Emotional Labor in LIS: An Analysis

Abstract

This submission is a reappraisal of emotional labor as it has been framed in LIS. The article gathered and characterized very recent LIS publications on emotional labor. Those publications imply expectations for administrative interventions: an emotional labor movement for librarians so to speak. Moreover, that shift has generated some distance from the meaning of emotional labor in research, more strongly linking the concept to expectations of self-care, whole-self-at-work, and compensation issues which don’t have obvious operational applications when made specific to libraries. The management interventions would quickly become intrusive and/or erode privacy and liberties. What follows is a contextual statement that helps explain the sociology driving at least a part of these shifts, and a series of speculations that shed light on the topic.