Emotion Work

Emotion work, or emotion management as it is often called, means that each encounter with others receives its expected and appropriate amount of feeling. [Page 251]According to Arlie Russell Hochschild, emotions are managed based on an individual's or individuals' understanding of situational and cultural feeling rules (normative ideas about how one should or should not feel in a given situation). For example, one might say, “I tried hard to cry and feel sad when my father died,” or “I just don't think I can feel any sympathy for her even though I should.”

As emphasized by Hochschild, emotion work is the intrapersonal management of one's emotions in both private and public contexts. Consequently, the personal use value of emotion work lies in the efforts of an individual to evoke, transform, or suppress one's feelings through surface acting (purposeful management or alignment of behavioral expression with social expectations or feeling rules) and deep acting (purposeful alignment of one's “genuine” or “natural” emotion with the behavioral expressions; a cognitive strategy). In a paid work context, this emotion work (emotional labor) may be an expected aspect of one's labor power or has exchange value. In other words, in a paid work context, one might be evaluated (get paid, earn tips) according to her or his ability to smile for the customers even if the feeling typically attached to smiling is not felt or remain calm in the face of an angry client even if anger is justified as a response. Emotional labor can be thought of as emotion work with market value or as a commodity. Other researchers have noted that besides being intrapersonal, emotion work may also include the management of others' emotions, which is the interpersonal management of emotions. Consequently, emotion work includes the management of self-feeling and others' feelings in a variety of situations.

Of particular interest to the study of emotion work and gender is the point that emotional labor is a critical component of the service economy and that this economy has been deeply entrenched in the cultural beliefs that suggest women are more naturally suited to this emotion work than are men. Given U.S. cultural assumptions about women's emotionality, women have historically shouldered the burden of emotion work in the work force as well as in the household. Consequently, as deep-acting (a significant aspect of emotional labor) has the greatest potential of being alienating in that it is as much about deceiving self as deceiving others, women may disproportionately face the costs of emotional inauthen-ticity. A great deal ofresearch is seeking to understand whether and to what extent women are disadvantaged in this sense in the service economy and to what extent emotion work in all of its complexity is gendered— experienced differently by males or females, or for those perceived to be feminine or masculine.

Current research on emotion work can be organized into the following categories: (a) a particular emotion (i.e., anger, ambivalence, anxiety, envy, guilt, jealousy, remorse, shame, or sympathy) and its management in given situations (i.e., during an illness or the illness of others, as an aspect of or response to terrorism, or during trials and jury deliberation); (b) women, men, and emotions; (c) emotion work within many widely varying paid work situations (i.e., among paralegals, lawyers, paramedics and firefighters, midwives, medical residents, models, academics, and Wal-Mart greeters) and social movement activism (i.e., animal rights, among hate groups, environmental rights, self-help groups, and in recruitment efforts for activists); and (d) emotion work in families or in close relational partnerships. This entry provides a brief discussion of these combined areas as they particularly relate to gender in society.

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