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 management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or her face? (p. 89).
Specifically, in observing the practices of training Delta airline flight attendants, and in gathering information on their work requirements, it is intriguing to note how much a part of their job deep actin...