Introducing Mood Work

Abstract

Abstract In this introduction we suggest a number of ways that, mood has been and, can be a productive way to approach, various forms of labour including: the emotional expenditure of those that, care either professionally or as 'voluntary' ' labourers; the pedagogic labour of teaching; and, the mood, work of the state and, the media. The introduction also introduces the main themes of the essays in this special issue.Keywords emotional labour, Heidegger, mood, seminarThe most obvious questions are still worth asking: why mood, why mood work, and why mood, work now? The mood-filled nature of the recent global economic meltdown is an obvious incentive: during those months in late 2007 and throughout 2008, months when the business news took centre stage, we were regularly told that 'the market' was suffering from depression, and afflicted with all the symptoms that came with that - anxiety, lack of confidence, panic. A mood of doubt rendered years of financial boosterism as little more than a mirage. But such vivid pictures of our economic structures (if so solid a sounding word as 'structures' can be applied to the world of stocks and shares, of futures and derivatives) don't articulate something new, rather they point us to the much longer history of the way that mood has been invoked as a central category for describing the states of the social and economic. As Jani Scandura reminds us: 'after the 1929 stock market crash, depression came to refer simultaneously (and without antecedent) to psychological ill health and financial collapse in American clinical and popular discourse'.1Alongside the moods of the market our title 'Mood Work' is also directed to the world of work, to various forms of labour. One feature of recent studies in the political sociology of labour, particularly as it has been changing throughout many Western countries, is the increased focus on work where the product of labour is connected in some way to mood. What social scientists and others call immaterial labour and affective labour is very often also mood work. In the pioneering work of the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild 'mood work' is called emotional management and emotional labour. Based on ethnographic work conducted in 1980, Hochschild's book The Managed Heart: Commercialization, of Human Feeling takes us into the moodful world of flight attendants. Hochschild's book is both about the physical and psychological cost of such labour and about how unevenly emotional labour is distributed (for instance within patriarchal family structures where women often perform the vast majority of care). She also points to the growing ubiquity of emotional labour:But most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people's feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as 'friendly and dependable' and her boss as 'up-and-coming', the waitress or waiter who creates an 'atmosphere of pleasant dining', the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for, the salesman who creates the sense of a 'hot commodity', the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth - all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor.2If Hochschild terms this work emotional labour, then why replace these terms with the vaguer phrase 'mood work'? We don't set out to challenge Hochschild's important work by swapping mood for emotion; rather we think that a mood perspective might provide new insights about our social worlds that might be harder to grasp if the focus is entirely concentrated on emotion.If we stick with Hochschild's example of the experience of flight attendants, airline companies and flying, then we might initially suggest that mood incorporates the entire situation as well as the 'players' within it. …