Reference no: EM132429100 , Length: word count:2700

Emotional Labour and the New Service Sector

Essay Topic: What is meant by the term ‘emotional labour'? How does it help us to understand working conditions and attitudes in the service or experience economy?

This lecture deals with recent analyses of the changing relations in the workplace. Here we will track through the ways in which aspects of work, first located in the service sector in particular, place great emphasis on customer services, on 'sincerity' and inter-personal communications.

We will consider how this is then extended across a much wider landscape of work and employment, such that we witness the rise of 'emotional work'. We start with Arlie Hochschild's famous study of airline stewards and the emphasis placed on having to smile in the workplace, and on 'sincerity' in customer services.

We then consider how this impacts across the different sectors, especially retail and in the catering industry. This allows a useful historical comparison between Hochschild's classic account and a recent piece of auto-ethnography carried out by Emma Dowling. We will then broaden out the debate about the 'smile economy' to consider how we are nowadays regulated in new ways in the workplace: how are people expected to navigate their careers when so many jobs are temporary?

What is the psycho-social cost of the requirement to find 'happiness at work'? Finally, the lecture will consider the less prominent field of care work; is this not also an important if under-valued area of 'emotional labour'? We will consider who are the care-workers of today's economy? Why does this work remain under-paid and with little status?

What would a feminist account demonstrate in regard to this kind of (domestic) labour? If it is the case that too much emphasis has been placed on the idea of talent and success what are the alternatives? Need we consider a return to 'ordinary jobs' and what would it mean to be able to adopt a slower or more flexible approach to work?

Points for discussion:

1) How do these various sociological accounts of new forms of work and employment reflect patterns of your own 'work experience'?

2) How does affect and emotion operate in the new de-regulated work environments?

3) Discuss the experience of waitressing as described and analysed by Emma Dowling?

4) Provide some comments on Hochschild's The Managed Heart and tally it with your Easyjet observations!

5) How are poor people expected to demonstrate an ethics of care, love and compassion in the workplace?

6) What are the gender, class and ethnic inequalities at work in the field of 'emotional labour'?

7) How can low-skill manual jobs be made more rewarding? Is it a question of respect as Sennett might suggest?

8) How can small-scale craft economies be seen in the context of global capitalism and the power of the multi-nationals e.g. local organics vegetable shops, small independent furniture design?

Attachment:- Emotional Labour and the New Service Sector.rar