The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

When I speak of the transmutation of an emotional system, I mean to point out a link between a private act, such as attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as summoning up good feeling for a customer. I mean to expose the relation between the private act of trying to dampen liking for a person—which overcommitted lovers sometimes attemp

Acts of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling.

Seeming to “love the job” becomes part of the job; and actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps the worker in this effort.

any system, exploitation depends on the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—money, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is.

Emotion locates the position of the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeli

When the “womanly” art of living up to private emotional conventions goes public, it attaches itself to a different profit-and-loss statement.

Like the sense of hearing, emotion communicates information. It has, as Freud said of anxiety, a “signal function.” From feeling we discover our own viewpoint on the world.

Like other senses—hearing, touch, and smell—it is a means by which we know about our relation to the world, and it is therefore crucial for the survival of human beings in group life.

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.