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MN2002 - Organizational Behavior > Emotional labour > Flashcards

Flashcards in Emotional labour Deck (24)
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1
Q

What is the feeling management?

A
  • management of emotions in everyday life
  • i.e. trying to feel grateful, trying not to feel unhappy etc
  • emotions: a mixture of the natural and the artificial
2
Q

What is the transition from emotion management to ‘emotional labour’?

A
  • the management of internal feelings and the vibe display of these feelings in the face and body
  • emotional labour involves both managing one’s own feelings and managing the feelings of others (perhaps at the same time)
3
Q

What is the transition from private to commercial uses of feelings?

A

“What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play upon a range of feelings for private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations” (Hochschild)

4
Q

What are the three characteristics of jobs that involve emotional labour?

A
  • Require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public
  • Require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person
  • Allow the employer (through training and supervision) to exercise control over the emotional activities of employees
5
Q

What is the demise of factory production and rise of service sector?

A

“The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society” (Daniel Bell, The coming of the post-industrial society)

6
Q

What is ‘customer experience’?

A

An intangible products produced and consumed during human interactions

“The emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself (Hochschild)

Many genuinely enjoy their customer service work. Service workers emphasised the importance of being a ‘people person’ and using communication skills, such as listening, and acting in the course of their work (Anderson et al 2002)

7
Q

Are emotions at work genuinely felt, or are they feigned?

A

‘Surface acting’ (mere body language) vs ‘deep acting’ (a real, self-induced feeling)

8
Q

What sort of labour is required of flight attendants?

A

physical, mental and emotional

9
Q

How are flight attendants required to manage their emotions?

A
  • “The [training] manual suggests that facial expressions should be ‘sincere’ and ‘unaffected’. One should have a ‘modest but friendly smile’ and be ‘generally alert, attentive, not overly aggressive, but not reticent either’ … It is suggested that a successful candidate must be ‘outgoing but not effusive’, ‘enthusiastic with calm and poise’, and ‘vivacious but not effervescent’
  • flight attendants must both invoke feelings (in themselves and others) as well as suppress them
10
Q

What is the importance of authentic smiles, not ‘painted smiles’?

A

“for the flight attendant, the smiles are part her work, a part that requires her to coordinate herself and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly…and the product passenger contentment — would be damaged.” (Hochschild)

11
Q

What is the link between emotional labor and sexuality?

A

“the smile can be sexualized, as in ‘We really move our tails for you to make your every wish come true’ (Continental), or ‘Fly me, you’ll like it’ (National) … So the sexualized and burdens the flight attendant with another task, beyond being unfailingly help and open requests: she must respond to the sexual fantasies of passengers” (Hochschild)

12
Q

What is an example of flight attendants being sexualized?

A
  • ‘We believe the company intentionally does this to make us look a bit sexier and to let the passenger see more’, a union representative said.
  • ‘Some of the Marco Polo members think they can do things to us because they are privileged and we somehow allow it. That is very bad … They think it is part of the their privilege … Afterwards, they believe they can apologise and everything is settled’
  • Increase in incidents of sexual harassment at work, which stewardesses face at least once in every 10 flights
13
Q

What is the link between labour and debt collectors?

A

Debt collectors

  • deflate the customer’s status through hostility and humiliation
  • use of aggressive legal threats
  • treat the customer with skepticism and suspicion

Felling rules devised by management
- “My boss comes into my office and says, ‘Can’t you get madder than that?’. ‘Create alarm!’ — that’s what my boss says” — that’s what my boss

Less strenuous form of emotional labor?
- “I’d rather do eight hours of [debt] collection than four hours of telephone sales. In telephone sales you’ve got to be nice no matter what, and losts of times I don’t feel like being nice. To act enthusiastic is hard work for me” (interview with debt collector; in Hochschild)

14
Q

What is emotion Dissoance?

A

When expressed emotions are in an organizationally desired form (conform to ‘display rules’) but are incongruent with those felt

“A separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods … Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce strain by pulling the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign” (Hochschild)

15
Q

What are some example of occupations that require emotional labour?

A

flight attendants, Disneyland employees, bus drivers, firefighters, police, paramedics, funeral directors, call centre workers, barristers, university lectures

16
Q

What is emotional labour?

A
  • the management of internal feelings and the visible display of these feelings in the face body and voice
  • emotional labor involves both managing one’s own feelings and managing the feelings of others (often at the same time)
  • instrumental use of emotions by organization in the service sector according to standardized ‘feeling rules’
  • surface acting vs deep acting
17
Q

How does the commercial use of emotion differ from its private use?

A
  • emotions are turned into a resource for the organization
  • management control over emotions (e.g. detailed rules and scripts)
  • lack of personal discretion and choice over feelings — estrangement from one’s own internal emotions; deskilling
  • inherent inequality between the self and the other (i.e. flight attendant and passenger)
18
Q

What is the dimensions of inequality?

A

Hochschild compares male/female flight attendants — and look at male debt collectors
- different forms of emotional labor

overrepresentation of women in service sector
cultural conceptions of gender roles

law firm (pierce 1999)
Men: forceful, displays of anger
Women: suppression of anger, caring, comfort

19
Q

What is the link between emotional labour and resistance?

A
  • resistance to demand for emotional labor in an intensified working environment:
    >retreat into surface acting: insincere smiles, minimal personal warmth, ‘going into robot’
    >“If i don’t like someone .. I will be efficient with them, giving them what they want and no more, but I will not be really friendly. I sometimes have a really monotone voice, sounding a bit cold … I will not laugh at their jokes, for example” (Interview with flight attendant; in Taylor and Tyler)
20
Q

What are other types of ‘emotion work’? (e.g. coping strategies)

A
  • “The other crews are the best thing about this job and the only thing that keeps me going. We always manage to have a laugh during flights and that’s what makes the long hours, annoying passengers and terrible working conditions bearable” (Interview with flight attendant; in Bolton and Boyd)
  • women are more likely to shoulder this burden (Pugliesi & Shook)
21
Q

What is the importance of emotional labour in Disneyland?

A

Disneyland as ‘the smile factory’
- “Although we focus our attention on the profit and loss, day-in and day-out we cannot lose sight of the fact that this is a feeling business and we make our profits from that” (Disney executive; cited in Van Maanen)

Training in emotional labor
-“First, we put on a friendly smile. Secondly, we use only courteous phrases. Third, we are not stuffy — the only misters in Disneyland are Mr Toad and Mr Smee” (Disneyland employee handbook; cited in Van Maanen)

22
Q

What are the emotional demands from Disneyland ‘guests’?

A
  • ‘Why aren’t you smiling’, ‘Having a bad day?’, ‘Did Goofy step on your foot?’
  • “I can remember being out on the river looking at the people … I’d come by on my raft and they’d all turn and stare at me. If I gave them a little wave and a grin, they all wave back and smile; all then thousand of them. I always wondered what would happen if I gave them the finger?” (Disneyland employee handbook; cited in Van Maanen)
23
Q

What are the forms of resistance to emotional demands?

A
  • ‘Seat-belt squeeze’, ‘seat-belt slap’, ‘break-toss’, ‘hatch-cover ploy’, ‘near miss’
  • willed emotional numbness: ‘go robot’, ‘automatic pilot’, ‘lapse into a dream’
24
Q

What are the important demand of emotional labour for barristers?

A

Surface acting

  • “You’ve got to pretend to be interested in solicitors’ squalid little lives — interested in their children, their petty squabbles, their workload … you have to smile and assume an interested demeanor” — because solicitors engaged barristers (Harris, 2002)
  • “Advocacy is about bluster; appearing calm, angry, sad, proud, horrified, disbelieving, all on demand” (Harris, 2002)

Gendered aspect to surface acting: male barristers towards female court clerks
- “if you want on first [appear in court first], you flirt … a wink and a smile and chat go a very long way” (Harris 2002)

Limited evidence of deep acting: emotional/professional detachment