Feeling rules

Abstract: This essay proposes an emotion-management perspective as a lens through which to inspect the self, interaction, and structure. Emotion, it is argued, can be and ofter is subject to acts of management. The individual often works on inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them "appropriate" to a situation. The emotion-management perspective draws on an interactive account of emotion. It differs from the dramaturgical perspective on the one hand and the psychoanalytic perspective on the other. It allows us to inspect at closer range than either of those perspectives the relation among emotive experience, emotion management, feeling rules, and ideology. Feeling rules are seen as the side of ideology that deals with emotion and feeling. Emotion management is the type of work it takes to cope with feeling rules. Meaning-making jobs, more common in the middle class, put more premium on the individual's capacity to do emotion work. A reexamination of class differences in child rearing suggest that middle-...

Abstract: In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work?In search of the answer, Arlie Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural" The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural" Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated it cost to those who do it for a livingLike a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness) This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us On the basis of this book, Hochschild was featured in "Key Sociological Thinkers", edited by Rob Stones This book was also the winner of the Charles Cooley Award in 1983, awarded by the American Sociological Association and received an honorable mention for the C Wright Mills Award

Abstract: In recent years, scholars have come to recognize emotions and emotional processes as central to an understanding of contentious politics. The study of emotions was not absent from early analyses of collective behavior and social movements, but it was typically accompanied by a number of problematic assumptions that no longer inform most research on the subject. This earlier work typically equated emotions with irrationality and assumed that emotions and rationality are incompatible. This often led to a narrow focus on the emotional content of sudden outbursts of crowd behavior. The work represented in this collection rejects the false dichotomy of emotions and rationality and adopts a much broader perspective on the role of emotions. These articles address a wide range of issues, including the role of emotions in sustaining movements over time, the complex and often contradictory nature of emotion work within movements, and the activities that produce the emotional energy needed to forge and maintain collective political identities. They clearly document the centrality of emotions to the process by which people engage in contentious politics. Much of the recent research on emotions and political conflict has entailed micro-level analyses and ahistorical case studies, mainly in the United States and Western Europe. The articles collected here embrace a broader scope, moving across diverse cultures and incorporating attention to long-term and large-scale processes, such as the institutionalization of electoral practices in England, democratization in Mexico and Korea, the global spread of nationalism, and the revolutionary transformation of regimes in China. These articles suggest that the historical study of emotions can lead us to question commonsense understandings, address silences in the existing literature, and rethink conventional categories of analysis. Close historical inspection of the circumstances surrounding the

Abstract: Much of the research on emotion work in organizations has focused on the ways in which emotional per- formance reproduces gender inequality Yet, most of these studies overlook the racial character of professional workplaces and how emotion work is experienced by racial/ethnic minorities In this article, I examine how the normative feeling rules that guide emotional performance in professional workplaces are racialized rather than neutral or objective criteria Based on 25 semistructured interviews with black professionals, contend that feeling rules have different implications for black workers and ultimately reinforce racial difference This research contributes to the sociological literature on emotion work by further developing the racial components of emotional performance Keywords: feeling rules, emotion work, race, black professionals, tokenism