Human Emotion as a Commodity

In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the transmutation of human emotion into a commodity, and the effects this has on those who daily expend their emotion for the sake of business. While the first part of her book she dedicates to private life, in the second part she discusses the costs of emotion work in the workplace and the different strategies used by both employees and employers to manage these costs. Specifically, Hochschild focuses on the commercial expropriation of feeling management, the differences between various types of emotion labor, and how gender, status and the search for authenticity are effected by the feeling mechanism in each individual.

In the beginning, Hochschild points out that emotion work and emotion exchange are both a natural occurrence in every day lives. Feeling is a clue, she says, a signal that filters out the relevance of what we may see (p. 28). Many times in private life an individual must do some surface acting to obey societal rules of conduct (p. 37). However, there are times when individuals attempt to do deep acting in order to feel ways they think they should (p. 39). In the post-Industrial society, both of these methods of behavior have been confiscated by the business community, especially deep-acting, to compete more readily in the realm of customer service.

When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by manageme

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e service-oriented as well as more amenable to management's demands. Should any of this not work with a passenger or customer who is an "irate", then the trainers ask the flight attendants to not confide in a fellow employee who may escalate the emotion, but instead find one who may be able to take over the deep acting. This works well when there is an even exchange and the employee is able to receive some emotional backup from management in exchange for the emotion work, or some respite from constant customer demand. This is not always the case however. Hochschild points out that in 1978 the airlines began competing by adding more flights, cheaper, faster, fewer stops, fewer flight attendants to more passengers and pushing the customer service aspect to increase the bottom line. Many flight attendants she interviewed and observed simply could no longer reconcile the deep acting customer service with what was demanded of them. Meals, drinks, customer requests, and complaints about the cabin being too full or the flight too late, all kept the attendants so busy that there was no time for empathy or warmth. The display could no longer meet the demand for the display and a type of emotive dissonance (discussed in Chapter 1) had

Category: Psychology - H