The Managed Heart
by Arlie Russell Hochschild · first published 1983
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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 r
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…years, and still find it distasteful), and workers in those cultures rightly recognize these demands for emotional labor as being harmful to their mental health (see for example Hochschild's seminal The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling).
on “Ask HN: How friendly is Berlin for startups?” ↗Seems like HN could do well with an introduction to Arlie Hochschild and "The Managed Heart" http://www.amazon.com/The-Managed-Heart-Commercialization-Fe.... Here's a bit of the blurb from Amazon: "In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion…
on “The Tyranny of the Forced Smile” ↗Perhaps to highlight efforts in some threads here, I'm reading The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild. Besides considering emotional work, she speaks of feeling rules. The latter provides a term for rules of engagement, so to speak, we bring to incidental, causal and serious interactions.…
on “Talking to strangers can make us smarter?” ↗…labor are performed primarily by women. These jobs typically involve creating feelings of well-being or affirmation in others – responsibilities usually assigned to women. Hochschild, A. (1983). 1983 The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.
on “Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)” ↗Hochschild's point in The Managed Heart was that many jobs place outsized demands on workers' emotional lives, beyond workplace names of politeness designed to reduce conflict. There is a massive difference between being asked not to be rude…
on “It's not 'emotional labour', it's kin work” ↗