employers are increasingly demanding that their employees deep act, work on and change their feelings to match the display required by the labour process.’9 Employees are left to manage the dilemmas of authenticity, integrity and their sense of their own natural, spontaneous personality, which all spill into their private lives. Perhaps this reinforces the low self-esteem often associated with women and the low-wage service economy; perhaps it also contributes to the high turnover of call-centre staff – often 25 per cent or more a year.
This alienation from the individual’s own emotions was Hochschild’s concern: ‘When the product – the thing to be engineered, mass produced, and subjected to speed-up and slowdown – is a smile, a feeling, or a relationship, it comes to belong more to the organisation and less to the self. And so, in the country that most publicly celebrated the individual, more people privately wonder, without tracing the question to its deepest social root: “What do 1 really feel?”’10
Perhaps you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. What does it matter if the call handler has to talk as if she is smiling? What does it matter if staff are instructed to smile – has being made to smile ever hurt anyone? This is a fascinating aspect of this form of hard work – how it is dismissed, belittled, or just happens without being remarked on: ‘The truly remarkable feature of emotion work is its sheer ordinariness, the extent to which it has permeated most forms of work and to which it is deemed natural.’11
Two reasons explain the uncritical acceptance of this kind of hard work. The first is that it is largely done by women: 54 per cent of service sector jobs in Britain are held by women, and 89 per cent of the jobs held by women are in the service sector.12 Whatever is regarded as women’s work has historically been underpaid and undervalued compared with men’s work. That structural inequality has been extended to many of the emotionally demanding service jobs created in the last few decades. Women are regarded as being better at managing their own emotions while serving the emotional needs of others; these are skills which they have brought to bear in the building of family and community life, and which until now had little market value.
Secondly, a historical legacy of rational materialism still values the solid, measurable and tangible over the immeasurable and intangible. That makes us better at treating heart disease than afflictions of the heart such as depression and anxiety; the former is declining, the latter are increasing. There is still a cultural stoicism which belittles emotion: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’ But how can you think of yourself as a ‘trash can’ all day, and then go home with the satisfaction of having done a good job? How do you gain the sense of self-worth which properly comes with paid employment if you’re being paid to be servile?
While we’ve learnt that certain forms of labour are inimical to good health – coalmining often led to lung disease, for example – we have yet to begin to think that perhaps some forms of emotional labour fall into the same category. Many people compartmentalise human interactions, applying completely different etiquettes to each: they are generous and solicitous to friends, but switch to being rude to the customer services representative, demanding of the waitress, and ignoring the cleaner and the dustbin men. ‘Blank them out’ is the most common attitude extended towards those who serve. In some ways this is an even more cruel denial of a human being than a patronising hierarchy in which at least ‘everyone had their place’. Underlying this indifference is the erosion of human reciprocity – a sense about what we owe each other – which is symptomatic of a culture which puts so much emphasis on the individual.
Increasingly, policy-makers focus on ‘self-esteem’ as a critical element in how to break the cycle of poverty and deprivation entrenched in some neighbourhoods. It’s an issue which Charles Leadbeater takes up in his book Up the Down Escalator (2002). He quotes Robert William Fogel, the Nobel Prize-winning economist: ‘The modernist egalitarian agenda was based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual and immaterial assets.’ Leadbeater points out that ‘Self-esteem cannot be redistributed in the way income can,’ and goes on to claim that ‘Assets of the spirit [in Fogel’s words] have to be personally produced; they cannot be delivered by the state.’ But self-esteem is not a personal achievement; it is the product of a set of social relations, and it is the state which orders many of them. What is missing from the analysis is how the emotional labour of low-paid jobs in the service sector reinforces that low self-esteem.
The contradictions of the growing emotional economy are increasingly an issue for the public sector. The welfare state has wrestled with different forms of emotional labour – in health, education and social services – for many decades, but now the demands are increasing. For example, teachers are having to cope with much higher levels of behavioural problems and children with special needs (between 1993 and 2003 their proportion nearly doubled from 11.6 per cent to 19.2 per cent in primary schools, and from 9.6 per cent to 16.5 per cent in secondary13). In higher education, lecturers can be allocated as little as five minutes to assess a student’s work.
In other areas of the welfare state such as health, some of the historic methods to contain the intensity of emotional labour are now crumbling. Nowhere is emotional labour more demanding than in a hospital, where issues of life and death generate huge amounts of fear. Doctors developed a form of emotional detachment as part of the professionalisation of their work in the nineteenth century, and usually delegated the emotional labour to female nurses. Part of the impetus behind the highly bureaucratic procedures adopted in the mid-twentieth century was the desire to reduce anxiety levels. Isabel Menzies wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1959 analysing how nurses’ emotions were managed:14 for example, a single nurse would be allocated a particular task, such as taking temperatures or providing bedpans, for all the patients on a ward, thus reducing continuous one-on-one contact with individual patients with whom close relationships might have developed.
These methods of emotional management are being dismantled in response to patient pressure for continuity of care. There is a growing insistence on the part of recipients of the service to be treated as individuals rather than as ‘just a number’. In an individualistic society, the consumer wants to be recognised, and for the service to be personalised; he or she wants the emotional interaction they can buy in the private sector. As a result there has been a shift in nursing practices, so that each nurse has a particular responsibility for a small number of patients, and is expected to develop a relationship with them. The consultancy Harding & Yorke has even been called in to do training for the Royal College of Nursing, and has been commissioned to carry out an empathy audit for an NHS hospital prosthetics department.
Doctors are now expected to communicate sensitively with their patients, and are trained to do so. Old habits of deference and respect for professionals have given way to a new assertiveness. In many cases this is clearly a welcome development, but it can also generate inflated demands which can be difficult to meet: how many times, for example, does a doctor have to explain a complex course of treatment, and to how many relatives?
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