We have ideas about what feelings should be. We say, “You should be thrilled at winning the prize,” or “You should be furious at his insult.” We appraise the fit between a feeling and a context in light of what I call “feeling rules.” By these rules, we try to manage our feelings—to feel happy at a party or grief-stricken at a funeral.
When paid to do a job, we are often asked to abide by certain feeling rules; thus, the company edict that “the customer is always right” means we do not have the “right” to feel mad at a customer, even if we are. So we find ourselves doing emotional labor—the effort to seem to feel and to try to feel the right feeling for the job, and to try to induce the right feeling in certain others. A flight attendant, as I described in The Managed Heart, is trained to manage fear during turbulence, exasperation with cranky passengers, or anger at abusive ones.11 A bill collector is often trained to inhibit compassion for debtors. A wedding planner may coax a once-divorced groom to “get excited” about planning his second wedding. According to the Japanese scholar Haruo Sakiyama, hospice workers make it okay for relatives of the dying to face the dying of their loved ones.12 Not all jobs that deal with feelings call for emotional labor, and not all emotional labor is stressful (see chapter 2). But as services now make up the largest sector of the American economy, service workers—salespeople, grocery checkers, complaints clerks, nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers, dog walkers, nannies, doulas, secretaries, personal assistants, life coaches, actors, teachers, hospice workers, funeral parlor directors, commercial surrogates, call-center workers, and wantologists, among others—all do it.13
Some jobs that call for emotional labor are done by Americans on American shores. Other jobs immigrant laborers do in America. Service workers have long migrated from one country to another, but today increasing numbers of care workers leave their young and old in the poor global South to take up jobs tending—and giving their hearts to—the young and old in the affluent North.14 Such jobs often call on workers to manage grief, depression, and anguish vis-à-vis their own families back home, even as they genuinely feel—and try to feel—joyful attachment to the children, elderly, and sick they daily tend in the affluent North (see chapters 10 and 11).
Emotional labor crosses borders in the other direction as well. By e-mail and telephone, service providers in Bangalore, India, tutor California children in math, make long-distance purchases of personal gifts, and even scan responses on Internet dating sites to help busy First World professionals chose whom to invite to a romantic dinner. Commercial surrogate mothers in India “rent their wombs” to infertile couples from the global North as I describe in chapter 11. This service calls for the ultimate in emotional labor: the effort to detach from the babies they carry and give up.
So it is through our way of seeing reality—our dictionaries and rule books of feeling—and our ways of managing it, that emotion and feeling are partly social. This is true of our lives at home and at work, in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. If, as C. Wright Mills said, the sociologist’s job is to trace links between private troubles and public issues, then emotion lies at the very heart of sociology.15
Many economic and social trends bear down on private troubles. Important among them, I believe, is the growing dominance of large corporations and their indirect effects on the culture of personal life. As Franklin D. Roosevelt observed in the 1940s, the major corporations have become kinds of “private government.”16 Among the world’s hundred largest economic entities, forty-four are corporations.17 Corporations have been granted the status of legal persons, and the fiduciary responsibility of boards of directors has been legally limited to serving stockholder interests. As the engines of prosperity, the growth of American corporations has been heralded as a largely unmixed blessing.
But as Bob Kuttner has argued in Everything for Sale, a former balance of power—between companies, government, and labor unions—has now tilted in favor of large companies.18 For in the 1970s, American companies started to relocate their plants near cheaper labor pools around the world, undercutting labor unions at home and getting city, state, and national governments to compete in their offers of lower taxes and more lax regulation in order to entice capital investment. As companies have grown in power, so have they grown in cultural influence over areas of private life far removed from the boardroom. A market culture has come to the fore, proposing its own ideas of self and relationship, its own rules of emotional attachment to and detachment from others, its own demands for emotion management.19
Indeed, as I suggest in chapter 1, many of us find ourselves moving along a market frontier. On one side of this frontier, we see activities as simple things we do. On the other side, we see them as rent-able or saleable. When we come to see an activity as being for rent or sale, we see it differently. Take friendship: normally we understand friendship as the offer of generosity, trust, faith, and the promise of a loving, long-term give and take between two people. But in the ads for a new commercial service enabling clients to find friends in their local neighborhood, a new language has crept in.20 An ad for Girlfriendcircles.com, a for-pay friend-finding site, reassures readers that they can rest assured that fellow clients are serious about finding a friend. Why? Because they paid money for it. “We value what we invest in,” they note. Under “What Is the Cost?,” the Web site reads, “We want you to care enough about friendship to put a little [money] into it. . . . Some have said, ‘It’s wrong to pay for friends!’ And we whole-heartedly disagree! We pay for shoes, movies, mochas and manicures—why not for one of the very things that research shows plays a gigantic role in our happiness, health, longevity, stress reduction and chances of success in our life goals?”21 By describing how to find a friend in a spirit of such breezy, self-interested pragmatism, the entrepreneurs pry us away from the idea of being a friend.22
Our emotions tell us where to draw the line. We say to ourselves, “This feels right,” or “This doesn’t feel right.” We experience an anxiety tipping-point which tells us “this is new but it’s okay” or “this is weird and not okay.” We may do nothing in response to the sense that “this is not okay.” But far more often, as I describe in chapter 1, we react to that feeling by trying to re-personalize our world.
Behind every answer in this volume are a host of yet more important questions. In the title essay, I ask, “So How’s the Family?” But following that, I ask: How’s empathy? How’s the way we look for joy? Where in our lives are those precious connections between the Thomas Paines of the world and the Jane Austens? I invite you on a journey through these questions in the faith that finding better answers will help us build a better world.
The Feel of Things
ONEGoing on Attachment Alert
At her sister-in-law’s parties, Grace Weaver, a lonely 49-year-old divorcee and mother of a 12-year-old child, was looking for a “man to grow old with.” Other relatives and friends tried to fix her up, but no dice. For several years now, she had not found “that certain someone,” and time was getting on. So she tried a new tack.
I remember waking up the morning after going out to a New Year’s Eve party. I felt disappointed I hadn’t met any interesting men. I flipped on the television and watched a show on Internet dating. I’d always thought Internet dating would be tacky and leave me feeling icky, overexposed, naked. But then this coach Evan Katz came on saying, “Come on, guys. There’s nothing embarrassing about Internet dating.” I jotted down his name and wondered if this shouldn’t be my New Year’s resolution: hire a coach, take control of my life.1
She signed up for Match.com for $17.99 a month.2 She also hired Evan Katz, whose online name was E-Cyrano and whose Web site read: “I am a PERSONAL TRAINER for women who want to FALL IN LOVE.” He offered her three coaching packages: Basic, Premium, and V.I.P. She chose the $1,500 Premium package.
