Clients from the global North also travel to service providers in the global South. Many elderly Americans, for example, retire to Mexico. Japanese retire to Thailand and Swedes retire to Spain, sometimes falling sick and dying in the absence of family, in foreign locales. What emotional stories unfold between caregiver and cared-for? Among travelers in what’s now called “medical tourism,” American infertile couples who wish to have a child can travel to India—where surrogacy is legal, unregulated, and readily available for a tenth of what it would cost in the United States—and engage a surrogate mother to carry and give birth to their genetic child.13 In a visit to the Akanksha Clinic in Anand, India, I was able to talk to some poor Indian surrogates about how it felt to rent their wombs to foreigners. All of them badly needed and wanted the money, but each woman felt differently about her experience. One surrogate, the twenty-eight-year-old wife of a sidewalk vegetable vendor and mother of two children of her own, told me, “Madame-doctor tells us to think of our wombs as carriers, and I do that. But I try to keep from getting too attached to the baby I’m carrying. I remind myself of my own children.” Others tried “not to think about it.” Another woman bearing a child for a friendly Indian client developed a “little-sister-big-sister” bond with the genetic mother, and thought of the baby she carried as her own, and therefore as a great gift to her “big sister.” If the Filipina nanny did the emotional labor of attaching herself to American children who were not her own, the Indian commercial surrogate did the poignant work of detaching herself from a child who was her own.
By exploring relationships which plunge workers into the whirring fan of a global economy—and more—we can apply the perspective described in this book. The flight attendants, bill collectors, and others I describe in these pages might recognize themselves in the lives of millions of others in scores of jobs around the world.
San Francisco
October 2011
NOTES
1. Grandey, Alicia, Jim Deifendorff, and Deborah Rupp, eds. Forthcoming 2012. Chapter 1, figure 1, “Search for ‘emotional labor or labour’ using GoogleScholar.” In Emotional Labor in the Twenty-first Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work. London: Routledge, Psychology Press. The authors searched in business, social science, and medicine databases for journal articles with “emotional labor” or “labour” anywhere in the paper.
2. Cross, R., W. Baker, and A. Parker. 2003. “What Creates Energy in Organizations?” Sloan Management Review 44:51–57.
3. Frost, P.J., and S. Robinson. 1999. “The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero and Casualty.” Harvard Business Review 77:96–106.
4. Terry A. Maroney. Forthcoming 2012. “Emotional Regulation and Judicial Behavior.” California Law Review. See also Terry A. Maroney. 2011. “The Persistent Cultural Script of Judicial Dispassion.” California Law Review 99:629, 630, defining “judicial dispassion.”
5. Shields, Stephanie A., Leah R. Warner, and Matthew J. Zawadzki. 2011. “Beliefs About Others’ Regulation of Emotion.” Paper presented at the International Society for Research on Emotion, July 27, 2011, Kyoto, Japan.
6. Batja Mesquita. 2011. “Emoting as a Contextualized Process.” Paper presented at the International Society for Research on Emotion, July 26, 2011, Kyoto, Japan.
7. Yukiko Uchida. 2011. “Emotions as Within or Between People? Cultural Variation in Subjective Well-being, Emotion Expression, and Emotion Inference.” Paper presented at the International Society for Research on Emotion, July 26, 2011, Kyoto, Japan.
8. In Japanese The Managed Heart has been translated and published by Sekai Shisosha (Kyoto); in Chinese, by Laureate Books (Taipei); and in Korean by Image Books (Seoul).
9. Interview with elder care manager, for Hochshild, Arlie Russell, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, forthcoming 2012.
10. Hochshild, Arlie Russell. 2009. “Can Emotional Labor Be Fun?” Work, Organization and Emotion 3 (2).
11. Sherman, Rachel. 2007. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press.
12. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 2012.
13. The sperm and egg of the American genetic parents were germinated in a petri dish in the Akanksha clinic, and planted in the uterus of the surrogate who then carried the baby to term. My description of this is found in “Childbirth at the Global Crossroads,” American Prospect (October 2009): 25–28. Also see “Emotional Life on the Market Frontier,” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 21–33; “Afterword,” in At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild, edited by Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011, 269–271; and “Through an Emotion Lens,” in Theorizing Emotions: Sociological Explorations and Applications, edited by D. Hopkins, J. Kleres, H. Flam, and H. Kuzmics, New York and Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2009, 29–38.
Preface to the First Edition
I think my interest in how people manage emotions began when my parents joined the U.S. Foreign Service. At the age of twelve, I found myself passing a dish of peanuts among many guests and looking up at their smiles; diplomatic smiles can look different when seen from below than when seen straight on. Afterwards I would listen to my mother and father interpret various gestures. The tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul, and the prolonged handshake of the French economic officer, I learned, conveyed messages not simply from person to person but from Sofia to Washington, from Peking to Paris, and from Paris to Washington. Had I passed the peanuts to a person, I wondered, or to an actor? Where did the person end and the act begin? Just how is a person related to an act?
As a graduate student at Berkeley some years later, I was excited by the writings of C. Wright Mills, especially his chapter in White Collar called “The Great Salesroom,” which I read and reread, I see now, in search of answers to those abiding questions. Mills argued that when we “sell our personality” in the course of selling goods or services we engage in a seriously self-estranging process, one that is increasingly common among workers in advanced capitalist systems. This had the ring of truth, but something was missing. Mills seemed to assume that in order to sell personality, one need only have it. Yet simply having personality does not make one a diplomat, any more than having muscles makes one an athlete. What was missing was a sense of the active emotional labor involved in the selling. This labor, it seemed to me, might be one part of a distinctly patterned yet
