Emotional Labour: The Management of Feeling and Display in the Workplace

Coined by Arlie Hochschild, emotional labour is a valuable theory for sociology of work scholars. It generally refers to an individual’s management of feeling and display within the workplace and the commodification of it by business leads. Written in the context of 1980’s America, this chapter will summarise the main concepts outlined within Hochschild’s seminal theory which includes feeling rules, surface and deep acting. This will be followed by a discussion of its antecedents which incorporates three interlinked discourses of labour, display, and emotion within its construction. Theoretical inspiration, for Hochschild, involved the writings of Erving Goffman and Sigmund Freud. I will then highlight significant interdisciplinary developments and various criticisms that have led to the advancement of theory. In the latter part of this chapter, I look towards the future of emotional labour and argue that scholars should attend more to place and context when researching others doing emotion management in the workplace. I also suggest that focusing on the outsourcing of emotional labour via online robots, or chatbots, would be a highly prosperous phenomenon to uncover.