Emotional Labor

Emotional labor is the work of managing and displaying feelings in order to fulfil the requirements of a job or social role, such as appearing cheerful, calm, or caring regardless of one’s actual emotional state. The concept was introduced by Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart, based on her study of flight attendants and bill collectors, in which she distinguished surface acting, changing outward display, from deep acting, trying to change inner feeling, and argued that selling emotional work can lead to estrangement from one’s own feelings. She drew on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy and impression management and on Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. Amy Wharton, Robin Leidner, and Rosemary Pringle examined emotional labor in service, interactive, and gendered workplaces, while Deborah Brook and Mary Ann Hochschild and others studied care work. Emotional labor is unevenly distributed, with women and workers of color often expected to provide more, a point stressed by Adia Harvey Wingfield and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Arlie Hochschild’s later work extended the idea to domestic and global care chains. Critics note that the term is sometimes stretched beyond paid work. Emotional labor remains central to research on service work, gender, care, burnout, and inequality.