Emotional Labor

In a consumer culture, people consume not only products but also services provided by individuals and companies. Just as these consumers want particular goods to meet their needs and desires, they also expect these services to be provided in a way that makes them feel good about consuming or, at least, does not interfere with their consumption. Companies rely on their employees' abilities to provide services with a smile, regardless of their own feelings. When workers suppress or produce emotions to do their job, this process is called emotional labor.

Put another way, consumers (and employers) expect employees to fulfill certain social roles that carry with them emotional obligations. This is a required but unpaid part of their work. For example, a news anchor must remain emotionally neutral during tragedy, a telemarketer must be genuinely pleasant to an angry customer, a Disney employee must always put on a show of fun and never be seen to be unhappy, and a debt collector must quickly summon anger. Thus, an important, often invisible part of the work that face-to-face and voice-to-voice workers provide is to hold back (“manage”) or to create emotions to put forward a suitable physical or emotional appearance to a customer. In short, emotional labor elicits the appropriate response from the consumer, [Page 520]creating value for the consumer, profit for employers, but no extra wages for the employee.

Emotional labor exists mainly in the industrialized countries with a large service economy such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia. It is especially widespread in the United States, where nearly three-quarters of all jobs are located in the service sector.

The term emotional labor was coined by Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart. Hochschild was strongly influenced by Erving Goffman's idea of “impression management,” the social acting that all people do to display their desired image to others. Hochschild applied impression management to emotions. She showed that part of the desired image that employees such as flight attendants and bill collectors must present to customers is a “managed heart”: a proper emotional appearance, regardless of what they really feel. This presentation requires two types of acting: “surface acting,” which obligates workers to strongly suppress feelings to provide the appropriate appearance, and “deep acting,” which requires them to summon the necessary emotion that they then come to feel.