The Managed Heart
Other books by Arlie Russell Hochschild:
The Second Shift: Working Couples and the Revolution at Home
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy
The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (UC Press)
The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
The Managed Heart
Commercialization of Human Feeling
Updated with a New Preface
ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1983, 2003, 2012 by
The Regents of the University of California
First paperback printing 1985
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1940–.
The managed heart : commercialization of human feeling / Arlie Russell Hochschild.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-27294-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Emotions—Economic aspects. 2. Work—Psychological aspects. 3. Employee motivation. I. Title.
BF531.H62 2012
152.4—dc21
2003042606
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).
For Ruth and Francis Russell
Contents
5 Paying Respects with Feeling: The Gift Exchange
PART TWO/PUBLIC LIFE
6 Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses
7 Between the Toe and the Heel: Jobs and Emotional Labor
8 Gender, Status, and Feeling
9 The Search for Authenticity
Afterword to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
APPENDIXES
A. Models of Emotion: From Darwin to Goffman
B. Naming Feeling
C. Jobs and Emotional Labor
D. Positional and Personal Control Systems
Notes
Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Bibliography
Index
Preface to the 2012 Edition
As I sat five rows back in a Recurrent Training room at the Delta Airlines Stewardess Training Center in the early 1980s, listening to a pilot tell recruits to “smile like you really mean it,” I remember noticing the young woman next to me jotting down the advice verbatim. I had already been talking for months to flight attendants from various airlines, interviews that are reflected in this book. So I had a sense of what feelings—anxiety, fear, ennui, resentment, as well as an eagerness to serve—might underlie that smile.
It was that “pinch,” or conflict, between such feelings and the pilot’s call for authenticity that led me to write down in my own notebook, “emotional labor.” Never did I dream that thirty years later, seated at my computer and exploring the Internet, I would discover some 559,000 mentions of “emotional labor” or “labour,” and its unpaid form, “emotion work.” In their Emotional Labor in the Twenty-first Century, Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, and Deborah Rupp discovered over ten thousand mentions of “emotional labor” (or “labour”) in academic articles, half of them since 2006, and 506 with the term in the title.1
I’m pleased that the idea has caught on but the real reason for such a burst of interest in the subject is, of course, the dramatic rise in the service sector itself. Indeed, as contributors to the American gross domestic product, the manufacturing sector has declined to 12 percent while the service sector has risen to 25 percent. Day-care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, airports, stores, call centers, classrooms, social welfare offices, dental offices—in all these workplaces, gladly or reluctantly, brilliantly or poorly, employees do emotional labor.
But how much of it do they do? And in what way? R. Cross, W. Baker, and A. Parker call some employees “energizers.”2 The coordinator of hospital volunteers, for example, may try to create a cheerful sense of shared mission. Executive leadership trainers and military trainers may, on the other hand, energize recruits in the spirit of get-out-there-and-defeat-the-enemy. Then there are the “toxin handlers”—complaints clerks, bankruptcy court personnel, bank officials dealing with home foreclosures, divorce lawyers, parking meter attendants, and those who specialize in firing workers. (I interviewed one such man for my book, The Time Bind, who described himself as “the man in the black hat.”)3