Reference no: EM133388040

Case Study: While everyone realizes that jobs require workers to do certain things, the fact that many jobs require workers to feel certain things has not been so widely noticed. For instance, we typically expect waiters not just to bring us our food, but also to project a friendly, happy and generally pleasant demeanor. This requires the waiter to either pretend to be happy to serve her patrons or to actually make herself feel happy to do so. In her book "The Managed Heart" sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild describes this phenomenon as "emotional labor." For her book, Hochschild followed debt collectors and stewardesses and described the different sorts of emotional labor both professions required. For instance, debt collectors thought that to be effective they needed to be extremely aggressive towards those they dealt with and to play on their feelings of guilt and inadequacy for not paying their debts. So debt collectors taught themselves to regard those who owed money as deserving such harsh treatment. On the other hand, stewardesses were required to be friendly even to passengers who were trying, unreasonable, or even abusive. In response to this they generally tried to regard their customers in a way that justified such emotions. They reported to Hochschild that they often made excuses for the behavior of such passengers to themselves and some even reported trying to think of passengers as children. That is as perhaps unreasonable and demanding, but also helpless and dependent.

Critics of such emotional labor argue that it requires workers to in a way sell their feelings, which they think crosses some sort of line that merely selling one's labor does not. On the other hand, one might ask why should selling one's feelings should be any different than selling one's intellect or labor, which other jobs require.

Question: What do you think a virtue theorist would say about emotional labor in say the case of a flight attendant or waiter who is expected to be friendly with rude or even abusive patrons or passengers? What about the debt collectors in Hochschild's study? Do you agree with the virtue theorist's response?