| Abstrakt: |
Emotional labor is a term that describes the real, though often hidden, work that goes into producing personable demeanors on the job. Studies of emotional labor have traditionally focused on employees, finding that they perform a greater share of emotional labor on the job than managers, either in direct service interactions, or in the daily maintenance of relationships with superordinates. Recent studies have argued, however, that managers must often perform deeper, and hence more potentially damaging, forms of emotional labor than employees. I use qualitative content analysis to compare prescriptions for emotional labor in two sets of white-collar business self-help books, five aimed at managers and five intended for employees. I find that employee texts counsel readers to perform more frequent, other-directed emotional labor in the form of what I call ?ego work? and ?character impression management.? Management texts, on the other hand, advise readers to work on deep aspects of self, what I term ?paradigm work? and ?honest engagement?; their emotional labor is explicitly self-directed. I assert we cannot correctly interpret these findings, and the likely toll of such emotional labor, without considering the class context in which it is performed. Whether ?deeper? forms of emotional labor are more exploitative, as the literature has assumed, depend on contextualized power relations at work. Emotional labor means differently, and is likely to be experienced differently and have a distinct effect, based on the class position from which it is performed and on the class position of the intended recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
