Furthermore, the emotional labour may require some degree of deference on the part of the employee. Bowing is taught to workers at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo because ‘Guests wish to experience an appropriate feeling of prestige or superiority, purely by virtue of their using what is commonly evaluated as a deluxe enterprise.’6 The culture of the hotel industry is about an illusion of old-fashioned servility and ingratiating hierarchy. The flipside of the catchphrase ‘the customer is always right’ is the put-upon employee who is required not only to repress his or her own emotions (irritation, frustration), but also to accept responsibility, which results in the endless and meaningless apologies of service culture. The egalitarian aspirations of Western democratic countries do not seep into the interface between employee and consumer in the service economy. The result is a mismatch between the values of the workplace and the values of consumer culture: in the former, employees are expected to repress their own emotional responses; in the latter, they are encouraged to give them full rein.
Inevitably, the mismatch is most acute amongst the lowest-paid: they are required to provide emotional experiences which they could never afford to receive themselves. In a culture which privileges the expression of emotion and rejects traditional forms of emotional self-management – such as the British stiff upper lip – the mismatch becomes even more acute: on the one hand, the consumer can become more demanding, while on the other, the employee has to control his or her own culturally legitimised emotions.
One study quoted the instructions given to clerical staff at Harvard University, who were advised to ‘Think of yourself as a trash can. Take everyone’s little bits of anger all day, put it inside you, and at the end of the day, just pour it into the dumpster on your way out of the door.’7 In Hochschild’s seminal study, flight attendants were told to think of passengers as guests, children, or people who have just received traumatic news – similar analogies are used in training British call-centre staff. This kind of cognitive restructuring of employees’ responses is required to pamper the customer’s every whim. Such self-control can be very hard work, as management theorist Irena Grugulis points out: ‘Expressing warmth towards and establishing rapport with customers may provide a genuine source of pleasure for workers. Yet in practice, emotions are incorporated into organisations within strict limits. Emotion work does not necessarily legitimise the expression of human feelings in a way that supports the development of healthy individuals, instead it offers these feelings for sale. Work is not redesigned to accommodate the employees’ emotions, rather employees are redesigned to fit what is deemed necessary at work.’8
There is a world of difference between the waitress who chooses to smile, quip with her customers and be good-natured, and the one whose behaviour has been minutely prescribed by a training manual. The former has some autonomy over her own feelings; the latter has been forced to open up more aspects of herself to commodification. Research into a call centre for a British airline concluded: ‘Service sector employers are increasingly demanding that their employees deep act, work on and change their feelings to match the display required by the labour process.’9 Employees are left to manage the dilemmas of authenticity, integrity and their sense of their own natural, spontaneous personality, which all spill into their private lives. Perhaps this reinforces the low self-esteem often associated with women and the low-wage service economy; perhaps it also contributes to the high turnover of call-centre staff – often 25 per cent or more a year.
This alienation from the individual’s own emotions was Hochschild’s concern: ‘When the product – the thing to be engineered, mass produced, and subjected to speed-up and slowdown – is a smile, a feeling, or a relationship, it comes to belong more to the organisation and less to the self. And so, in the country that most publicly celebrated the individual, more people privately wonder, without tracing the question to its deepest social root: “What do 1 really feel?”’10
Perhaps you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. What does it matter if the call handler has to talk as if she is smiling? What does it matter if staff are instructed to smile – has being made to smile ever hurt anyone? This is a fascinating aspect of this form of hard work – how it is dismissed, belittled, or just happens without being remarked on: ‘The truly remarkable feature of emotion work is its sheer ordinariness, the extent to which it has permeated most forms of work and to which it is deemed natural.’11
Two reasons explain the uncritical acceptance of this kind of hard work. The first is that it is largely done by women: 54 per cent of service sector jobs in Britain are held by women, and 89 per cent of the jobs held by women are in the service sector.12 Whatever is regarded as women’s work has historically been underpaid and undervalued compared with men’s work. That structural inequality has been extended to many of the emotionally demanding service jobs created in the last few decades. Women are regarded as being better at managing their own emotions while serving the emotional needs of others; these are skills which they have brought to bear in the building of family and community life, and which until now had little market value.
Secondly, a historical legacy of rational materialism still values the solid, measurable and tangible over the immeasurable and intangible. That makes us better at treating heart disease than afflictions of the heart such as depression and anxiety; the former is declining, the latter are increasing. There is still a cultural stoicism which belittles emotion: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’ But how can you think of yourself as a ‘trash can’ all day, and then go home with the satisfaction of having done a good job? How do you gain the sense of self-worth which properly comes with paid employment if you’re being paid to be servile?
While we’ve learnt that certain forms of labour are inimical to good health – coalmining often led to lung disease, for example – we have yet to begin to think that perhaps some forms of emotional labour fall into the same category. Many people compartmentalise human interactions, applying completely different etiquettes to each: they are generous and solicitous to friends, but switch to being rude to the customer services representative, demanding of the waitress, and ignoring the cleaner and the dustbin men. ‘Blank them out’ is the most common attitude extended towards those who serve. In some ways this is an even more cruel denial of a human being than a patronising hierarchy in which at least ‘everyone had their place’. Underlying this indifference is the erosion of human reciprocity – a sense about what we owe each other – which is symptomatic of a culture which puts so much emphasis on the individual.
Increasingly, policy-makers focus on ‘self-esteem’ as a critical element in how to break the cycle of poverty and deprivation entrenched in some neighbourhoods. It’s an issue which Charles Leadbeater takes up in his book Up the Down Escalator (2002). He quotes Robert William Fogel, the Nobel Prize-winning economist: ‘The modernist egalitarian agenda was based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual and immaterial assets.’ Leadbeater points out that ‘Self-esteem cannot be redistributed in the way income can,’ and goes on to claim that ‘Assets of the spirit [in Fogel’s words] have to be personally produced; they cannot be delivered by the state.’ But self-esteem is not a personal achievement; it is the product of a set of social relations, and it is the state which orders many of them. What is missing from the analysis is how the emotional labour of low-paid jobs in the service sector reinforces that low self-esteem.
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