Emotional Labour and the New Workplace

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon ‘emotional labour’. Following Hochschild (1983 & 1993), this term refers to the management of human feeling, during social interaction within the labour process, as shaped by the dictates of capital accumulation. Until recently, the phenomenon of emotional labour had been neglected by the British academy (James, 1989; Fuller and Smith, 1991; Filby, 1992; Fineman, 1993; Sturdy, 1994; Kerfoot, 1995; Newton, 1995; Bolton, 1997; Fineman and Sturdy, 1997). However, analyses of emotional labour are crucial to fully appreciate the emergence of ‘the new workplace’. When restricting her attention to jobs where emotional labour was the main human capacity sold to an employer, Hochschild estimated in 1983 that one-third of all employment in the US and half of that performed by women could be classified as such. It can be safely argued that emotional labour has increased in significance since the early 1980s given the contraction of manufacturing, the expansion of the service sector and increased female participation in the labour force of western societies.