Emotional status and emotional labour: exploring the emotional labour among casualised and tenured knowledge workers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Working for Roskilde Festival is a dream come true for most of the employees there. In this paper, we apply Hochschild’s theoretical framework of emotional labour (EL) supplemented with recent contributions from affect theory which enables us to shed light on EL experienced by casualised and tenured professionals, respectively. Drawing on rich qualitative we contribute to making clearer how differences in work conditions are associated with different types of demands on emotional labour at the workplace. We aim to answer; what kind of emotional labour do casualised and tenured staff do? For each group, we identify patterns of EL relating to the temporality of a fixed term contract with varying demands on EL in the beginning, middle and towards the end of a contract. Identifying this pattern constitutes the main empirical contribution of the study. Such knowledge allows us to better mitigate the risks involved in relation to precarious employments.