The Alienated Heart: Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’ thesis and the anti- capitalist politics of alienation

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. Introduction: A very political theory It is difficult to overestimate the enduring influence of the emotional labour thesis found in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s seminal work, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (2003 [1983]). Debates on emotional labour continue to turn on this pioneering contribution (Bolton, 2005), and yet it is an unlikely candidate to have won such a high profile. Published in the harsh, neoconservative climate of Reagan’s USA, the book resolutely exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the expanding demand for the commodification of emotions in the form of customer service. Thus, The Managed Heart’s core arguments and political conclusions are highly relevant to today’s anticapitalist movement with its slogan of ‘our world is not for sale’, underpinned by its damning analyses of neoliberalism, corporate power and consumerism. Since The Managed Heart, Hochschild’s emotional labour thesis has spawned an immense range of studies that reach far into the world of work beyond her original study of flight attendants and debt collectors. These, which Bolton (2005: 53) has referred to pejoratively as an ‘emotional labour bandwagon’, include studies of nurses, Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists, holiday representatives, call-entre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others (see Steinberg and Figart, 1999; Bolton, 2005). While these studies vary in the degree to which they follow Hochschild in her explicit condemnation of emotional labour, they tend to contain an implicit acceptance of its exploitative and subordinating nature. Some have extended Hochschild’s thesis to include additional dimensions, as in Witz et al.’s (2003) addition of aesthetic labour, which stresses the increasing commodification of service workers’ appearance and sexuality as ‘display’. Most notable has been the development of a feminist dimension to emotional labour debates, which centres on the socially reproduced, gendered commodification of emotion in organisations, and on the related feminisation of most service work (see Fineman, 2005; Colley, 2006; Lewis & Simpson, 2007). Thus James (1989, 1992), in her pioneering studies of cancer nurses’ emotional labour, developed a feminist orientation in her analysis of the source, maintenance and commodification of compassion in the ‘caring workplace’. What underpins Hochschild’s politicised critique in The Managed Heart ii is the pivotal role played in it by her application of Marx’s alienation theory. This is borne out by the central argument of some of Hochschild’s critics, who seek to blunt her critique by rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of the alienation workers suffer through the commodification of their emotions. They argue instead that customer service interactions are double-edged in that they possess the potential to be subjectively satisfying as well as distressing for the worker (Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Korczynski, 2002). In essence, they reject the notion that the experience of having one’s emotions commodified is intrinsically alienating. Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing movement towards the rejection of ‘emotional labour’ as a meaningful category of wage labour (see Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Bolton, 2005; Lewis & Simpson, 2007), on the basis that not all emotions are commodified in the labour process, and that Hochschild’s application of alienation in this context implies that workers are rendered powerless. Consequently, Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’ theory is now challenged by a growing usage of Bolton’s (2005) alternative, largely depoliticised thesis on ‘emotion management’ in organisations. This argues that emotion workers exercise a significant degree of emotional free choice because of the very limited extent to which their emotions can be commodified. Therefore, they enjoy a largely unalienated experience of the labour process. To date it has been Hochschild’s opponents, rather than those who wish to build on her thesis, who have recognised her understanding and use of alienation as pivotal, and who have thereby subjected it to sustained criticism (e.g. Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Bolton, 2005). Although it has been condemned as absolutist, Hochschild’s application of alienation theory is nevertheless not thorough. She restricts her explicit theorisation to the two of Marx’s (1975 [1844]) four dimensions that are specific to the workplace: product alienation and labour process alienation. The first deals with workers’ loss of control over and ownership of their labour product, and the second with the removal of their control over the labour process. However, while alienation has its source at the point of production, Marx’s remaining two dimensions relate to the wider corrosive effects of alienation in society, and should not be separated from the first two (Yuill, 2005). These dimensions – human nature alienation and fellow beings alienation (including commodity fetishism) – deal with the way the suffusion of the commodity form and market relations through society severely distort our self-knowledge, social relations and understanding of the world. While these dimensions are occasionally implicit in Hochschild’s analysis, she does not explore them as wider social dimensions of alienation contributing to and compounding the direct commodification of workplace emotions. In not doing so, she stops short of theorising alienation as generic to capitalist society (Meszaros, 2005 [1970]; Billig, 1999). This effectively localises the existence of alienation to workplace social relations. Furthermore, The Managed Heart is devoid of an explicit class analysis. This undermines Hochschild’s argument in explaining individual and collective responses, including resistance by emotional labourers. She compounds this weakness with an insufficiently dialectical analysis (Rees, 1998) whereby she is unable to capture the complexity and potential of contradictory dimensions in the emotional labour process (Sturdy, 1998; Taylor, 1998). Thus Hochschild inadequately theorises the way workers are shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capitalism (Lukács, 1974; Heller, 1978). The combination of under-theorisation and theoretical gaps generates weaknesses in her overall thesis that leave it open to more valid criticisms than partisan claims of absolutism. In particular, Hochschild is criticised for her tendency to dichotomise the distinction between the private self and the commodified public self (Wouters, 1989; Barbalet, 2001; Bolton, 2005); and for overestimating the degree of managerial ownership and control of workers’ emotions (Ashworth & Humphreys, 1993; Barbalet, 2001; Bolton, 2005; Theodosius, 2006), as a consequence of which she presents frontline workers as ‘crippled actors’ (Bolton & Boyd, 2003). Whatever the weaknesses in Hochschild’s thesis, it is nevertheless, ‘one that clearly politicises our understanding of emotion at work’ (Fineman, 2005: 6). What follows is a critical defence of Hochschild’s emotional labour thesis at a time when there are growing efforts to reject its Marxian core of alienation theory, and to diminish its political content. Accordingly, this article aims to defend the thesis as a valuable contribution and a significant building block for a still thin Marxist debate on emotional labour. It begins with an exposition of Hochschild’s thesis, followed by an analysis of the ‘emotional labour’ concept against each of Marx’s four dimensions of alienation. Central to this assessment is the question of the adequacy of her theorisation of worker’s resistance arising from the alienation of emotional labour, and how it can be strengthened and developed within the classical Marxist tradition (see Rees, 1998). Emotional labour in play The Managed Heart’s opening lines set the analytic and political tone for what is to come. Hochschild begins by citing the case of the young boy in a wallpaper factory discussed by Marx in Capital. She notes Marx’s point that the boy is no more than an instrument of labour, and expresses a fundamental concern at the human cost. Hochschild then makes a direct comparison between the boy in the nineteenth-century wallpaper factory and a flight attendant over a century later: The work done by the boy in the wallpaper factory called for a co-ordination of mind and arm, mind and finger, and mind and shoulder. We refer to it simply as physical labor. The flight attendant does physical labor when she pushes heavy meal carts through the aisles, and she does mental work when she prepares for and actually organizes emergency landings and evacuations. But in the course of doing this physical and mental labor she is doing something more, something I define as ‘emotional labor’. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. (p. 7) Here Hochschild is laying the foundations for her argument that the human cost of performing emotional labour is as harmful as that of the physical and mental labour discussed by Marx. This is because ‘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’ (p. 7). The early introduction of alienation theory is joined by another equally fundamental use of Marx’s critique of wage labour; namely, the distinction between exchange value and use value in the commodification of emotions. This is integral to Hochschild’s primary definition of emotional labour as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has “exchange value”. I use the synonymous terms “emotion work” or “emotion management” to refer to those same acts done in a private context where they have “use value” (p. 7). v Hochschild’s analysis rests on this distinction between emotion work and emotional labour. Emotion work is the process of managing and presenting emotions in the private sphere of our lives, such as amongst family and friends and even as a customer. Emotional labour, in contrast, involves the commercialisation of workers’ feelings through a transmutation vi of ‘private sphere’ feelings into a package of emotions that is consumed by the customer as a commodified service interaction. The process has the effect of alienating frontline workers from their emotional product through management’s wresting of formal ownership and control from workers of the form, timing, giving and withdrawal of feelings, moods and their display. Two other aspects compound this loss of control. First, there is an unequal relationship with the customer: ‘the customer is always right’. This is in contrast to our private lives, where we tend to experience a much greater level of assumed and/or near equality in our emotional interactions: In private life, we are free to question the going rate of exchange and free to negotiate a new one. If we are not satisfied, we can leave; many friendships and marriages die of inequality. But in the public world of work, it is often part of an individual’s job to accept uneven exchanges, to be treated with disrespect or anger by a client, all the while closeting into fantasy the anger one would like to respond with. Where the customer is king, unequal exchanges are normal. (pp. 85–6) Second, management imposes codified feeling rules on emotional labourers in order to ensure the delivery of the requisite quality of customer service. These rules dictate the form, content and appropriateness of emotional displays, thereby separating workers from the design and control of the labour process. Workers, therefore, are estranged from their emotional product and the process of emotion production. Hochschild argues that employers’ feeling rules increasingly go further than demanding behavioural compliance, which she calls surface acting. This is because management frequently strives for emotional workers to internalise the feelings they are required to display, not only in order to enhance the ‘quality’ of the emotional display, but also to diminish the likelihood of emotive dissonance (Jansz & Timmers, 2002), caused by the strain of continuously bridging what is really felt with what has to be feigned over long periods. Hochschild argues that the response of many emotional labourers is to ‘try to pull the two closer together either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign’ (p. 90), which she calls deep acting. Deep acting is the result of a worker’s seeking a more comfortable space for her self, free from the dangers of emotive dissonance (Jansz & Timmers, 2002) through the fusion of her real and acted emotional labour. However, despite fusion’s apparent benefits, there is ‘a cost to be paid’ (p.119), since it is a condition that requires a systemic suppression of the real self, thereby deepening the individual’s subordination to her commodification. However, as a contradictory and unstable condition, it can transform into a nascent form of resistance: Often the test comes when a company speed-up makes personal service impossible to deliver because the individual’s personal self is too thinly parcelled out to meet the demands made on it. At this point, it becomes harder and harder to keep the public and private selves fused... The worker wonders whether her smile and the emotional labor that keeps it sincere are really hers. Do they really express a part of her? Or are they deliberately worked up and delivered on behalf of the company? (p.133) Alienated from what? Underlying Hochschild’s conceptualisation of emotional labour is her ‘social theory of emotions’. Such a theory, she argues, has to possess both social and psychological dimensions in that it needs to be able to ask how the construction of social interaction for profit influences an individual’s personality. Hence, while employers’ feeling ‘rules run deep ... so does the self that struggles with and against them’ (p. 229). Hochschild states that to manage feeling is to strive consciously to alter a pre-existing emotional state that is indicative of a given self. Yet this notion of a psychological given self does little to articulate its relationship with the socially constructed dimension of emotion. For this, Hochschild turns to Freud’s notion of the signal function of emotion, whereby messages such as anxiety, delight, hope and despair signal to the individual that there is the presence of danger, pleasure and so forth from within or external to the individual. Signal function achieves the integration of the social and the psychological dimensions by being a manifestation of the innate self that is profoundly contingent upon socially constructed prior expectations: The idea of prior expectation implies the existence of a prior self that does the expecting ... Most of us maintain a prior expectation of a continuous self, but the character of the self we expect to maintain is subject to profoundly social influence. Insofar as the self and all we expect is social ... the way emotion signals messages to us is also influenced by social factors. (pp. 231–2) Hochschild’s theory of emotion, therefore, binds together the psychological and the social into an interdependent and dynamic unity that is akin to Marx’s ontology of the dialectical unity of the mind and body (Marx, 1975 [1844]; Meszaros, 2005 [1970]). It does this by integrating the notions of emotion as a signal function – a biological sensory function – with socially constructed prior expectations as indicative of the given self. Without such a conceptualisation, it would be incoherent to theorise alienated emotional labour, for without a theory of human nature, how is it possible to identify an alien condition that violates the individual? Hochschild’s given self, like Marx’s theory of ‘human nature’, appears to oppose the common-sense idea that each individual possesses a common, discrete and fixed human nature independent of society (Ollman, 1976 [1971]). While Hochschild does not provide an explicit anthropology of the given self, her implied conceptualisation is not incompatible with Marx’s materialist conception, which argues that the only nature-imposed condition of all human existence is the requirement to labour on the environment in order to satisfy human needs. As sentient beings, humans are different from other animals – we are reflective and imaginative in the abstract before concretely acting on our natural environment (Marx, 1976 [1867]). Marx calls our capacity for conscious labour species being. This is not just a theory of individual human nature: species being is inherently social because in order to survive, individuals have to enter into collaborative, interdependent relationships. For Marx, the source of alienation in capitalist society is the necessity for the overwhelming majority of people to labour for a wage in order to ensure physical survival and a semblance of emotional dignity, where a minority, the ruling class, owns and controls the means of production. A worker, therefore, hands over ownership and effective control of her labour – in other words, her species being. For Marx, this essential relationship between worker and capital generates alienation in capitalist society: The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free physical and mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker only feels himself when he is not working ... (Marx, 1975: 326) Here, Marx explicitly refers to the ruination of body and mind. This understanding of mind and body as an interrelated dialectical unity (Yuill, 2005) is crucial to the task of interpreting the efficacy of Hochschild’s argument that emotional labour is alienating in the same way as the production of physical commodities. Hochschild’s half-made theory of alienation Marx (1975), as indicated above, identified four dimensions of alienation, with the first two – product alienation and labour process alienation – dealing with the immediate conditions of workplace relations. The second two, fellow beings alienation and human nature alienation, encompass capitalist society as a whole. These dimensions are not separate processes with discrete sets of symptoms, but are rather aspects of a generic process that is endemic to capitalism. This is because the whole of humankind is alienated, in that it suffers a loss of control because the power of capital is embodied as an alien force that confronts individuals and society as a hostile and potentially destructive power (Meszaros, 2005 [1970]). How thorough and adequate, then, is Hochschild’s application of alienation theory, and what are its consequences for her theorisation of emotional labour?