields: norms and expectations that protect higher status individuals from negative emotions. • Protection from others (such as patients or clients) • Also a shelter from the demands of engaging in emotional labour.

• For example Attorneys and physicians (high status) vs. nurses and administrative assistants or paralegals (lower status).

• Disadvantaged groups do most of the emotional labour in lower status jobs • These jobs are often held by women and visible minorities.

Racialized and Classed Contexts: Shifting Audiences and Changes in Emotional Labor Among Restaurant Servers. B. Billingsley

• where customer satisfaction is of paramount importance, service sector employees are likely to experience minimal control in how much emotional labor is required for their job • “Communities of coping” are particularly important to restaurant

servers in high-stress environments because they help to prevent burnout and build solidarity. Servers value and also benefit emotionally from the strong ties they have with one another. • mutually reinforcing consequences of emotional labor: building a

sense of community among servers and reproducing racialized and classed perceptions about customers.

Racialized and Classed Contexts

• concepts of “frontstage” and “backstage” spaces (Goffman), and argue that workers’ emotional labor with customers occurs in the frontstage whereas the consequences of dealing with emotional labor are likely to take place in the back-stage • how well servers manage their emotional labor and presentation of self

directly impacts how much money they make. • Tipping. • Because of the need for venting, joking, and bantering to process stress

from emotional labor, backstage spaces become a host for communities of coping. • Two-faced racism: non-disclosed racialized perceptions in frontstage

spaces, that are instead expressed openly in back- stage spaces

Conclusion

• Emotional labour micro-macro levels of analysis • Social roles • Power and status