Vying for Hearts and Minds: Emotional Labour as Management Control

Abstract

Research on the labour process under capitalism has generated many insights about managerial control strategies. Even though these studies have matured, shifting/rom a focus on managerial imperative for direct control to a concern with the complexity and multiplicity of approaches, they have largely overlooked recent developments on emotional labour as a control mechanism. To remedy this oversight, this article identifies how owners and managers use emotional labour to elicit workers' consent to the conditions of employment at Travel Corp, a United States based professional services firm. Findings suggest that emotional labour masks the nature of capitalist work relations by re.framing the owner-employee relationship, obscuring managers 'power with customer demands, and suppressing labour-management conflicts over work responsibilities and job security. The focus on emotional labour highlights the important processes through which management secures employees ' consent and emphasises the subjective experiences of workers as sites of struggle over the labour process.

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