The Managed Heart

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1983

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 2

Part 1, Chapters 3-5

Part 2, Chapters 6-7

Part 2, Chapter 8-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 2, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Public Life”

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Feeling Management – From Private to Commercial Uses”

This chapter further examines the airline industry’s commodification of emotional labor, particularly focusing on flight attendants, to explore how corporate demands and competitive market pressures transform private emotional systems into public commodities. Management expects flight attendants to display constant friendliness and warmth while masking their true feelings, which creates a strain known as emotive dissonance. This separation between genuine feelings and feigned emotions leads to psychological stress and, over time, forces workers to align their real emotions with their job requirements.

The author traces this transformation back to the airline industry’s evolution from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, companies like Delta Airlines began incorporating emotional labor into their service offerings. Competitive dynamics, influenced by the Civil Aeronautics Board’s regulation and subsequent deregulation in 1978, shifted the focus from price competition to service competition, emphasizing the need for emotional labor. Delta encouraged all employees, particularly flight attendants, to promote the company, making them the most direct representatives of the airline’s service quality.

Moreover, the text highlights how advertisements played a crucial role in shaping expectations. Airlines like Continental and National used sexualized imagery and innuendos to appeal to male passengers, creating fantasies of “easily available and guiltless sex” (94). These ads raised unrealistic expectations and added layers of emotional labor for flight attendants, who had to manage and suppress their feelings toward inappropriate passenger behavior. Even companies like Delta, which avoided explicit sexualization in their advertising, had to cope with the inflated expectations created by other airlines’ marketing strategies. This commodification reflects a broader societal shift, transforming personal capacities for empathy and warmth into tools for corporate profit, which raises questions about the long-term effects on workers’ emotional well-being and their connection to their feelings.

The author notes that this trend extends beyond the US, citing Singapore International Airlines as an example. Advertising campaigns glamorized the cabin hostess as the “Singapore girl,” combining Western education with an “Asian attitude toward service” (95). The author highlights that this commodification begins even before the job interview and grooms applicants to fit a specific emotional and behavioral mold. She refers to the pre-interview materials for the role of flight attendants, which emphasize sincerity, friendliness, and a calm demeanor and often advise candidates to project the desired personality, sometimes at the expense of their true selves.

The text refers to the rigorous flight attendant training programs at airlines like Delta, which emphasize both technical and emotional skills. Trainees are taught to view the airplane cabin as their home and passengers as personal guests, blurring the lines between personal and professional roles. Flight attendants are expected to sell the company’s image and, by extension, themselves. This expectation creates a complex dynamic wherein flight attendants must navigate their own identities and emotional well-being while meeting the company’s needs. A crucial part of the job involves maintaining physical standards, so companies strictly regulate weight and appearance. Flight attendants face weigh-ins, and those who exceed weight limits risk reprimands and suspension.

The author notes that passenger feedback, such as letters and surveys, indirectly monitors flight attendants. Supervisors, seen as “big sisters” within the company, manage the emotional labor of flight attendants, allowing them to vent frustration to prevent them from taking it out on passengers. The commercialization of emotions transforms private acts into public ones, standardizing behavior and controlling social exchanges, which often leads to a loss of control for workers.

The book notes that the airline industry’s speed-up has exacerbated these challenges, making it difficult for flight attendants to provide personalized service. Increased passenger numbers and reduced crew sizes lead to greater workloads and less time for meaningful interactions. This has resulted in a shift from deep acting to surface acting, where flight attendants go through the motions without genuine emotional engagement.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Between the Toe and The Heel – Jobs and Emotional Labor”

This chapter contrasts the roles of flight attendants and bill collectors to illustrate the diverse emotional labor that different jobs require. The author explains how corporate demands shape the emotions that workers must display. Flight attendants must show constant friendliness and warmth while masking their true feelings. Conversely, bill collectors must often display distrust and aggression to instill a sense of urgency and accountability in debtors. The text highlights that while flight attendants’ training is extensive and focuses on maintaining a cheerful demeanor to enhance passengers’ experience, bill collectors receive minimal training and rely on escalating aggression to achieve their goals.

The contrast between these roles underscores how emotional labor is distributed across different social classes and job types, influencing how workers manage their emotions and interact with others. This divergence is also evident in their training and work environment: Flight attendants work collaboratively in a visible, passenger-facing role, while bill collectors operate in a more isolated, guarded setting. The author notes how the commodification of emotions impacts workers’ well-being: Flight attendants must align their genuine emotions with their job requirements, while bill collectors must maintain a cynical distance from both debtors and their employers.

Moreover, the text examines the broad spectrum of jobs that require emotional labor, highlighting key characteristics these roles share. Such jobs involve face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with the public, require workers to induce specific emotional states in others, and allow employers to control workers’ emotional expressions through training and supervision. The author contrasts roles like diplomats, who perform significant emotional labor, with mathematicians, who do not, to illustrate the variability within professional categories. She emphasizes how some clerical workers and waiters engage in emotional labor, while others do not, and notes the impact of management styles on the emotional demands placed on employees.

In addition, the text notes that jobs involving emotional labor constitute more than one-third of all US jobs, which makes it a significant but often unrecognized source of workplace stress. This emotional labor is not merely a private matter but is regulated and standardized within the public sphere since it contributes to the smooth functioning of public life.

Emotional labor is distributed across social classes in different ways, and these roles impact workers in different ways. The text contrasts the experiences of lower-class workers, who typically perform physical or monotonous tasks with little face-to-face interaction, and those in middle-class positions like flight attendants and bill collectors, who must manage their emotions to effectively represent their companies. Middle-class workers often embody the company’s image, and their emotional displays become symbols of corporate identity. However, since these workers are not high-level decision-makers, they are more aware of the costs of emotional labor and view it primarily as a job requirement.

At higher socioeconomic levels, corporate decision-makers integrate their political, religious, and philosophical beliefs with their work roles. Over time, corporate rules on how to perceive and feel about various situations become internalized, blending into their personalities and becoming second nature. The highest echelons of the corporate world, occupied by tycoons, set the emotional tone for their organizations, and their personal preferences shape the corporate culture and emotional expectations of their employees.

However, the author points out that emotional labor is predominantly a middle-class phenomenon. She explores how the family is a training ground for emotional labor, and different social classes teach their children to manage feelings in ways that prepare them for future work roles. Working-class families often use a positional control system based on formal rules and status, while middle-class families use a personal control system that emphasizes managing feelings and understanding others’ emotions.

Additionally, the text addresses how the commercialization of emotional labor extends into private life, noting that the private domain, once a refuge from the market, has increasingly adopted elements of commercial culture. This blending of the private and public spheres means that emotional labor is now a significant aspect of both personal and professional life, shaping how individuals interact and manage their emotions across various contexts.

Part 2, Chapters 6-7 Analysis

This section critiques how the service industry commodifies emotional labor. The author thematically explores Emotional Labor’s Impact on Mental Health and Personal Identity by contrasting the idealized, cheerful depiction of flight attendants in advertisements with the real emotional toll of maintaining such a facade, as discussed in Chapter 6. She refers to the concept of “worked-up warmth” (89) and the principle of “emotive dissonance” to describe the strain resulting from the necessity to align genuine feelings with performed emotions over time. Similarly, Chapter 7 uses juxtaposition by referring to the customer-pleasing role of the flight attendant against the confrontational, customer-challenging role of the bill collector: One uses “the smile and the soft questioning voice,” the other “the grimace and the raised voice of command” (137).

The author’s use of specific examples, such as the sexualization of flight attendants in advertisements, thematically illustrates The Commodification of Emotions in the Workplace and emphasizes the broader implications of emotional labor. The discussion of how companies like Continental Airlines exploit the sexualized image of flight attendants to distract male passengers from the fear of flying reveals how corporations can manipulate emotional labor to serve their interests, often at the expense of workers’ dignity and personal boundaries. The example of flight attendant weigh-ins and grooming standards, which trainees accept as routine despite their intrusive nature, highlights the extent of corporate control over personal aspects of employees’ lives. Similarly, Chapter 7 refers to Winn-Dixie cashiers wearing dollar bills to incentivize politeness, which illustrates how employers monitor and enforce emotional labor in the workplace. Additionally, anecdotes from doctors, lawyers, and salespeople provide concrete illustrations of the expectation and management of emotional labor in these professions.

The author uses direct quotations. For example, in Chapter 6, she cites a recruiter advising applicants to “imagine the kind of person the company wants to hire and then become that person during the interview” (96), which highlights the expectation of emotional conformity and the subjugation of personal identity to corporate needs. Chapter 7 quotes workers, such as the flight attendant who notes, “The passenger may not always be right, but he’s never wrong” (139), and the bill collector who says, “You try to catch them off guard. If you’re too nice, believe me, they give you a hard time” (140). These quotes demonstrate how each job requires a specific set of emotional skills and manipulations, highlighting the tension and moral ambiguities facing the workers.

Irony and subtle critique help describe how the airline industry uses the notion of a “family” to foster a sense of loyalty and dependence among recruits, a strategy that simultaneously exploits and manipulates their need for security and belonging. The description of the training environment, which encourages trainees to see their supervisors as parental figures, critiques the infantilization of employees and the blurring of personal and professional boundaries. Chapter 7 uses irony to highlight the bill collector’s cynical distance from the company’s claims, as evident in the stories of a collector who worked for a dubious “matchbook school” and a flight attendant’s struggle to maintain a genuinely warm demeanour despite personal challenges. This irony exposes the societal and economic pressures that distort human interactions in the workplace.

The text uses metaphors and analogies to highlight emotional dynamics. For instance, in Chapter 7, the metaphor of the corporate world having a “toe and a heel” (137) illustrates the dual nature of service and collection functions within businesses: Each extremity performs opposing emotional tasks. The use of imagery, such as the “Great Danes” guarding the collection agency, underscores the hostility and intimidation embedded in the bill collector’s environment, which contrasts with the more sanitized and friendly imagery associated with flight attendants.

Additionally, references to specific practices and policies, like Delta’s use of outside collection agencies to maintain its “nice guy” image and the detailed description of how collectors trap debtors into acknowledging their identity, highlight the institutional strategies behind emotional labor. References to studies and reports, such as the St. Petersburg Times article on Winn-Dixie’s courtesy campaign, support the author’s arguments via empirical evidence. In discussing the social implications, the text touches on how emotional labor intersects with social class. The author details how middle-class and working-class families prepare children for emotional labor differently. This sociological perspective situates emotional labor within the context of socialization and class dynamics.