The Alienated Heart: Hochschild's ‘emotional labour’ thesis and the anticapitalist politics of alienation

Abstract

Arlie Russell Hochschild's influential emotional labour thesis in The Managed Heart (1983) exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the commodification of human feelings as customer service, and complements contemporary anticapitalist writing with an enduring influence and political relevance that is underpinned by Hochschild's application of Marx's alienation theory. Critics have sought to blunt the politics of her thesis by rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of workers' alienation. But her application of alienation theory is not thorough, since her explicit usage of it is limited to only two of Marx's four dimensions, and thus it stops short of theorising alienation as generic to society. This undermines Hochschild's argument on emotional labourers' resistance, since she inadequately captures the way workers are shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capitalism. The continuing political potency of her thesis requires that it should be defended and strengthened.

No funny business: Precarious work and emotional labour in stand-up comedy

“…Typically, the appropriate set of emotions is prescribed by management in service sector work. Of course, individuals also engage in emotion work in their private lives but when emotions are commercialized by organizations and subject to instrumental 'feeling rules', capitalist relations of exploitation extend into the most intimate spheres of life (Brook, 2009). …”

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“…Hochschild's account is Marxist, something that has tended to be obscured in much academic discussion of her work but which still needs amplification (Brook, 2009). For Marx (1844), alienation under capitalism is four-fold: there is alienation of each individual from the others as competition for resources is reconfigured as competition for work; there is alienation from one's own nature as it become imperative that the body is maintained and capable of work; there is alienation from nature as such when it is turned into something that is turned into exploitable resource; and there is alienation in the most-well-known classical sense as division in the human subject as they are separated from the products of their own creative activity.…”

An indivisible union? Assessing the marriage of Hochschild's emotional labour concept and labour process theory

“…Nevertheless, Marxist derived Labour Process Theory (LPT) (Braverman, 1975; Thompson, 1983/89) has progressively adopted it as a core concept in its applied analyses, principally of service work (Warhurst, Thompson and Nickson, 2009). Yet the 'imprecise boundaries' between Marxist -including the foundations of LPT -and nonMarxist sociology in Hochschild's theorisation of emotional labour have only been sporadically addressed from within the labour process tradition until very recently (see Bolton, 2005Bolton, , 2009Bolton, , 2010Brook, 2009aBrook, , 2009band Taylor, 1998) What follows argues that the attraction of the emotional labour concept for the labour process analysis tradition i (LPA) is precisely because Hochschild explicitly defines and locates emotional labour within Marx's concept of wage-labour by introducing it as an additional aspect of labour power, alongside physical and mental labour. More significantly, Hochschild argues management's control is unstable, whereby workers frequently offer only 'surface acting' rather than genuinely felt performances.…”

“…However, the common charge from within LPA that Hochschild's theory inadequately captures the contradictory nature of workplace relations and the incompleteness of management control is a valid one (Bolton, 2005;Brook, 2009a;Callaghan and Thompson, 2002;Taylor, 1998;and Warhurst et al, 2009). This is because she overly focuses on the individual experience of emotional labour via her core notions of 'surface acting', 'deep acting' and 'transmutation of feelings', at the expense of wider workplace social relations.…”