The Managed Heart

“This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work.”

The author emphasizes that emotional labor requires a complex coordination of mind and feeling, and tapping into the core of one’s individuality. She discusses the parallel between physical and emotional labor, highlighting that both can lead to a form of estrangement or alienation from aspects of oneself. This comparison underscores the psychological costs of emotional labor, suggesting that it can disconnect individuals from their own emotions and identity, much like how physical labor can distance workers from their bodies. This analysis sheds light on the deep, often invisible impacts of emotional labor on personal well-being.

“Roughly one-third of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly one-half have jobs that call for emotional labor.”

The book underscores the significant prevalence of emotional labor within the US workforce, highlighting its particular impact on women. By quantifying the proportion of workers involved in emotional labor, the text draws attention to the widespread yet often overlooked demands on employees to manage and display emotions as part of their job roles. This analysis thematically supports The Gendered Nature of Emotional Labor by noting that society places a disproportionately high number of women in roles requiring emotional regulation, shedding light on the social and economic implications of gendered expectations in the workplace.

“When the transmutation of the private use of feeling is successfully accomplished—when we succeed in lending our feelings to the organizational engineers of worker-customer relations—we may pay a cost in how we hear our feelings and a cost in what, for better or worse, they tell us about ourselves.”

This passage discusses the psychological consequences of emotional labor, emphasizing how the commercialization of personal feelings for organizational purposes can distort individuals’ emotional experiences and self-perception. The text highlights the risk of losing touch with genuine emotions and the authentic signals they provide about one’s true feelings and identity. By framing emotions as tools for corporate gain, individuals may become estranged from their inner selves, leading to a diminished capacity for self-awareness and emotional integrity. This excerpt underscores the hidden costs of emotional labor on personal authenticity and mental well-being.

“The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes.”

This excerpt explores the idea that the process of managing emotions doesn’t merely regulate them but fundamentally transforms and defines them. The author suggests that emotional labor is an active, dynamic process in which the methods used to control feelings become intrinsic to the emotions experienced. This analysis underscores the depth of emotional labor’s impact, revealing how professional demands can reshape personal emotional experiences and blur the lines between genuine feelings and those crafted for external purposes. By highlighting this transformation, the author emphasizes the implications for individuals’ emotional integrity and authenticity.

“Emotion, like seeing and hearing, is a way of knowing about the world. It is a way of testing reality. As Freud pointed out in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond easy endurance. Actually, every emotion has a signal function. Not every emotion signals danger. But every emotion does signal the ‘me’ I put into seeing ‘you.’”

The author discusses the intrinsic role of emotions as tools for understanding and navigating the world. By referencing Freud’s concept of the “signal function” of anxiety, she illustrates that emotions provide critical feedback about both internal states and external threats. She expands this idea to all emotions, asserting that they convey personal perspectives and reactions to various situations. This analysis highlights how emotions reflect our subjective viewpoints and serve as vital indicators of our interactions with the world, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing these signals in both personal and professional contexts.

“The other way is deep acting. Here, display is a natural result of working on feeling; the actor does not try to seem happy or sad but rather expresses spontaneously, as the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski urged, a real feeling that has been self-induced.”

This passage examines the concept of deep acting, through which individuals work on their internal feelings to produce genuine emotional expressions rather than merely displaying them superficially. By referencing Stanislavski’s method, the author highlights how deep acting involves self-induced emotions that result in spontaneous and authentic displays, contrasting it with surface acting, in which people feign emotions. This analysis underscores the psychological effort involved in deep acting and its implications for authenticity in emotional labor.

“At the same time, everyday life clearly requires us to do deep acting. We must dwell on what it is that we want to feel and on what we must do to induce the feeling.”

The author discusses the concept of deep acting as a necessary part of everyday life, emphasizing that it involves a deliberate effort to generate and align emotions with desired feelings. This process is not merely an automatic reaction but requires conscious introspection and manipulation of one’s inner emotional state to meet societal or personal expectations. This highlights the pervasive nature of emotional labor beyond professional settings, suggesting its integral role in personal interactions and self-perception.

“But something more operates when institutions are involved, for within institutions various elements of acting are taken away from the individual and replaced by institutional mechanisms. The locus of acting, of emotion management, moves up to the level of the institution.”

The text examines how institutions play a significant role in shaping emotional labor, highlighting that within institutional settings, the control over emotional expression is no longer solely in the individual’s hands but is instead guided by organizational rules and mechanisms. This shift means that emotion management becomes a collective process, orchestrated by institutional directives rather than personal discretion, and thereby emphasizes the institution’s influence over a person’s emotional experiences.

“Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them.”

This passage delves into the concept of “feeling rules” and their pivotal role in emotion management. The author emphasizes that these rules dictate the expectations and norms governing emotional expressions within intimate relationships. By establishing a framework of entitlement or obligation, feeling rules shape how individuals manage and express their emotions privately, thus reinforcing the emotional bonds between parents and children, spouses, friends, and lovers. This highlights the significance of these unspoken guidelines in maintaining and understanding deep personal connections.

“A feeling itself, and not simply the way it is displayed on face and body, can be experienced as misfitting a situation in a surprising number of ways.”

The author examines the internal experience of emotions, emphasizing that feelings can often seem out of place or inappropriate within certain social contexts. She illustrates how this misalignment between felt emotion and societal expectations creates internal conflict, reflecting broader cultural norms and pressures. This analysis underscores the intricate relationship between personal emotions and the external social rules that dictate how we should feel in various situations.

“Looking at a bright light to make a tear glisten is a mark of homage, a way of paying respects to those who proclaim that sadness is owed. More generally, it is a way of paying respects to a rule about respect paying.”

The author explores the concept of emotional conformity and the societal pressures to adhere to emotional norms. She illustrates how individuals may engage in deliberate actions, such as looking at a bright light to induce tears, to align with expected emotional displays. This behavior underscores how societal rules govern emotional expressions, highlighting the tension between genuine feelings and the obligation to meet social expectations for appropriate emotional responses.

“Most of the time, gratitude comes naturally, thoughtlessly, and without effort. Only when it comes hard do we recognize what has been true all along: that we keep a mental ledger with ‘owed’ and ‘received’ columns for gratitude, love, anger, guilt, and other feelings.”

The text delves into the underlying mechanisms of emotional exchanges, illustrating that gratitude and other feelings are often managed subconsciously as part of a social “ledger.” The author emphasizes that these feelings, usually expressed effortlessly, reveal their structured nature only when they become difficult to muster. This analysis sheds light on the implicit social accounting we maintain, balancing emotional debts and credits in our interactions.

“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 to her face?”

This question examines the implications of management-imposed rules on emotional expression in the workplace. The author discusses how employers expect workers, like flight attendants, to perform both deep and surface acting as part of their jobs. This requirement, coupled with the fact that customers often have more rights than employees, leads to a commodification of personal emotions such as empathy and warmth. The text questions how this commodification impacts the workers’ relationship with their own feelings and their ability to maintain a genuine connection to their emotional expressions.

“The trainees, it seemed to me, were also chosen for their ability to take stage directions about how to ‘project’ an image. They were selected for being able to act well—that is, without showing the effort involved. They had to be able to appear at home on stage.”

The author examines the selection process for flight attendants, highlighting how companies prioritize candidates who can seamlessly project a desired image. She discusses how this ability to “act well” and appear effortlessly genuine is crucial, revealing the industry’s demand for emotional labor. This analysis suggests that the corporate expectation for employees to perform emotional labor effectively, without visible strain, underscores the commodification of personal expression in service roles.

“When this emotional system is thrust into a commercial setting, it is transmuted. A profit motive is slipped in under acts of emotion management, under the rules that govern them, under the gift exchange. Who benefits now, and who pays?”

The book explores the transformation of emotional labor from a personal to a commercial context, highlighting how the profit-driven motives of corporations overshadows the intrinsic value of genuine emotional interactions. This shift forces workers to perform emotional labor not out of personal inclination but as a commodified service, ultimately benefiting the company while potentially costing its employees their emotional authenticity and well-being.

“The project of the flight attendant is to enhance the customer’s status, to heighten his or her importance. ‘The passenger may not always be right, but he’s never wrong.’ Every act of service is an advertisement. In contrast, the final stages of bill collecting typically deflate the customer’s status, as the collector works at wearing down the customer’s presumed resistance to paying.”

The author contrasts the roles of flight attendants and bill collectors to highlight the different emotional labor demands placed on them. Flight attendants are tasked with enhancing the customer’s status and creating a positive experience, reflecting the service industry’s emphasis on customer satisfaction. Conversely, bill collectors often must diminish the customer’s status to overcome resistance to payment, illustrating a more confrontational and negative form of emotional labor. This comparison underscores the varied nature of emotional labor across different jobs and its impact on how workers interact with and perceive their clients.

“Jobs of this type have three characteristics in common. First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person-gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.”

This passage identifies the three defining characteristics of jobs that involve emotional labor. The author emphasizes the necessity of direct interaction with the public, the expectation to elicit specific emotional responses from others, and the employer’s control over employees’ emotional expressions. This analysis showcases how emotional labor extends beyond physical or cognitive tasks, requiring workers to manage their own emotions in alignment with organizational goals. This insight is crucial to understanding the theme of Emotional Labor’s Impact on Mental Health and Personal Identity and the commercial exploitation of personal emotions.

“Big emotion workers tend to raise little ones. Mothers and fathers teach children letters and numbers and manners and a world view, but they also teach them which zone of the self will later be addressed by rules of work.”

Here, the author discusses how parents, particularly those whose jobs involve emotional labor, pass on the skills and expectations of emotional management to their children. This training shapes how children later navigate the emotional demands of their own jobs, highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotional labor practices and the socialization of children into specific emotional roles. This insight connects familial upbringing with workplace behavior, emphasizing the role of early emotional education in preparing individuals for the emotional expectations of various occupations.

“More emotion management goes on in the families and jobs of the upper classes than in those of the lower classes. That is, in the class system, social conditions conspire to make it more prevalent at the top. In the gender system, on the other hand, the reverse is true: social conditions make it more prevalent, and prevalent in different ways, for those at the bottom—women.”

The author discusses the distribution of emotional labor across social classes and gender, highlighting that while emotional management is more common in the upper classes due to social expectations, it is more prevalent and manifests differently among women due to their subordinate social status. This analysis shows how societal structures influence who performs emotional labor and underscores the intersection of class and gender in shaping these expectations.

“Because of the division of labor in the society at large, women in any particular job are assigned lower status and less authority than men. As a result, they lack a shield against the ‘doctrine of feelings.’ Much more often than men, they become the complaint department, the ones to whom dissatisfaction is fearlessly expressed.”

This passage highlights the gendered dynamics of emotional labor, emphasizing how societal norms assign women lower status and authority in their jobs. This systemic division makes women more vulnerable to the “doctrine of feelings,” whereby their emotions are less valued and they bear the brunt of complaints and dissatisfaction. The author underscores the intersection of gender and labor, illustrating how women disproportionately shoulder emotional burdens due to entrenched societal structures that diminish their professional authority.

“More women than men go into public-contact work and especially into work in which status enhancement is the essential social-psychological task. In some jobs, such as that of the flight attendant, women may perform this task by playing the Woman.”

This excerpt thematically develops The Gendered Nature of Emotional Labor, emphasizing how women disproportionately occupy public-contact roles that require them to enhance the status of others. She highlights how these roles often compel women to adopt and perform traditional feminine qualities, such as nurturing and attractiveness, as part of their job. This analysis underscores the societal expectations and pressures on women to conform to gender roles in their professional lives, revealing the intersection of gender and labor dynamics.

“What was once a private act of emotion management is sold now as labor in public-contact jobs. What was once a privately negotiated rule of feeling or display is now set by the company’s Standard Practices Division.”

In exploring the commercialization of emotion management, the author highlights how public-contact jobs have standardized and commodified personal acts of managing emotions, which were once private and individually negotiated. The author refers to the company’s Standard Practices Division, emphasizing how organizations have institutionalized emotional labor, turning it into a regulated and profitable aspect of work, thus transforming genuine emotional expressions into marketable skills. This analysis underscores the shift from personal emotional expression to a corporate-controlled and profit-driven practice.

“The more our activities as individual emotion managers are managed by organizations, the more we tend to celebrate the life of unmanaged feeling.”

The author discusses the cultural response to the commercialization of human emotions. She highlights that as organizations increasingly manage and regulate individual emotional expressions for profit, society places a growing value on spontaneous and authentic feelings. This celebration of “unmanaged feeling” is a reaction against the pervasive control that corporate practices exert over personal emotions, emphasizing a yearning for genuine, unmediated emotional experiences in contrast to the artificial ones produced in a commercial context.