Summary:

In the book that first introduced the idea of emotional labor (1983), Arlie Hochschild describes jobs
where emotional expressions like smiles are "part of the work," and the corporate processes that
train workers into forms of feeling that are deeper than just a surface performance, whether those
workers function as the positive "toe" of the company or its negative "heel."
Throughout the book, Hochschild:

offers definitions of emotional labor in relation to other kinds of labor

argues that emotional labor is more than just a surface performance, engaging with people's
intimate emotional life

discusses the idea of "feeling rules" in life

explores the role of feeling rules in the exchanges of private life

describes the use of "feeling rules" in commercial environments

contrasts positive and negative emotional labor

highlights gender differences in emotional labor

considers the link between "authenticity" and emotional labor

Methods
Hochschild's book is built around a thorough range of inquiry, with a special focus on the experience
of flight attendants:

personal stories in a practice of reflexive self-disclosure

surveys of two Berkeley classes (n=261) coded with research assistants for evidence of
emotion work. The surveys asked:

"describe a real situation that was important to you in which you experienced a deep
emotion"

"Describe as fully and concretely as possible a real situation that was important to
you in which you either changed the situation to fit your feelings or changed your feelings to
fit the situation.

an extensive ethnographic exploration of the experience of flight attendants at the airline

Delta

attending classes at the Delta Training Center

conversing with trainers on and off duty

conversing with new recruits

conversing with experienced flight attendants

interviewing 20 Delta officials

interview with 7 supervisors in a group

interviewed advertising agents

observed 30 years of Delta advertising material

interviewed two PR officials in charge of "handling" Hochschild

observed flight attendant recruitment at Pan American Airways

group and individual interviews

3-5 hour open-ended individual interviews with 30 flight attendants (25 women, 5 men) from

a range of airlines, with an average of 11 years of experience

5 union officials trying to organize American Airlines flight attendants

a sex therapist who had seen 50 flight attendants as clients

observed an assertiveness training course for flight attendants

interviewed 5 bill collectors at Delta, including the head of Delta's billing department

Throughout the book, Hochschild puts this data in conversation with theory on the nature of the
emotions, the nature of work, and thinking on post-industrialist economies of the 20th century.

Exploring the Managed Heart

In the opening chapter, Hochschild introduces the idea of emotional labor by comparing the
experience of a fight attendant to the child factory laborer described in Marx's Das Kapital. By
starting with this example, Hochschild is contrasting between these two kinds of labor while also
pointing out how the flight attendant's smile and emotions are as much "an instrument of labor" as
the body of the child.
Hochschild argues that "the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself" (5).
Hochschild defines emotional labor as:
the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor
is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value. I use the synonymous terms emotion
work or emotion management to refer to these same acts done in a private context where they
have use value. (7)
Furthermore, emotional requires people to "coordinate self and feeling" and disguise the effort
involved; "otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product--passenger
contentment-- would be damaged" (8). To achieve this Hochschild argues, people engaged in
emotional labor are often expected to train their feelings, not just their performance of feeling. When
people "work up some warmth" of feeling out of obligation to an employer, Hoschild calls this a
"transmutation of the private ways we use feeling" (19).
In this chapter, Hochschild sets up the scholarly conversations her book engages with:

the idea of emotional labor in context of post-industrial socity[1] in the 20th century, where the
need for interpersonal skills in the service industry rather than mechanical skills in manufacturing
were becoming dominant. Hoschild also links her work to discussions of geographic and social
mobility, which require people to "move through many social worlds and get the gist of dozens of
social roles" (21).

the display of feeling, as explored by sociologist Erving Goffman

discussions on what emotions are, and how people manage emotions (giving this topic an
entire appendix)

discussions of gender and class differences in labor

Feeling as a Clue
In this chapter, Hoschild sets shares an example from the flight attendant training, where a trainer
encourages flight attendants in strategies to remove anger or irritation and also "reduced the anger
in the class" as she teaches. Hoschild shares this example, along with stories by flight attendants, to
set up the possibility that feeling might not just be a "biological event, something that external stimuli
can bring on" but might be something that people manage (29). Drawing from Freud, Hoschild
argues that feeling is instead a "signal function" that comes from a standpoint. Sometimes we use it
to justify our actions, but sometimes we hide it or transform it.

Managing Feeling
When we manage our feelings, is it just an act, or is it something deeper? Hoschild argues that
Erving Goffman's work on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life[2] focuses on "surface acting"
and that another form of emotional performance, "deep acting" is also present in emotional labor. To
do so, she draws from the Stanislavski method of acting[3], where actors are encouraged to draw
from personal experience to go beyond pretending to feel to actually feeling. Goffman argues that
there are two kinds of deep acting:

"One is by directly exhorting feeling"

"making indirect use of a trained imagination"

In this second case, people use "emotion memory" to recall things that prompt the kind of feeling
needed in a particular situation (40). The method actor "must first experience them in that way too,
perhaps with an eye to using the feelings later" (41). To make use of this emotion memory, "the actor
must believe that an imagined happening really is happening now." by conjuring an "as if"
supposition that they bring to the current situation (42).
Hoschild that this kind of deep acting occurs often in everyday life, drawing from her surveys of
Berkeley students. She describes moments where students felt that their emotional reaction to
situations didn't appropriately match a situation, and they used their emotion memory to adjust their
emotions(43). For example, one student discusses a painful break-up by describing a "double
pretending" where she was "pretending to him" that she loved him and "pretending to herselve that
she loved him." After the breakup, she also attempted to retrain her emotions with that interpretation
(45-6). In another case, Hoschild describes someone who is trying to change a sense of being
trapped in a marriage into a sense of wanting to remain voluntarily.
Hoschild argues that institutions can also be involved in emotion management, where "companies,
prisons, schools, churches... assume some of the functions of a director" in method acting,
suggesting "how to imagine and... how to feel" like "a farmer puts blinders on his workhorse to

guide its visions forward" (49). She argues that "institutions arrange their front stages... guide the
way we see and what we are likely to feel spontaneously," whether they are medical facilities, a
psychiatrist's office, or an airplane. Finally, Hoschild offers examples of a telephone company
offering prescription-free drugs to help employees manage their moods [4]

Feeling Rules
When we manage our emotions to follow "a script or a moral stance," Hoschild calls those scripts
"feeling rules." After outlining the ways that different social contexts vary in the feeling rules, Hoschild
discusses the "rule reminders" through which we recognize that these rules exist, whether reminders
come from ourselves or others, through explicit reference to how we should feel ("cajoling, chiding,
tasing, scolding, shunning)(59), the reactions of others.
Hoschild also outlines differences between psychiatry and sociology, examining the case of the
emotional anxiety experienced by a bride. Where psychiaty would focus on the individual's feeling,
the sociologist would focus on the ceremony, the social context, and the web of rights and
obligations that interact with the person's own feelings to foster "proper" feelings within a ritual. The
anxious bride feels "a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling" and carries out "emotion
work" to prompt herself to "be happy" (61).
This sense of "misfitting feelings" reveals "feeling rules," according to Hoschild, often felt at
weddings, funerals. We might feel too much or too little, experience mis-timed feelings, and face
challenges around the public-ness of those feelings as we encounter rules about the right place and
time to experience feelings.
Beyond individual events, Hoschild also discusses the role of feeling rules in long-term relationships.
She argues that while these close relationships "expect to have more freedom from feeling rules and
less need for emotion work," "the deeper the bond, the more emotion work, and the more
unconscious we are of it" (68). Hoschild discusses the idea of family as a "relief zone away from the
pressures of work," where normative feeling rules, especially between parent and child are very
clear (69). And yet, times of cultural change with rising divorce and remarriage rates, with women
taking on careers and children cared for by professionals, call into question the roles and feeling
rules associated with family. Hoschild argues that "if periods of rapid change induce status anxiety,
they also lead to anxiety about what, after all, the feeling rules are."

Paying Respects with Feeling: The Gift Exchange

In this chapter, Hoschild considers obligations of feeling in cases of reciprocity and exchange. She
uses the example of a novice worker who seeks advice from an expert and who consequently "owes
gratitude" (77). In these exchanges, the sincerity of the gratitude is part of the exchange -- if the

gratitude is not sincere, the receiver may feel that the giver of gratitude has not paid what has been
owed(78). Hoschild calls this a "straight exchange" of feeling (78).
Hoschild also discusses "improvisational" use of feeling exchange with an example where an
instructor fails to support a new employee, the novice complains, the instructure says ironically,
"Gee, I'm really sorry, I feel so bad" and both of them laugh (79). For Hoschild, this ironic expression
of feeling puts the two employees in solidarity rather than conflict by acknowledging that the priorities
that expect an opology are set by the company, not the novice.
People with obligations could feel could choose not to pay by failing to follow the emotion rule. They
could also engage in "antipayment," where the obliged person doesn't follow the emotion rule and
also permits displays of opposite feelings (81).
Hoschild also discusses emotional "offerings" to long-term relationships, what happens when people
take on emotional work to maintain a relationship, especially marriages, where Hoschild considers
equal opportunities and status hard to maintain.

Feeling Management
In this chapter, Hoschild reports her work at Delta airlines to explore "what happens to the way a
person relates to her feelings or to her face" when emotion is managed and sold by a company in
situations where "workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers" (89).
In these contexts, "a separation of display and feeling" (emotive dissonance) "is hard to keep up
over long periods" (90). Hoschild offers a fascinating claim about the history of contestation over
emotional labor in the airline industry leading up to her fieldwork in 1978:
In the airline industry of the 1950s and 1960s, a remarkable transmutation was achieved. But certain
trends... led this transmutation to fail in the early 1970s. An industry speed-up and a stronger union
hand in limiting the company's claims weakened the transmutation... Those who sincerely wanted to
make the deeper offering found they could not do so, and those who all along had resisted company
intrusions on the self came to feel some rights to freedom from it...When the transmutation
succeeded, the worker was asked to take pride in making an instrument of feeling. When it
collapsed, workers came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated, and
susceptible to damage. (91)
In this chapter, Hoschild describes how Delta's focus on profits influenced its effort to link up its
advertising with its expected flight attendant behavior, offering a service that is "human and
personal" (93). Some airlines (not Delta) even encouraged sexualized advertising and attendant
behavior as an attempt to reduce the fear of flying among male customers, a set of expectations that
came to characterize public understanding of the role [5]. In this context, "ordinary niceness is no
longer enough; after all, hasn't the passenger paid for extra civility?" (95).

Hoschild outline the corporate forces at work in this emotional labor(95):

the selection process of flight attendants, where:

manuals of conduct for interviewees focus on their emotional bearing

applicants are selected based on appearance

applicants are screened for "outgoing middle-class sociability," based on the kind of
image they want to project and customers they want to reach

applicants are chosen "for their ability to take stage directions about how to 'project'
an image" (98)

Training for nearly 9 hours a day: where "the training would... stake out a series of company
claims on private territorials of self" (100-102)

reminders that employees could be easily replaced

standards of conduct (no alcohol, no personal pastimes like knitting or reading, no

gifts)

changing notion of home (since staff could be living in many different places in their
early career)

weight standards for attendants

identifying with the company and seeing themselves as representing the company

the sense that it was safe to feel dependent on the company

the idea that the company was a family

appeals to smile and to modify feeling states, asking trainees to "think of a

passenger as if he were a 'personal guest in your living room.' "

Hochschild pays especially close attention to the analogy of the workplace to the living room,
focusing on moments when the analogy would break down in moments of danger, unreciprocated
hospitality, or "when the going gets rough" with late planes and crying babies.

Another analogy given to airline attendants it the appeal to think of unruly customers "just like
children," referring to them by name and using terms of empathy (111).
Airline companies also manage employee feelings by encouraging certain kinds of language:
"supervisors never speak officially of an obnoxious or outrageous passenger, only of
an uncontrolled passenger" (111). One evocative example refers to a passenger who "snitched" the
dessert from another person's tray; the attended responded by saying that "I notice this man's
dessert is on your tray" rather than escribing blame (112).
In addition to these cases of individual emotional labor between attendants and customers,
Hochschild also describes collective emotional labor, outlining the work done in teams and the
banter that regulates and relaxes flight attendants (115-116).
Hochschild gives more space to the role of supervision, from customer comments go into the
personal files of flight attendants the reviews of "plaiclothes supervisors" influence careers, and the
way that direct supervisors use that information to make decisions affecting attendants. Mostly,
attendants are rated by customers in twice-annual passenger evaluations, and the supervisors
emotional workers that perform the face of the company to attendants, just as attendants are
the face of the company to customers.(118)
Hochschild argues that all of these forms of emotion work are transmuted from the private realm (the
living room) to the commercial setting (119) in places like Delta. To achieve this, Hochschild argues,
workers must "give up control over how the work is to be done," as company policies are decided
further up the chain. For this reason, Hochschild calls the deep acting of emotional labor "a new
development in deskilling" that narrowly defines how workers carry out their labor. In the case of
flight attendants, who are highly trained to handle emergency situations, their emotional labor
became the focus of people's perception of their job as "no more than glamorous waitresses" despite
their substantial skills in logistics and emergency management (120,121).
The status of emotional labor is in tension with company imperatives for efficiency, argues
Hochschild, who describes the way that flight attendants had less time with individual passengers as
airplanes became faster, passenger capacity grew, and airports reduced layover times with greater
efficiency (122). The U.S. recession in the early 1970s prompted this drive for efficiency, and
Hochschild relates stories from employees who experienced it.

Organizing By Emotion Workers

While this topic doesn't get a whole chapter in Hochschild's book, I see this as one of the most
interesting.Natematias (talk) 02:54, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
Hochschild describes the challenges of engaging in labor activism in emotion work: "since their job is
to act upon a commercial stage, under managerial directors, their protest may take the form of
rebelling against the costumes, the script, and the general choreography" (126). Here, Hochschild

describes actions by flight attendants to set up unions to organize for higher wages, more
recreational trips, better health ansd safety regulations, and larger crews:
"what is directly relevant here is that they have challenged company regulations affecting whole
territories of the body and its adornment, regulations on facial make-up, hairstyles, undergarments,
jewelry, and shoe styles" (126)
One example of airline activism is the "shoe-in" where crews would collectively wear shoes against
regulations, wear an extra piece of jewelry, or differ from regulations inthe make-up they war. If the
employee was cited for the offence, the grievance would then become a point of contention between
unions and the company, especially around body weight regulations, where employees would
calibrate their weight to be just high enough above regulations to pressure the company on these
rules and potentially prompt legal action (127). The most notable of these tensions was what
Hochschild called "the smile war" around the requirement of employees to smile. Workers would
sometimes refuse to perform and "go into robot" by visibly pretending to show feeling in an ironic
critique of the labor required of them (129).
If a stage company were to protest against the director, the costume designer, and the author of a
play, the protest would almost certainly take the form of a strike--a total refusal to act. In the airline
industry the play goes on, but the costumes are gradually altered, the script is shortened little by
little, and the style of acting itself is changed-- at the edge of the lips, in the cheek muscles, and in
the mental activities that regulate what a smile means (131)

Emotional Labor and the Redefined Self

In this section Hochschild puts forward three questions unique to those who do emotional labor:

"how can I feel really identified with my work role and with the company without being fused
with them?" (132)

"how can I use my capacities[for deep acting] when I'm disconnected from from those I am
acting for" -- the airline cabin is not a living room full of personal guests but a cabin "full of
demanding strangers," so they fall back on surfce acting and worry about "being phony" (134)

"if I'm doing deep acting for an audience from whom I'm disconnected, how can
I maintain my self-esteem without becoming cynical?" How does one maintain the illusion
safely?

Between the Toe and the Heel: Jobs and Emotional Labor

Here, Hochschild presents the results of her smaller, less former research with collections at Delta,
the "heel" of the company when compared to the smiles of flight attendants. Yet unlike flight
attendants, bill collectors were not screened or trained as carefully; Hochschild imagines that
employees "had probably learned skills in escalating aggression much earlier in life" (139). These
employees appreciated not having to act nice, and unlike the attendants who enhance customer
status, these employees deflate the customer's status and work at "wearing down the customer's
presumed resistance to paying" (139). In the offices of these employees were signs like "Catch your
customer off guard. Control the conversation" (141). Collectors, who were allowed to give false
names, learned from their own managers to rapidly escalate the stress in a conversation and avoid
feeling empathy or trust for customers (141). Among the debt collecters interviewed by Hochschild,
aggressiveness is expected in these contexts and complaints are considered a sign of success
(146).
Hochschild concludes the chapter by identifying examples of emotional labor in a wide variety of jobs
as well as the family.

Gender, Status, and Feeling

In this chapter, Hochschild connects gender and status to emotion work, arguing that emotion work
is not as important for men as women, and not in the same ways, because "women in general have
far less independent access to money, power, authority, or status in society" and "are a subordinate
social stratum" (162-3):

"lacking other resources, women make a resource out of feeling and offer it to men as a gift
in return for the more material resources they lack"

men and women tend to be allocated to different kinds of emotion work: women as flight
attendants and men as bill collectors.

"the general subordination of women leaves every individual woman with a weaker 'status
shield' against the displaced feelings of others" and therefore more likely targets for the
aggression and abuse of others (163)

"a different portion of the managed heart is enlisted for commercial use" between men and
women, with women responding to subordination by using their appearance and relational skills
defensively, while male workers wield anger and threats-- with both groups experiencing
alienation or estrangement from that part of them

To support these claims, Hochschild talks about common stereotypes about middle class women
and how they influence how women are seen. She also discusses the expectations that women

display cooperative and "emotional arts" to succeed. Citing Vian Illich on "Shadow Work" [6], where
"the trick is to erase any evidence of effort, to offer only the clean house and the welcoming smile"
(167).
Hochschild argues that another reason for gender differences might be that "more women at all
class levels do unpaid labor of a highly interpersonal sort" (170). She also describes the rising
number of women in the workplace; in the early 19080s, emotional labor constituted 1/3 of
employment in the U.S., 1/4 of all men's employment and over half of women's employment.
Hochschild argues that when women are placed in jobs of emotional labor, attitudes towards women
in general are affected; even as women are afforded courtesies of politeness or chivalry, "their
feelings are accorded less weight than the feelings of a man" (171). This can happen in two ways:

"by considering them rational but unimportant"

"by considering them irrational and hence dismissable"

In the workplace, people who have less status (e.g. women) have less of a "shield" against abuse,
claims Hochschild. As a result, "a day's accumulation of passenger abuse for a woman differs from a
day's accumulation of it for a man," as women are "more exposed than men to rude or surly speech,
to tirades" (174). At Delta, male attendants were asked about their career plans, while women
attendants were asked why they weren't married (176). Male flight attendants reacted to passengers
"as if they had mroe authority than they really did" while "female flight attendants... assuming that
passengers would honor their authority less, used more tactful and deferential means of handling
abuse" (178). The result was an assumption that women flight attendants had a "higher tolerance for
abuse" (179).
Hochschild concludes this chapter by examining the ways that companies used public perceptions of
women as motherly or sexually attractive to "attach profit to these qualities" (182). As a result,
women felt estranged from these statuses and many female flight attendants saw therapists to work
through a loss of sexual interest (183).

The Search for Authenticity

Might the growing role of emotional labor help explain the increasing focus on "authenticity" in
Western society and commercial life? Hochschild concludes the book by considering this question.
To begin, Hochschild argues that "a good part of modern life involves exchange between total
strangers" and that emotional labor preserves the possibility of trust and good will rather than
suspicion and anger.
When people have trouble "adjusting self to role" and are estranged from display of emotions,
feeling, or the signal function that emotion offers to the self, they might doubt themselves -- they

might also be doubted by others as just friendly for their job. This is the context into which
authenticity becomes important. Hochschild cites Lionel Trilling's Norton lectures on Sincerity and
Authenticity[7], which outline the history of this idea.

Appendices
The appendix of this book is well worth exploring, which offers an overview of academic thinking on
the emotions "from Darwin to Goffman" up to the point of publication. Another appendix offers some
early results from cognitive psychology in the early 80s on how to name and describe feeling, and
the role that naming plays in our personal experience of emotion
The notes and bibliography of the book are also extensive; together with the appendices, they
comprise roughly 1/3 of the printed book.
Theoretical and practical relevance:
This book, which introduced the idea of emotional labor, is a classic work of sociology. It's notable for
its arguments, for its methods, and for the clear and winsome style. The book won the Charles
Cooley Award in 1983, awarded by the American Sociological Association and received an
honorable mention for the C. Wright Mills Award. Highly recommended.