Sublime

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

people actively manage feelings in order to make their personalities fit for public-contact work.

I was struck by how the deprivations that people experience can lead to eccentric kinds of compensation—like the hoarding syndrome of some of the poor.

Not long ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied life at Amerco, an unusually worker-friendly Fortune 500 company. In her 1997 book The Time Bind, she reported that workers had grown so entranced with life in their workplace that they’d started avoiding their less well-tended-to personal lives. To maximize the time spent in the office or on t

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

These acts of re-labelling are often inspired by the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Hochschild’s 1983 The Managed Heart described how certain jobs involve the management of a worker’s own internal emotional states.

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.

emotional labor.* This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self tha