Emotional and Affective Labor

Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) inaugurated the sociology of emotional labor. Hochschild studied flight attendants at Delta Airlines and bill collectors at a Midwestern firm to ask a question largely absent from classical sociology of work: what happens when workers are paid not only to perform physical or mental tasks but to produce particular emotional states — in themselves and in their customers? Her answer — that such work extracts a distinctive psychic cost — reshaped how sociology understands the service economy.

Hochschild defined emotional labor as 'the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display' sold for a wage. Flight attendants were trained to project warmth, calm, and solicitude regardless of how they actually felt or how passengers behaved; bill collectors were trained to project controlled anger and urgency to pressure debtors. Both were required not merely to display these emotions but, through company training, to actually feel them or a close approximation — to transform their inner life in ways the employer prescribed. Hochschild drew on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology but pushed further: Goffman's actors managed performances, while Hochschild's workers were required to reshape the underlying feelings, commercializing domains of the self that were previously private.

The book's empirical core is a remarkable set of interviews and ethnographic observations. Hochschild rode jumpseats with Delta flight attendants, attended their training sessions (where instructors urged trainees to 'really feel' the warmth they were projecting), and followed collectors through their shifts. She documented the 'feeling rules' each job transmitted — scripts for what emotions to feel and display in which situations — and the techniques workers used to conform. She also documented the consequences: emotive dissonance (the strain of displaying feelings one does not have), burnout, a sense of alienation from one's own feelings, and what Hochschild called the transmutation of private emotion into a corporate resource.

Hochschild's theoretical debt was to Karl Marx and to C. Wright Mills. Marx had analyzed the alienation of industrial labor from product and process; Hochschild extended the concept to the alienation of a worker from her feelings. Mills had already noted in White Collar (1951) that the 'personality market' of the service economy commodified smiles and sociability; Hochschild gave the insight rigorous empirical and theoretical form. The Managed Heart won the ASA's highest scholarly award and remains one of the most cited works in contemporary sociology.