Summary
Contents
How do we understand health in relation to society? What role does culture play in shaping our experiences of, and orientation to, health and illness? How do we understand medicine and medical treatment within a sociological framework?
Emotional Labour
Emotional Labour
Emotional labour is the induction or suppression of feeling in order to sustain an outward appearance that produces an emotion in others. This kind of labour is controlled by employers and can be seen as a commodity that has an exchange value, even though it draws on a deep sense of self that is integral to the individual.
The concept of emotional labour was first developed by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983). She was interested in how emotion was used as a commercial commodity to sell products, images and organizations. She drew on the work of Goffman, Dewey, Gerth, C. Wright Mills, Freud and Darwin to create a bio-psycho-social interactionist approach towards emotion and how it was managed. She suggested ...