Feeling Rules

Over the past 30 years, sociologists have become more attuned to the ways that emotions are subject to social structures and constraints, rather than seen as individualized, private domains. The concept of feeling rules offers a framework for understanding some of the key ways by which sociologists have provided an analysis of emotions in a social context. In her groundbreaking work The Managed Heart (1983), sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild examines the sociology of emotions by exploring three related but distinct concepts: feeling rules, emotion management/emotion work, and emotional labor.

Hochschild describes feeling rules as a kind of social contract that informs the appropriate and prescribed emotions in a given situation. Feeling rules govern the extent, direction, and duration of feelings called for in a situation or interaction. These rules also specify the emotional debt owed to each of the actors in an exchange. Abiding by feeling rules allows an individual to be fully integrated into the social norms of society. As ideology shifts, feeling rules shift, as they are the “bottom side” of ideology. Emotion management, also called emotion work, is required to conform to feeling rules. Emotion work is a deeply reflective, internal process of first assessing the situation, the feeling rules applicable to the situation, and the emotions felt in the moment, then negotiating those three factors to produce or display the appropriate feeling. It is the act of trying to change, in degree or quality, a feeling or emotion.

Emotion management builds on E. Goffman's dramaturgical perspective and psychoanalytic interpretations of interpersonal interactions. The acts of “trying to feel” and “trying not to feel” are essential in Hochschild's conceptualization. The idea that individuals have agency in formatting their emotional displays to conform to social feeling rules is what distinguishes Hochschild's idea of emotion management from that of social psychologists and that of psychoanalysts. It agrees with previous scholars that the expression of emotions is shaped by social forces but goes a step further to argue that social factors affect what people think and do about their emotions. Managing emotions, inducing or suppressing feelings according to feeling rules, is common in private life but also occurs in the workplace. Emotional labor captures the relationship between emotion management and employment. Hochschild examines the ways that emotion work is specifically tied to the rise of the postindustrial, service-oriented economy and the corporate cultures that resulted. Hochschild focuses on the ways in which feelings are produced and exchanged for wages as employers exercise authority over their employees’ emotional displays.

Emotional labor is emotion management within the confines of feeling rules specified by the employer. Workers’ emotion management is regulated, and their feelings are exchanged for wages. The job of the employee includes managing emotions so that their display is consistent with organizational ideology. The emotional displays of employees both enhance the good or service produced by the company and are a commodity. Hochschild explicitly deals with gender and class differences in the performance and exchange value of emotional labor, arguing that women and middle- and upper-class individuals are more likely to be required to perform emotional labor because their work tends to deal more with people than with things, whereas men and lower- and working-class workers tend to deal more with things. Ultimately, feeling rules provide the baseline for both emotion management and emotional labor. They establish the expected, appropriate emotional demeanor in various settings and contexts. As such, feeling rules make emotion management and emotional labor possible by creating the basis for which these practices occur.

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