Arlie R Hochschild's The Managed Heart

The topic of emotional labour was largely unexplored when Arlie R. Hochschild introduced the term in The Managed Heart, published in 1983. Her book is probably the most quoted work with regards to service work and emotional labour. Since then her work has been used widely in fields from psychology, organizational behaviour, law, nursing, business and public administration to the social sciences in general and sociology in particular. This introduction is to briefly review Hochschild’s ideas.
Growing up as the child of diplomats, Hochschild often had the opportunity to meet her parents’ colleagues when they visited. She would often observe the visitors’ diplomatic gestures and would later listen to her parents’ interpretation of those gestures. Hochschild became curious about the disparity between how those diplomats expressed themselves in public places and how they might actually have been feeling. This fascination drew her to the work of C. Wright Mills, which revealed that when we ‘sell our personality’, in the course of selling …show more content…
To exemplify this labour, Hochschild refers to the smile of the flight attendants in Delta Airlines (1983, p. 4). She observed that Delta regards the smile of the FAs as the workers’ biggest asset and one of the company’s main selling points. In fact, it is so valuable that this personal smile is constantly being groomed to reflect the company’s disposition. The workers have no qualms in smiling for the company but often they find it hard to retract their smile at the end of the day. To Hochschild, this inability to control their own expression will alienate the workers from their own smile: when we lose our capacity to feel our own feeling, which Hochschild says is a capacity we honour as deep and integral to our individuality, we begin to estrange ourselves (Hochschild, 2003, p.