(self-) Seduction in the Manufacturing of Consent: Exploring Emotional Exploitation in the Service Sector

This article uncovers an underexplored phenomenon observed in managerial–employee exchanges within the service sector: emotional exploitation. Drawing on ethnographic insights from the public house industry, it explores how managers deploy emotion-inducing tactics to seduce lower-echelon workers into accepting unfavourable working condition. Crucially, such consent is not always manufactured by management; processes of self-seduction - where workers consent through self-persuasion - also play a central role. Emotional exploitation, this paper argues, is a routine feature of pub work, shaped by fluctuating emotional intensities, surplus or shortages of staff, and the affective pull of collegial relationships. It further examines how low-paid workers both heed and resist the mechanisms of (self-)seduction. In doing so, it extends Jocoy’s (2003) analysis of emotional labour within labour control strategies, adds to Burawoy’s (1979) theory of manufacturing consent, and deepens Hochschild’s (1983) thesis on the commodification of emotion under capitalism - highlighting how (self-)seduction further alienates workers from aspects of the self.