In her seminal work The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described a workplace practice known as “emotional labor management.” Hochschild was studying the extreme kinds of “emotional labor” that airline stewardesses, bill collectors, and shop assistants, among others, had to perform in their daily routines. They were obliged, in her words, “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” In the case of airline stewardesses, the managers and human resources staff of the airline companies relied on reports from passengers or management spies to make sure that stewardesses kept up their cheerful greetings and radiant smiles no matter what.
The stewardesses Hochschild studied were working under a regime of “scientific management,” a workplace control system conceived in the 1880s and 1890s by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Read Full Article »