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Economics and Management Notes Employment Relations Notes

Emotional Labour Notes

Updated Emotional Labour Notes

Employment Relations Notes

Employment Relations

Approximately 32 pages

For each of the 7 topics I studied, I've included my finals revision notes (except High Performance Work Systems, which I did not revise but have included the essay notes for). The notes are very concise (3-4 pages), with each subheading indicating a line of argument that could be taken in an essay on the topic (based on the exam questions that have come up over the last 6 or 7 years - the notes could be used to answer any of these well), and then bulletpointing how the argument could be laid out...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Employment Relations Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Emotional Labour

Definition: centres around the ‘management of feeling to create an observable facial and bodily display’ (Hochschild). Different from emotional work – the process of managing and presenting emotions in the private spheres of our lives.

Argument for exploitation

  • Hochschild: emotional labour entails private feelings being packaged and consumed as a commodified interaction.

    • Workers are alienated through management seizing formal control over the form, timing, giving and withdrawing of emotional feelings, which are instead dictated by codified rules. emotional feelings come to belong more to the organization than to the self.

    • Management impose codified ‘feeling rules’ to ensure a delivery of desired service quality, separating workers from the design and control of the labour process.

    • Rules go further than surface acting, workers are expected to actually experience feelings as and when they are told to do so, resulting in a systematic suppression of the true self.

  • Mann: Attempting to portray emotions that are not felt creates the strain of emotional dissonance, can cause personal and work related maladjustment, depression, cynicism, alienation, and leave the worker feeling ‘robotic and unempathetic’ (Albrecht and Zemke), with a lack of work identity (Van Maanen and Kunda).

    • If feeling the right emotions is linked in their minds to being good at their job and they have to rely on faked expression this could affect self esteem/efficacy.

    • Freud – people who continually inhibit emotions are more prone to disease, greater negative effect on those acting in good faith.

    • However in the case of nurses for example, under emotional harmony, it can protect them from getting too involved and weakening clinical judgement. Being able to detach emotionally may protect them from undue emotional stress (McQueen).

    • In jobs like nursing where emotional labour is central:

      • Must not continued to be devalued, as health care services risk becoming blind to emotional needs of patients and staff.

      • Need to teach not only performance of labour in a formally recognized way, but also strategies for coping with the effects.

  • Resonates with Marxist Labour Process Theory as put forward by Braverman.

But is this too strong?

However can note that Bolton and Boyd’s war of smiles demonstrates that workers have shown an ability to resist a tightening of feeling rules, and that the transmutation of feelings is an unstable condition subject to inherent antagonism within the wage-labour relationship.

  • War of smiles: Bolton and Boyd study of air hostesses – management telling air hostesses to smile more often and more sincerely resulted in workers smiling more briefly and less broadly, undermining the overall message. Attempts of managers to tighten control and intensify work are often...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Employment Relations Notes.