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Chapter 6
Emotion Work.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect. Herbert Spencer from Social Statics.
The study of emotions at work began with the Human Relations Movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s in America. The importance of the informal workgroup was that it was friendly, and that it had a coherence. This was seen as a resource by management, who wanted to increase productivity. This movement was also a reaction to the idea that workers responded entirely, or largely, to wage increases; and that this was the way to achieve increased productivity. This stress on the informal work group became unfashionable after the Second World War. The charge was that the worker was seen as too easily manipulable, almost as if they animals. The upsurge in worker militancy in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Britainxe "Britain" France and elsewhere, showed a more political side to industrial workers. They became agents of social change, and not easily led animals. However, the oil crisis of 1973 brought a period of de-industrialisation. This really meant a sharp decline in the number of workers in manufacturing industries. Coal mining and shipbuilding were key examples. Service industries were affected too, but more and more workers were entering this sector of the economy. By the 1990’s the service sector was larger than manufacturing, in terms of numbers employed. Sociologists have responded to this with a range of studies of service workers. An early focus of these studies was on the issue of gender. There were many more women workers than men, in service industries. The issues of promotion, or the ‘glass ceiling’, sexual harassment, and the commitment of women to trade unionism, were the early concerns. Then, in 1983, a study of American flight attendants, which were mostly women, focused on the issue of emotional work" (Hochschild, 1983). Service to a client or customer does not always involve a physical object. Where this is the case, examples include handing coins and bank notes over a counter, receiving cheques, sending insurance policies etc. Examples of service without a physical object include advice and counselling work. Typical workers would include lawyers, priests, and psychiatrists. What is common to all of these service workers is emotional work. This involves understanding the needs of others, and smiling. Hochschild estimated that about one third of all jobs in America involved some emotional work. However, there was a major gender difference. Only a quarter of men’s jobs, compared with over a half of women’s involved emotional work. Her study focused mainly on flight attendants on Delta Airlines. These attendants were subjected to rigorous Initial Training, and subsequent Recurrent Training. Initial training focused on the flight attendant. Recurrent training focused on the passenger. Initial training distinguished surface acting from deep acting. In surface acting, we deceive others about how we feel, but not ourselves. In deep acting pretending is made easy, as the trainer puts it, “by making it unnecessary” (Hochschild, 33: 1983). This means that the training in deep acting is so successful that the self is changed. The specific issue here was the need to suppress the anger of the attendant about the behaviour of an irate customer. Where deep acting works, there is no need to pretend that we do not feel anger. There really is no anger there. The self that experienced anger, with exposure to this common occurrence of an irate passenger has been changed. So a passenger who uses a rude name in addressing an attendant is called an ‘irate’ in initial training. The point of the training is to focus the attention of the attendant away from her anger, and on to the passenger. What are their reasons for being irate? These reasons, missing a connection, losing luggage, etc. require empathetic listening, but do not require attendant anger. The suggestion is that there is very little in passenger behaviour that is worth getting angry about. The point of this training is to reduce the anger of the attendant, which can be a cause of stress. The irate passenger might produce an angry response because of an untrained attendant, which may lose the company future sales. The main technique for reducing passenger anger is smiling. The training aims to get the attendant to produce a sincere smile through deep acting. Trainers give the following advice; “Relax and smile’, and smile. “Your smile is your biggest asset, use it!”
(Hochschild, 105: 1983). In the training sessions attended by Hochschild, there was some student resistance to this aspect of the training. The trainer, an experienced attendant herself dealt this with, by stepping back and smiling herself at the audience of students. This seemed to imply some sort of complicity with the students. An agreement that all this may well be ridiculous but the trainer was now doing her deep self, and the audience would soon be doing it themselves too. A possible message to the students, not explicitly spoken might have been, this is hard work, and what we are paid for! Apart from smiling, deep acting initial trainingxe "training" required the attendant to see the aircraft cabin as her home, and the passengers as her personal guests. The cabin may hold 36 passengers to each attendant, but the same domestic feelings are required. As the trainer said, “You see your sister’s eyes in someone sitting in that seat” (Hochschild, 105: 1983). Perhaps because this is so implausible as a sincere belief, a final aspect of deep acting is taught. The attendant must think of the passenger as the sale of this ticket, and possible future tickets. She must also see herself as on sale. The trainer says, “You are selling yourself.... You are on your own commission” (Hochschild, 109: 1983). This harsh commercialisation may have become necessary because of increasing competition, and the larger number of passengers in the aircraft cabin. It does however sharply contrast with the smiling domesticity of the previous part of the training. It is a frank recognition by the company that work has got harder: that deep acting may, on occasion, fail: that smiles may become empty and insincere: that passengers may feel that they have a right to be abusive as they have bought the ticket. Recurrent training focuses on passenger anger, and how to handle it. This training happens regularly for experienced attendants. Avoiding attendant anger following passenger anger is crucial here. The training gives explanations of passenger anger as based on the fear of flying itself. This can be reduced by mild flirtation. The company prides itself on avoiding the more overt sexuality of it’s competitor’s advertising. Practically, mild flirtation is to be achieved by keeping eye to eye contact, but not for too long, and sincere smiling. One attendant described herself as liberated, partly because she was not married with children as her peers from school were; partly because she had chosen this glamorous career. This biography, known to the employer through a rigorous selection procedure, made this requirement to flirt acceptable to the trainee; at least in training. The claim that it would deal with passenger anger was persuasive. More simply passengers were portrayed as children. They needed constant attention. Here the attendant role is not flirting, but mothering. Lastly, attendants are told not to take passenger abuse too seriously. This is because the abuse is directed at the company, at the uniform worn, and not at the attendant personally. There are two problems here. A real personal guest in a home might not behave in this way. Buying the ticket may well produce a feeling that one has a right to abuse. This points up the commercialisation of the relationship between attendant and passenger. This commercialisation was previously hidden in the flirt/mother relationship. Now it is exposed. The uniform taints the person of the attendant. The trainer’s redefinition of passenger anger as being to the uniform and not the person does not work. The second related problem is that the attendant is trained to sell themselves as the company in direct contact with the passenger. Passenger anger may not make the distinction between uniform and person, especially if the training has been successful. This points to a real problem in the training. If the attendant is trained to be the company in order to sell the company, then the irate passenger is quite rational in not distinguishing uniform and person. The training almost invites passenger anger when something goes wrong! The training is into a type of domesticity requiring empathy with passengers’ problems, and a dismissive attitude to passengers as children, or adults who do not need to be taken seriously. This may reflect a change in the history of the industry in the early 1970’s. Experienced attendants talk of a golden age of flying, which ended with the oil crisis of 1973. Before that a more genteel, richer clientele, made smiling easier. There were shorter in-flight hours and fewer passengers, and smaller planes. With the profit crisis of the 1970’s came longer hours, larger planes, and less genteel passengers. The new type of passenger, which particularly annoyed the attendants, included those who were called the “Teenage Execs”! (Hochschild, 107: 1983). Typically they behaved disrespectfully to the attendants. This raised the level of passenger abuse, which then became a major part of training. There was also less time to adjust to changes in time zones on long flights. This increased jet lag. One attendant called this a speed up. This recalls an earlier analysis of work by F.W. Taylor. He tried to speed up the production line by finding the one right way to do any job. To find this right way the job had to be analysed into its smallest component parts. Each part had to be timed. This process had also happened on the airlines. Although attendants were told that they had responsibility for dealing with irates, they had detailed specifications as to how to do their jobs. They were trained how to deal with a passenger who was too fat for one seat, who was not served a meal, who was not given a free magazine, or not with a sincere smile. There are detailed time specifications for handing out meals, for drinks, and for second servings of tea, coffee, or alcohol. One irate who needs a lot of attention, throws all these times out. Attendants get behind time. Colleagues become essential here in meeting the overall time schedules for the whole flight. This speed up makes sincere smiling more difficult, and creates the need for more intensive training in smiling. Passengers become more demanding. Unsmiling attendants were seen as emotional loafers. Attendants began to fight back. Stories of the smile war included the following, now well known, one. When asked by a young businessman why she was not smiling, the attendant replied: “I’ll tell you what. You smile first, then I’ll smile.” He smiled and she replied; “Good. Now hold that for 15 hours.” (Hochschild, 127: 1983). Other unofficial stories were about losing the smile war. Free playing cards were given to passengers on a long flight. One passenger complained when told that no packs of cards were left. One was found under a seat, and when given to the passenger, who had complained, she opened her handbag and there were 15 packs of cards inside. The attendant snapped! Another example was a passenger throwing a cup of hot tea over an attendant’s arm. These losers in the smile war react by going into ‘robot’. This means that they retreat into surface acting, and withhold deep acting. They do not attempt to hide the fact that they are acting from the passengers. This creates an emotional detachment from the passengers. This raises the problem for the attendant as to whether they are a phoney person, or are alienated. The attendants see this as an undesirable state. Other attendants do not approve it of. This creates a residual need for the attendant to return to deep acting. In deep acting the service felt personal, and this was satisfying to the attendant. In surface acting mode one had become alienated from the deep acting mode. Another problem here, not addressed in the study, is that deep acting itself could be seen as phoney, and as alienated. Although the attendants had been successfully trained in deep acting, that training was necessary because the untrained self might not have been capable of deep acting. The untrained might have acted otherwise; and was in any case different from the trained deep self. The issue is, was the attendant alienated by the success, or by the failure of deep acting? The concept of alienation is a classic idea in sociology, originating in the writings of Karl Marx. Marx saw alienation as an inevitable feature of the capitalist ordering of the economy and society. For Hochschild, alienation seems to be a consequence of the breakdown of the deep acting. This breakdown is in turn related by Hochschild to the economy, specifically the oil crisis of 1973. This leaves open the possibility, in other economic circumstances, of deep acting returning in non alienated forms. Therefore, it is possible to have non-alienated workers in a capitalist economy. This was not Marx’s view. Hochschild seems to prefer the word estrangement to alienation. She argues that surface acting may be an estrangement from a real or deep acting self. But surface acting is presented as a successful form of defence against irates. The existence of a tension between the real/deep acting self, and the phoney/surface acting self is itself a problem in this analysis. There is no whole self. After initial training there is a permanent tension between the two selves. This tension may itself become normal. This is the closest Hochschild comes to criticising the whole capitalist order. The second study, in 1989, focused on emotional work in the family (Hochschild, 1989). This was described as the second shift; the first being in paid work. The most tiring aspect of domestic emotional work was agreeing the division of labour between the adults. Who does which tasks? These agreements often did not work. This was because one or both adults often saw the division of tasks as unequal. This caused resentment between partners, and between husbands and wives. However, these agreements and re-negotiated agreements keep relationships going. Part of the agreement was an often unconscious gift from one partner to another. The gift of long hours at paid work, and overtime pay, was seen by one partner as excusing them from large parts of domestic labour. One problem here was that the other partner refused this gift. This in itself caused resentment. More seriously, the other partner did not recognise this unconscious behaviour as a gift. This was partly because it was not explicitly articulated as a gift anyway. More resentment followed. Ways of managing this resentment included reducing one’s needs. One could care for oneself and not need the partner’s care. Another way was for both partners to work longer hours of paid work. Indeed some partners competed with one another for these longer hours. Paid work was seen as a superior gift, when compared with the gift of unpaid domestic labour. As in a previous study there is denigration of one’s own domestic labour. One consequence of this was long hours when the children were without both parents. This creates a need for paid domestic labour, child minders, cleaners etc. So emotional work in the home changes from unpaid to paid work. This in turn requires the need for paid work outside the home to pay for the domestic labour. The reduction in the amount of time of unpaid domestic labour given to the child means that what time there is, becomes more important to both parent and child. It was called quality time. This became the topic of the third study called “The Time Bind”, in 1997. This was a study of a progressive local employer, who had years of experience in training and promoting women workers, but was also seeing many of them leaving the company. This was a considerable cost to the company. So the Human Resources department created a new work/life balance programme, in order to retain these women workers. Part of the progressiveness of the company was its acceptance of the quality message. In particular the slogan, ‘Delight the customer’ was seen as important. One consequence of this was working longer hours. Senior managers worked 50 to 70 hours a week. This included some weekend working too! The company had taken 8 years to ‘engineer’ this new quality culture. One problem was that the quality culture increased the hours at work. Questions were raised as to whether the long hours were really necessary, especially if some workers did the job in fewer hours. Yet other workers liked the longer hours. Time at work was seen as less emotionally draining than domestic labour. This was because family life, with both adults at paid work, was becoming so routinised in the search for efficiency that there had been a speed up of domestic unpaid labour. This speed up was as, or more, emotionally draining than paid work. Getting the children to the childminder in time, so that one was not late for the childminder’s schedule, was part of getting to paid work on time. Collecting the child from school, or a visit to the doctor, or school sport, all had to be fitted around work times. There was a system of flexible work times. However, tasks still had to be completed by deadlines. This often meant that after the doctor or sport was over, the parent had to return home, and then go back to work in the early evening. Dealing with this time shortage meant that the home became a place where unpaid work was even more speeded up, or Taylorised, than paid work. The emotional strains of dealing with young children who did not always fit this strict timetabling was quite severe on the adults involved. Children needed to be coaxed into the complex time schedules of family life. Parents became time and motion experts at home, as well as at work.
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