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Exploring the Managed Heart
The Professional Smile:
the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition - its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance that departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return.
Seen in one way, this is no more than delivering a service. Seen in another, it estranges workers from their own smiles and convinces customers that on-the-job behavior is calculated.
- what is emotional labor?
- what do we do when we manage emotion?
- what is emotion?
- what is the cost of managing emotion in private life and at work?
Thought
Dated?
1973 - In the coming of Post-Industrial Society
The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society.
1974 - Labor and Monopoly Capital
Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job.
By Author’s estimation:
roughly one-third of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly one-half have jobs that call for emotional labor.
Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice of the use of feeling in theater, or in psychotherapy or in forms of group life we admire.
The charm of the little robot R2 - D2, in the film Star Wars, is that he seems so human. Films like this bring us the familiar in reverse: every day, outside the movie house, we see human beings whose show of feeling has a robot quality.
Feeling As Clue
Rethinking what an emotion or feeling is.
Many (organismic) theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold.
Author sees this as a limiting view. “For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which flight attendants in Recurrent Training are taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion in, ways that can actually change feeling?”
think of emotion as more permeable to cultural influence than organismic theorists have thought, but as more substantial than some interactional theorists have thought.
As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feeling and gestures of company policy. We have a practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling.
Managing Feeling
Surface Acting
To show through surface acting the feelings of a Hamlet or an Ophelia, the actor operates countless muscles that make up an outward gesture. The body, not the soul, is the main tool of the trade. The actor’s body evokes passion in the audience’s soul, but the actor is only acting as if he had feeling.
Stanislavski’s Method acting and the limit of surface acting:
This type of art (of the Coquelin school) is less profound than beautiful. It is more immediately effective than truly powerful; its form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is sharp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself.
Stanislavski:
On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake … Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer for its own sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. Of the thing that goes before you should think as you can. As for the result, it will produce itself.”
Deep Acting
Two ways to deep act
- indirect use of trained imagination
- directly exhorting feeling Herbert Goldquote
He fought against love, he fought against grief, he fought against anger. They were all linked. He reminded himself when touched, moved, overwhelmed by the sights and smell of her, or a sight and smell which recalled her, or passing their old house or eating their foods, or walking on their streets; don’t do this, don’t feel. First he succeeded in removing her from the struggle … He lost his love. He lost his anger. She became a limited idea, like a newspaper death notice. He did not lose her entirely, but chipped away at it: don’t, don’t, don’t, he would remind him- self in the middle of the night; don’t feel; and then dream what he could.
Remembering events and remembering emotions:
Two travelers were marooned on some rocks by high tide. After their rescue they narrated their impressions. One remembered every little thing he did; how, why, and where he went, where he climbed up and where he climbed down; where he jumped up or jumped down. The other man had no recollection of the place at all. He remembered only the emotions he felt. In succession came delight, apprehension, fear, hope, doubt, and finally panic.
Everyday deep acting
rel: Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz
An account of keeping love in check
Last summer I was going with a guy often, and I began to feel very strongly about him. I knew, though, that he had broken up with a girl a year ago because she had gotten too serious about him, so I was afraid to show any emotion. I also was afraid of being hurt, so I attempted to change my feelings. I talked myself into not caring about him . .. but I must admit it didn’t work for long. To sustain this feeling I had to invent bad things about him and concentrate on them or continue to tell myself he didn’t care. It was a hardening of emotions, I’d say. It took a lot of work and was unpleasant because I had to concentrate on anything I could find that was irritating about him.
A young woman who was trying not to love a man used her supporting cast of friends like a Greek chorus: “I could only say horrible things about him. My friends thought he was horrible because of this and reinforced my feelings of dislike for him.”
Once a love story is subject to doubt, the story is rewritten; falling in love comes to seem like the work of convincing each other that this had been true love. “What pretending that I loved him meant to me was having a secret nervous breakdown.”
Institutional Emotional Management
Companies, prisons, schools, churches-institutions of virtually any sort-assume some of the functions of a director and alter the relation of actor to director.
As a farmer puts blinders on his workhorse to guide its vision forward, institutions manage how we feel.
The text goes over different “stages”. The professional’s office should be pleasant but impersonal and not messy. It is distinguished from the home, and personal flair shows expertise. “The stage setting is intended to inspire the confidence that the service is worth paying for.”
Feeling Rules
A restless vitality wells up as we approach thirty.
- Gail Sheehy
A wink or ironic tone of voice may change the spirit of a rule reminder. Such gestures add a meta-state- ment: “That’s the feeling rule, all right, but we’re disregard- ing it, aren’t we?” We are reminded of the rule by being asked to disregard it.
Wedding anecdote:
My marriage ceremony was chaos, unreal, completely different than I imagined it would be. Unfortunately, we rehearsed at eight o’clock the morning of the wedding. I had imagined that everyone would know what to do, but they didn’t. That made me nervous. My sister didn’t help me get dressed or flatter me, and no one in the dressing room helped until I asked. I was depressed. I wanted to be so happy on our wedding day. I never ever dreamed how anyone could cry at their wedding. That’s the happiest day of one’s life. I couldn’t believe that some of my best friends couldn’t make it to my wedding. So I started out to the church with all these little things I always thought would not happen at my wedding going through my mind. I broke down-I cried going to the wedding. I thought, “Be happy for the friends, the relatives, the presents.” But I finally said in my mind, “Hey, people aren’t getting married, you are.” From down the long aisle we looked at each other’s eyes. His love for me changed my whole being from that point. When we joined arms I was relieved. The tension was gone. From then on, it was beautiful. It was indescribable.
What she imagined or hoped might be her experience of the wedding (“the happiest day of one’s life”) made her privately miserable.
Yet in one sense, it was not her wedding. The throwing of rice is a medieval fertility rite, the wearing of white a Victorian addition, and the very idea of a father but not a mother giving away a daughter but not a son derives from Saxon times, when a father would sell his daughter for her labor. (Only after the Crusades, when women exceeded men in number, did the father come to “give her away.“) It was her wedding in the sense that it was her borrowings from cul- ture, as well as her borrowings from public notions about what she should inwardly experience on such a day.
Degree of stoicism in parents of child patients
The parents were frequently described by the medical staff as being strong, though occasionally this behavior was interpreted as reflecting “coldness” or lack of sincere concern. The parents were also often aware of this paucity of emotional feeling, frequently explaining it on the grounds that they “could not break down” in the presence of the children or their physicians. How- ever, the parents would occasionally verbalize their confusion and even guilt over not feeling worse.
Paying Respects with Feeling
rel:Distributed Gift - A gift in 100 obscure pieces
Gift Exchange
There are two types of exchange - straight and improvisational. In straight exchange, we simply use rules to make an inward bow; we do not play with them. In improvisational we presuppose the rules and play with them, creating irony and humor.
rel:Disguises
Sometimes improvisational exchanges themselves become crystallized into custom. A graduate student of mine from Korea once gave me two masks with wildly happy eyes and broad smiles. These masks, she explained, were used by Korean peasants when confronting their landlord on specified occasions; holding the smiling masks over their faces, they were free to hurl insults and bitter complaints at him. The masks paid the emotional respects due the landlord and left the peasants free to say and feel what they liked.
Feeling Management
When you see them receiving passengers with that big smile, I don’t think it means anything. They have to do that. It’s part of their job. But now if you get into a conversation with a flight attendant . .. well . .. no … I guess they have to do that too. - Airline Passenger
“The company wants to sexualize the cabin atmosphere. They want men to be thinking that way because they think what men really want is to avoid fear of flying. So they figure mild sexual arousal will be helpful in getting people’s minds off of flying. It’s a question of dollars and cents … Most of our passengers are male, and all of the big corporate contract business is male.
Slogans: “We really move our tails for you to make your every wish come true” (Continental), or “Fly me, you’ll like it” (National).
“As we say, the passenger isn’t always right, but he’s never wrong.”
Managers
- Emotion work is no longer a private act but a public act, bought on the one hand and sold on the other. Those individuals who direct emotion work are no longer the individuals themselves but are instead paid stage managers who select, train and supervise others.
- Feeling rules are no longer simply a matter of personal discretion, negotiated with another person in private but are spelled out publicly, in manuals, training programs and the discourse of supervisors.
- Social exchange is forced into narrow channels.
Between The Toe and Heel
The corporate world has a toe and a heel, and each performs a different function: one delivers a service, the other collects payment for it. When an organization seeks to create demand for a service and then deliver it, it uses the smile and the soft questioning voice. Behind this delivery display, the organization’s worker is asked to feel sympathy, trust, and good will. On the other hand, when the organization seeks to collect money for what it has sold, its worker may be asked to use a grimace and the raised voice of command. Behind this collection display the worker is asked to feel dis- trust and sometimes positive bad will.
Authenticity
In a social system animated by competition for property, the human personality was metamorphosed into a form of capital. Here it was rational to invest oneself only in properties that would produce the highest return. Personal feeling was a handicap since it distracted the individual from calculating his best interest and might pull him along economically counterproductive paths. - Rousseauquote
The false self: a disbelieved, unclaimed self, “a part of me” that isn’t really “me.”
The Narcissist and the Altruist Our culture has produced another form of false self: the altruist, the person who is overly concerned with the needs of others. Whereas the narcissist is adept at turning the social uses of feeling to his own advantage, the altruist is more susceptible to being used-not because her sense of self is weaker but because her “true self” is bonded more securely to the group and its welfare.