«Светлые» и «темные» стороны эмоционального труда: концепция отчуждения в теории А.Р. Хокшилд и современные исследования

Abstract

A.R. Hochschild’s book “The Managed Heart” has now been translated intoRussian, which is the beginning of an extensive research field of emotional labor. However, many of the most important aspects of the book are still waiting to be comprehended. One of them is the question of how alienation and emotional labor are related. Hochschild examines the alienation of the worker from his or her feelings and self in the performance of emotional labor in the service industry. The purpose of this article is not only to analyze Hochschild’s use of the concept of alienation, but especially to find an answer to the question of why this concept remains relevant to contemporary researchers of emotional labor. According to the author of the article, Hochschild uses the Marxist notion of alienation to give a critical potential to the interactionist approach to emotion management in the workplace and connect labor processes at the micro-level and the subjective emotional experience of the service worker with macro-processes and structures. This allows Hochschild and her followers to analyze the inequalities, role tensions, conflicts, and psychological problems of workers. The Marxist style of reasoning is important for Hochschild to characterize a vast class stratum — service workers, whose emotionality exploitation serves to maximize economic profits. As researchers of emotional labor have shown, not all types of emotion management can be alienating andhave negative social and psychological consequences. Thus, the notion of emotional labor is ambivalent in the sense of its consequences but remains heuristic for understanding and investigating labor relations also in the new social realities, in the context of the pandemic and digitalization of society.