The Managed Heart

“These questions and ideas were developing, then, when I went out to try to get behind the eyes of flight attendants and bill collectors, female workers and male, as each moved through a day’s work. The more I listened, the more I came to appreciate how workers try to preserve a sense of self by circumventing the feeling rules of work, how they limit their emotional offerings to surface displays of the ‘right’ feeling but suffer anyway from a sense of being ‘false’ or mechanical.”

This passage examines the internal conflict that workers face when their authentic emotions clash with the “feeling rules” that their jobs impose. By observing flight attendants and bill collectors, the author uncovers how such workers strive to balance personal identity with professional demands, often resorting to superficial emotional displays to meet job expectations. Despite their efforts, they experience feelings of inauthenticity, revealing the psychological strain of performing emotional labor. These real-life examples illustrate the broader implications of emotional labor, thematically emphasizing The Commodification of Emotions in the Workplace: Exploiting emotions for business purposes can lead to a fragmented sense of self and diminished emotional well-being.

“This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work.”

The author emphasizes that emotional labor requires a complex coordination of mind and feeling, and tapping into the core of one’s individuality. She discusses the parallel between physical and emotional labor, highlighting that both can lead to a form of estrangement or alienation from aspects of oneself. This comparison underscores the psychological costs of emotional labor, suggesting that it can disconnect individuals from their own emotions and identity, much like how physical labor can distance workers from their bodies.