Getting to the heart of the emotional labour process: a reply to Brook

Abstract

In an article published in this volume of WES Paul Brook suggests the need to strongly defend Hochschild’s emotional labour concept, as it is claimed that I threaten it with extinction with the development of a new typology of emotion management in the workplace.This article seeks to reply to Brook’s core concerns and deal with issues of substance about the phenomena Brook and I are both interested in. Mainly this paper considers how we conceptualize emotional labour and work, and how might that fit into labour process analysis? In response to the misgivings of Brook, the discussion will reveal why and how there is a need to develop analytically the idea of emotional labour, that the typology introduced in Emotion Management in the Workplace (Bolton, 2005a) offers a nuanced explanatory framework; and that labour process analysis is its theoretical home.