Bibliometric Mapping of Emotional Labor Studies in Public Administration

Chih-Wei Hsieh,Daan Wang,Mary E Guy

doi:10.20899/jpna.5.3.240-260

Abstract

Although emotional labor is increasingly recognized as an essential element in public service delivery (and more generally in the citizen–state encounter), research into emotional labor is at an incipient stage. Therefore, to aid theory development and empirical testing, in this article we use bibliometric mapping to reveal the intellectual networks and paths that emotional labor research has followed in its early diffusion into the field. Four network maps are drawn: one showing the co-authorship network of emotional labor studies, one showing the co-citation network, one showing the network of co-cited scholars, and one showing keyword co-occurrence. These maps reveal gaps that enable and encourage future researchers to move forward with further investigation and theory building. Additionally, this article serves as a model for how other subfields of inquiry can be similarly mapped and how this technique can be used to reflect the diffusion of knowledge within and across disciplines.

Highlights

Decades ago, after observing how flight attendants dealt with frightened, hungry, thirsty, and demanding passengers, sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) coined the term “emotional labor” to conceptualize the emotive aspect of service work
We focused our analysis on the 47 public administration journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database to screen the 865 documents
This section presents three networks: co-authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence networks. These networks respectively reveal which authors have contributed to scholarly knowledge of emotional labor in public administration, those who have influenced this research, and what topics have been studied

Summary

Introduction

After observing how flight attendants dealt with frightened, hungry, thirsty, and demanding passengers, sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) coined the term “emotional labor” to conceptualize the emotive aspect of service work. The focus of her work was on business enterprises where the quality of the employee–customer relationship determines whether there will be repeat transactions This concept is especially relevant in public service, where the citizen– state encounter often involves emotions far more intense than those encountered in a sales relationship. Whether constraining freedoms or responding when citizens are panicked, public service workers must manage their own emotive state while managing the emotions of citizens. If the affective component of public service is to be rendered successfully, workers must manage their own emotions as well as the emotional state of the citizen. When public service delivery requires workers to engage in face-to-face or voice-to-voice exchanges with citizens, successful performance of this work hinges on how they detect the other’s state of mind and heart and on how they adjust their own affective state and exhibit situationally appropriate emotions (Guy, Newman, & Mastracci, 2008). After more than a decade of development, it is time to take stock of the field’s intellectual integration of emotional labor into theory and research

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