The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, With a New Afterword

In private life we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotional work," just as we manage our outer expressions through surface acting. But what happens when this system of adjusting emotions is adapted to commercial purposes? Hochschild examines the cost of this kind of "emotional labor." She vividly describes from a humanist and feminist perspective the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an "occupational hazard" for one-third of America's workforce. Cover......Page 1 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright Page......Page 5 Table of Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Part One/Private Life......Page 14 1. Exploring the Managed Heart......Page 16 2. Feeling asclue......Page 37 3. Managing Feeling......Page 48 4. Feeling Rules.......Page 69 5. Paying Respects with Feeling: The Gift Exchange......Page 89 Part Two/Public Life......Page 100 6. Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses......Page 102 7. Between the Toe and the Heel: Jobs and Emotional Labor......Page 150 8. Gender, Status, and Feeling......Page 175 9. The Search for Authenticity......Page 198 Afterword to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition......Page 212 Appendixes......Page 222 A. Models of Emotion: From Darwin to Goffman......Page 224 B. Naming Feeling......Page 246 C. Jobs and Emotional Labor......Page 257 D. Positional and Personal Control Systems......Page 265 Notes......Page 266 Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition......Page 290 Bibliography......Page 300 Index......Page 330 In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose. Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated its cost to those who do it for a living. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an Arlie Hochschild examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us.

Praise for the first edition:

"Profoundly original. . .terribly important."—Studs Terkel

"The Managed Heart is written so accessibly that it appeals to both the academic and the general reader."—Gail Sheehy, New York Times Book Review

"Perceptive study of 'emotional labor'—jobs like those of [flight attendants], in which workers are trained to use emotion as actors do, but who. . .often end up unsure of what they really feel."—New York Times Books of the Year, 1983

"A worthy study of the high, and often hidden, personal costs that people in certain occupations pay for agreeing to treat their feelings as merchandise."—San Jose Mercury News

San Jose Mercury News

A worthy study of the high, and often hidden, personal costs that people in certain occupations pay for agreeing to treat their feelings as merchandise.

"In this second edition of her groundbreaking 1983 work, Hochschild examines what happens when systems of adjusting emotions - the inducing or suppressing of love, envy, and anger - are adapted to commercial purposes. She defines such "emotional labor" and vividly describes from humanist and feminist perspectives the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an occupational hazard for one-third of America's workforce."--BOOK JACKET In a section in Das Kapital entitled "The Working Day," Karl Marx examines depositions submitted in 1863 to the Children's Employment Commission in England.