[16 minute read]

Content warning: reading this book left me in a low state of existential panic and unable to respond appropriately to other people’s emotions for about a week. You have been warned.

If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I’m a big fan of the sociologist and feminist scholar Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild. Previously I have reviewed her books “Strangers in Their Own Land” and “The Second Shift“. I’ve also published a practical guide to sharing housework, inspired by reading “The Second Shift”. Today I’m going to review The Managed Heart the book that first brought Professor Hochschild to mainstream attention.

But before I begin the review, I’d like to talk about words.

Words are handles to grasp concepts. These handles (like the concepts they evoke) are by necessity blurry and fuzzy. They change. Is Pluto a planet? It depends on what “planet” means to you. If you’re an academic astronomer, you might answer this differently than one of the kids who sent Neil deGrasse Tyson hate mail.

Language must necessarily grow and evolve. I’ve given up trying to police the meaning of literally (although you’ll have to take the Oxford Comma from my cold, dead hands). That said, I really wish that every subculture dominated by people under thirty took one fucking second to do a fucking lit review before they grab academic sounding words for their HuffPo think pieces or blog posts.

(I live in a glass house here. I am loosely associated with the Rationalist Community, a group of people who have based their whole philosophy on the literal arch-enemies of the rationalist philosophical tradition. “Empiricist Community” didn’t sound as smart or clever, so it lost out as a name despite the fact it was far more accurate.)

Technical words mean specific things and their definitions are policed so that academic disagreement (and more rarely, agreement) can happen at all. Academics need to have a clear(ish) view of what concept-handles they’re playing with and clear(ish) boundaries on those concepts, lest they spend all of their days arguing about definitions, like a Clinton caught in a lie. Currently we filter that sort of person out of the general academic discourse by letting them go study Hegel, but there’s always a risk of that spilling over, to disastrous effect.

Worse, when a technical word is stolen for general vocabulary it often comes to mean what people think it should mean, rather than what it originally meant. Those concepts, which were important enough that they needed names, are now left to float, handle-less. For example, “market failure” is at risk of coming to mean “weird consequences of markets”, not “markets that are trapped away from the Pareto-frontier, such that they have an opportunity to make someone/some metric better off without making anyone/anything else worse off that cannot be realized”. The technical definition is not evoked as well by the phrase “market failure” and so is at risk of being elided in popular discourse.

A subsequent consequence of this is that academic debate becomes meaningless, confusing, or incomprehensible to ordinary people (as their ability to police the language they use for discussions results in inevitable linguistic drift when those same terms are misused elsewhere). Non-academics assume that academics are using the colloquial term, when in fact they’re saying something else. Switching terms like this often has serious consequences for the veracity of arguments!

When an economist says “a minimum wage can lead to market failures”, many people think the economist is saying “it would be better if people could be payed less”, where they might actually be saying “when a minimum wage exists, a company may fail to hire a low productivity worker (say a high school graduate, or someone who doesn’t speak the dominant language very well) while forcing another worker to work overtime; if no minimum wage existed, the company could hire that worker, making both the hired worker and the existing employee (now freed from overtime) better off, while leaving the company no worse off”.

All this is to say that “emotional labour” is a key concept from The Managed Heart. It was termed in this book. And as near as I can tell, it has literally never been used properly in a blog post or think piece.

So before I talk about what emotional labour (in the academic sense) is, I’d like to give several examples of what it isn’t.

Emotional labour isn’t the mental load that women have to carry when managing the chores and children of a household. Infuriatingly, this subject was covered by Professor Hochschild in another book. It has a whole chapter devoted to it! Properly termed, it would be “responsibility for managing the second shift” or something like that.

Emotional labour isn’t women helping men process and figure out their feelings without compensation. Under the framework introduced in The Managed Heart, I’d suggest that it could be called “feeling rules promoting asymmetric empathizing”, which I will admit is much less catchy.

Emotional labour isn’t even the work women do to manage their feelings in a relationship so that men feel supported and validated. That comes up in The Managed Heart and is one subset of “emotion work”.

I am not claiming that any of these other contenders for the term “emotional labour” do not exist, are not real problems, or do not deserve academic study of their own. I believe that they do exist, are real problems, and deserve study (much of which has been done by Professor Hochschild). But I am also going to ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, and talk only about emotional labour as it was defined by Professor Hochschild: “the commercialization of our capacity to influence our own feelings”.

Unpacking that seemingly simple definition will provide fodder for most of my review.

First, what are feelings?

Professor Hochschild carefully charts the development of theories of emotion. There’s Darwin’s physical theory of emotion, that holds that emotions are the evolutionary vestiges of certain acts. Teeth barred in a rictus of anger is, to Darwin, the evolutionary vestige of actually biting. Anger emerges as the remnant of what would have been aggressive action and shows up in situations where our ancestors might have been aggressive.

Freud had some nonsense about dammed up libido (I have a policy of ignoring everything Freud said that involves the words “libido”, “oedipal”, and “fixation”, and I’m not going to break it just for this review). William James held that emotions were signifiers of physical change; to James, the emotion of anger was merely what we feel when our body prepares to fight and is solely a consequence of underlying physiological processes.

Later theorists, like Gerth and Mills, situated emotions in a social context. They talked about how culture might influence emotions and how inchoate emotions might be made understandable when others interpreted them for us. For example, if a bride cries when left at the altar on her wedding day, her mother’s explanation “you must be furious” gives name and focus to her roiling emotions. The bride may come to believe that she is crying because she is angry, and that the roil of emotions in her belly is anger. Had her mother instead suggested that she was feeling “sorrow”, then perhaps that would have been the name she chose.

Professor Hochschild builds on these definitions (and many others) to get one she’s satisfied with. To her, emotion is a sense, like proprioception or touch. It allows us to sense how we relate to others actions or to developments. Emotion in a Hochschildian framework doesn’t just lead to action (e.g. I was angry so I attacked him), it also leads to cognition (e.g. I paused to wonder why I was so sad).

Professor Hochschild holds emotion up as one of the most important senses because it acts as a signal function. There is the tautological sense in which emotion lets us know how we feel about something, but there is also the sense in which it warns us. We talk about a twinge of jealousy or a sinking dread. These emotions help us realize that all is not right.

Emotions can be consonant with a situation (e.g. I feel so happy on my wedding day), or dissonant (e.g. I should be happy at my wedding, but I’m really just scared). Dissonant emotions are most often the ones we seek to change, but as emotion becomes commercialized, we are increasingly asked to change our consonant emotions as well.

What do we do when we can’t change our emotions? And how do we effect a change?

Surface acting is one way we can deal (in a socially acceptable manner) with “feeling the wrong thing”. In surface acting, we change our countenance or face, but make no attempt to change how we feel. We might grin through pain, wear a fixed smile, or hide that we want to cry. We may not fool anyone else and we certainly don’t fool ourselves, but sometimes surface acting allows us to pay our emotional dues to those around us.

Surface acting can feel exhausting; you can’t rest or relax while you are presenting a fake face to the world. Therefore, it is often beneficial for us to be able to engage in deep acting.

Deep acting is the sincere attempt to engender an emotion that you are currently not feeling. There are two ways that you can attempt deep acting. In the first, you can try and chivy and talk yourself into feeling what you desire. When someone says they are trying to fall in love, or conversely trying not to fall too hard, they are engaging in this first form of deep acting.

The second form of deep acting shares much with method acting. Method acting encourages the actor to bring in emotions from other parts of their life and use them to animate the emotions of their character. In deep acting, you push on your emotions by using memories of other emotional states. Deep acting might look like “I was unhappy on the day of my wedding, so I brought up memories of things I like about my partner until I was smiling“.

Society imposes on us many feelings rules, which we interact with by doing the emotion work of deep acting or the feigning surface acting. Here’s a simple feelings rule: it is considered impolite to feel anything other than happiness for a friend’s promotion. If you instead feel jealous, there will be a strong societal expectation that you show none of it. Instead, you must transmute the jealousy into joy via deep acting, or hide it via surface acting.

You might think that feeling rules only apply when you aren’t interacting with the people you’re closest with. Professor Hochschild disagrees. She believes that feelings rules bind us especially tightly when we are with our closest friends or our romantic partners. She talks briefly here (and at depth in “The Second Shift”) about the economy of gratitude that exists in a relationship and how it requires constant emotion work to maintain. You expect your partner to be excited on your behalf when you get a promotion or self-flagellating and apologetic if they cheat. Closeness acts like a filter; only people who instinctively manage their emotions in a way that is pleasing to you (or, in the case of partners who try and “win someone over”, put in a lot of effort) end up close to you, so the reality of the emotion work underlying close relationships is often obscured. Part of Professor Hochschild’s purpose in studying emotion work at work was to pull back this curtain and view emotion work that wasn’t so unconscious and unthinking.

There certainly can be a gendered dynamic to emotion work. Professor Hochschild believes that men are trained to expect a certain amount of emotion work from women: fluffing of the ego, soothing of the temper, etc. She also believes that emotion work is unevenly spread because women are better trained in it and men tend to be better off. Within the context of a heterosexual relationship, this often manifests in the unconscious deal of a man providing physical security through his more highly paid work, in exchange for a woman’s emotional labour and her labour around the house (this idea is more thoroughly dissected in “The Second Shift”).

The primary marketplace and arena of emotion work is “emotional bowing”. Emotional bowing encompasses two types of exchanges, improvisational and straight. In a straight exchange, you are following the rules and exchange rates of society. When you repay advice from a senior colleague with sincere gratitude, you are engaging in a straight exchange.

When the gratitude is feigned, obviously false, or the advice given grudgingly, you are still trying to play out the straight exchange, but you are quibbling about the exchange rate. Similarly, when you brush aside gratitude and claim the advice you gave was “my pleasure”, you are making a rather different point about the exchange rate and showing kindnesses and graciousness – and perhaps making something clear about the emotional tone you expect at your workplace. Even kindness can become a demand for future emotion work.

Many disagreements, especially among close friends and lovers are caused by different notions of the exchange rate between actions. In these close relationships, emotion work is just one way that we can repay others, but it is often the one that breaks down in response to problems, when we suddenly realize the thing we “should” be feeling takes actual work to feel.

In an improvisational exchange, the feeling rules themselves are called into question, often using sarcasm or irony. A man may jokingly tell a crying male friend “remember, men never cry”. By ironically referencing the feeling rule (that men cannot show emotion), he gives his friend permission to violate it. This sort of exchange requires clear knowledge and understanding of how everyone involved interprets feelings rules, so is uncommon except in close relationships.

When the crying man rejects the toxic masculinity that causes men to disown their emotions, referencing the feeling rule might cheer him up, as he is reminded that even his sorrow is a radical act in line with his values. But if he instead embraces that conception of masculinity, referencing the feeling rule might add to his grief and make him feel a failure. Only his friends would know which is likely to occur, so only his friends would risk an improvisational exchange.

This particular part of the book brought on my existential crisis, as I found myself unable to respond to emotional displays with anything other than attempts to calculate what was given, expected, and owed. I do now wonder if this is a common experience, or if my response was somewhat atypical? In either case, a warning before I (potentially) inflicted this on anyone else seemed prudent.

Anyway, all of this background brings us to emotional labour, the true topic of this book. Emotional labour is when emotion work is removed from its normal place in the home and in broader society, and starts to become part of someone’s economic responsibilities. Physical labour has long been commoditized and therefore made anonymous – that is to say, it does not matter which particular person manufactures your car, because any other labourer could have done it approximately as well. While emotional labour has long existed, it is only recently (with a decline in manufacturing jobs and increase in service jobs) that it has become commoditized and therefore gone mainstream.

Professor Hochschild takes a somewhat Marxist approach to the dangers of emotional labour. In the same way that Marx worried about labourers being alienated from the physical products of their work, Professor Hochschild worries about the effects of labourers being alienated from the emotional products of their work.

Like all of Professor Hochschild’s books, The Managed Heart is in some sense an ethnography. The subjects of this book are bill collectors (who are required to do the emotional labour of avoiding sympathy or pity) and flight attendants (who must do the emotional labour of providing a cheery, relaxed façade). In both of these cases, these required emotions (and the feeling rules that produce them) might be variously consonant and dissonant with what the worker may wish to feel.

Earlier, I said that workers are being increasingly asked to avoid consonant feelings. Take as an example the bill collector, moved by pity or charity to seek to find a repayment schedule that works for their client or a flight attendant furious at a customer who is repeatedly belittling them. In both of these cases, emotions are correctly functioning (both as a signal function, and in accordance with societal feelings rules), but economic realities demand that the worker feel something else. Corporate requirements impose a new set of feelings rules, which may clash with extant ones, potentially grinding up workers in the process.

Acting in response to these alien feeling rules can be exhausting. For flight attendants, Professor Hochschild identified three stances they can take towards their work, each with its own risks:

In the first, the worker identifies too wholeheartedly with the job, and therefore risks burnout. In the second, the worker clearly distinguishes her- self from the job and is less likely to suffer burnout; but she may blame herself for making this very distinction and denigrate herself as ‘Just an actor, not sincere.” In the third, the worker distinguishes herself from her act, does not blame herself for this, and sees the job as positively requiring the capacity to act; for this worker there is some risk of estrangement from acting altogether, and some cynicism about it– “We’re just illusion makers.”

No job is entirely without risks (both physical and psychological), yet work must get done. I would have like to see Professor Hochschild better engage with this fact. Her potential solution (to give workers more control over the emotional labour they are required to do) is not as free of costs as she seems to think it is. For whenever it is not universal, all those companies that refuse to give control of emotional labour over to their employees may find themselves at a steep advantage. The threat of this (if emotional labour is indeed a competitive advantage) might be enough to keep whole industries scared of allowing any worker control, absent a mechanism for perfect coordination.

(It seems like the best way to free people from emotional labour would be to prove that it is not important. But we are social animals and so I doubt such a proof is forthcoming. Or possible at all.)

Still, there is often something deeply troubling about how emotional labour is framed. Professor Hochschild gives the example of a seminar about “reducing stress and making work more pleasant” at the flight attendant recurrent training centre. Belying the messaging, it seemed like the real purpose of the seminar was to convince the flight attendants to sublimate any anger they might, in the future, feel at passengers into emotions less risky for the company. A pleasant working environment was secondary to the corporate goals.

In the model of emotion-as-signal-function, anger is important. Indeed, it seems that negative emotions (specifically the negative affect/fear cluster) are particularly important to living a safe life. There seems to be something deeply wrong and dangerous to workers in telling them that all anger in their professional life is their own problem, to be appropriately handled, rather than occasionally indicative of a customer who is seriously overstepping lines.

Regardless of the right or wrong of it, the flight attendants interviewed in the book had to manage their anger and they talked about several strategies they had developed to do so (some of which were taught to them at recurrent training). They might put themselves in the angry customer’s shoes and try and imagine that person as suffering from some life events that explained and excused their behaviour. Or they might remind themselves that they only had to deal with the customer for a little while, allowing them drive out their anger and replace it with relief. Asking other co-workers for emotional support was officially discouraged, because it might lead to anger spreading. Flight attendants who could help their colleagues feel the officially sanctioned emotions (e.g. by diffusing anger with light-hearted joking) were valued members of teams.

Professor Hochschild suggests that we are trained for emotional labour from a young age. Or rather, that some children are. She suggests that working-class children are prepared to have their actions governed by rules, while middle-class children are prepared to have their feelings governed by rules. Note that this isn’t necessarily explicit. I recall receiving no specific training on emotion management, but I know that I picked it up somewhere and that I’m somewhat disturbed by people who seem unable or unwilling to practice emotion management.

One way that emotion work is taught (or not) is by family dynamics. Professor Hochschild suggests that many working-class families use a positional family control system, while middle-class families use a personal control system. In a positional family, authority is derived from a certain mixture of age, gender, employment status, parenthood, etc. Those with authority make decisions within their spheres of authority and the other members of the family must act in accordance with these decisions, although they don’t have to like it.

In a personal control system, control is achieved via appeals to the emotions of a child. Because all decisions of the child are framed as a choice (but with an obvious correct answer), this can lead to a maddening chain of explanations. Whenever the child states their preference, the parent will explain the decision in more detail and explain why the child should feel differently, such that they’ll have the “correct” preference. I can’t remember if this was explicitly mentioned, but it seems to me that this would also serve the purpose of inculcating in the child a strong understand of normative feeling rules.

There is also a relationship between these control systems and discipline. Professor Hochschild cites research that middle-class parents are more likely to sanction intent, while working-class parents are more likely to sanction actions. The working-class parent sanctions the child because of the results of a temper-tantrum. The middle-class parent sanctions the child because they lost their temper.

Professor Hochschild suggests that the sum of this is three messages sent to a (middle-class) child:

• Feelings in others, particularly their superiors, are important and worth trying to understand.
• Their own feelings are important and a valid reason for making decisions.
• Feelings are meant to be managed, controlled, and yoked to rules.

It’s clear that because of this education, feelings rules are a gender and class issue. First, the feelings rules learned in childhood act as a middle- and upper-class shibboleth, making it clear who was raised outside of those classes. Working-class members looking for upwards mobility will have to do catch-up work that is entirely invisible – except in lapses – to those they are seeking to blend in with.

Second, in a world in which the higher ranks of government and corporations are biased towards men, women are given a particular incentive to be sensitive towards the feelings of men, while men have no corresponding requirement to be sensitive towards the feelings of women. Combine this with a toxic masculinity that leaves men little room to acknowledge or talk about feelings and you’re left with a situation where many men will seriously lack the capacity to understand – or even the knowledge that they should be trying to understand – the feelings of women in their lives.

Professor Hochschild frames the intersection of class and feeling rules somewhat more bluntly than I have:

More precisely, the class messages that parents pass on to their children may be roughly as follows. Middle class: “Your feelings count because you are (or will be) considered important by others:’ Lower class: “Your feelings don’t count because you aren’t (or won’t be) considered important by others:’

Note that this was written in the 80s and Professor Hochschild did suggest that orientation towards controlling emotions might soon (after the time of publication) cut across class lines due to the advent of automation. To an extent I think this has been borne out, but I feel like there is also an aesthetic element here. Class determines what emotions are acceptable to show (although of course this relationship is complicated and fickle, much like fashion), which also determines what people are raised to be able to do.

For a book that was supposed to focus on emotional labour, remarkably little of this book concerned actual interviews with labourers. The case studies here were much less in depth than in “The Second Shift” or “Strangers in Their Own Land”. This necessarily made the book harder to read and more academic and dry in tone. Ethnography often gives me the thrill of meeting (vicariously) interesting people (and of discovering that people I haven’t given much thought to are shockingly interesting!), but I found that distinctly lacking in this book.

(It’s much more theoretical than practical and I have to say that I prefer Professor Hochschild’s more practical books.)

That’s not to say the book wasn’t interesting or thought provoking. On the contrary, I often found thinking about it overwhelming. It introduced me to powerful models in areas of my life where I’d previously done little modelling.

If you want to better understand emotion, I recommend this book. If you want to read an entertaining ethnography, or see in depth case studies of how emotional management ties in to work, I’m less certain that you should. If you want an introduction to Professor Hochschild’s work, I also recommend skipping this one until you’ve read “The Second Shift”; that book is much more focused and somewhat better written.

Really, I think that my view of The Managed Heart illustrates a common problem, known to anyone who goes back and reads the earlier (and less polished) work of a beloved author. People grow, change, and develop. I can see some of the things I loved about Professor Hochschild’s later work here, but many other parts were missing.

Luckily Professor Hochschild has written several other books and they undoubtedly have more of what I like most about her. My ambivalence for the style (although not the contents) of this book have not at all dulled my resolution to read more of her work. Expect to see more reviews of Professor Hochschild’s books here in the future.