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Marxism and Education pp 89–116Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Learning the Feeling Rules: Exploring Hochschild’s Thesis on the Alienating Experience of Emotional Labor

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Abstract

Contemporary workplaces are increasingly marked by managerial efforts to harness and mould the emotional product of employees, either as specific commodified interactive service encounters or through securing workers’ personal “commitment” to organizational goals (Brook and Pioch, 2006). This is not confined to private service companies, as public sector services, such as local government and health care, increasingly mimic the competitive, “customer-orientation” management practices of the commercial sector (Bolton, 2005). As such, capital increasingly views organizational emotion (Fineman, 2007) as a resource to be extracted, refined, and exploited (Hochschild, 1983/2003). As such, the process of teaching workers to emotionally labor is a core ma nagement task in contemporary workplaces (Callaghan and Thompson, 2002; Seymour and Sandiford, 2005; Colley, 2006).

I use the term emotional labor to mean 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 those same acts done in a private context where they have use value.

Hochschild, 1983/2003: 7

Being the “right kind of person” is at least as important as doing the right things.

Colley, 2006: 17–18

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Authors
  1. Paul Brook
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Peter E. Jones

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© 2011 Peter E. Jones

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Brook, P. (2011). Learning the Feeling Rules: Exploring Hochschild’s Thesis on the Alienating Experience of Emotional Labor. In: Jones, P.E. (eds) Marxism and Education. Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119864_5

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