Sociology of the Emotions and Work - Essay Example

Sociology of the Emotions and Work Introduction Investigations in sociology often draw in contributions from many other disciplines, including psychology, biology, political science and anthropology because there are many different ways of approaching human behaviour. This paper draws from a wide range of approaches to home in on just two major topic areas: the area of work and the area of emotion, showing how they relate in human society. There is first a discussion of power and how it is conceptualised for the purposes of this study. After this there is a theoretical introduction to the concept of work in sociology, and then of emotion. There follows a broad examination of emotion at work, and then a more focused examination of gendered emotion at work. Finally there is a concluding summary of the ways that emotion and work link together, in theory and in practice, and how this relates to the all-pervasive concept of power in society. Section 1. Power and its conceptualisation. The study of human society invariably involves some consideration of theories of power, whether large scale, longstanding and overarching power such as that of patriarchy or smaller scale power as it operates between two individuals. Sociologists study how power operates in a range of situations from domestic, work and political spheres to any context where people interact with each other, since in a very general sense, it can be said that “all social relationships are power relationships” (Crossley, 2005, p. 215) We all influence each other at a personal level, and are tied up in a network of connections where power flows back and forth in fluctuating ways. Power permeates through society in many different ways, and not only through individual actions. Humans exist in national groups, and these states set up systems for allocating roles in society, many of which like educators, police, and large corporations involve groups and individuals exercising power over other groups and individuals. In work, for example, there are many institutions which frame the world of work in particular ways: some are set up to counteract patriarchy and promote equality, for example, but many others may reproduce patriarchal values, for example in supporting hierarchical and discriminatory management systems. Some power is inherited at birth through variables such as gender, race, class or culture and this is very often a hidden type of power, especially to those who wield it themselves. One of the most convincing conceptualisations of power is that of Foucault who writes about “technologies of power” which discipline and shape people in overt ways, but also in subtle ways, as for example when people internalise certain rules and practices, and adhere unthinkingly to a workplace norm. This hegemonic approach is highly relevant to the administrative systems that pervade the world of work, keeping people in order and ensuring that the goals of the organisation (or state, in the case of public servants) are constantly being advanced. Section 2. Work Human beings operate in society using physical, cognitive and emotional skills and the interplay of these skills within the power structures of their environment and with other human beings is a fruitful area of contemporary research. In the area of work there is in modern times an over-emphasis on rational, cognitive types of behaviour and an under-emphasis on emotion. Above all the workplace seeks to engender conformity on its workers, so that specific tasks can be completed efficiently and fast. The more smoothly workers submit to the dominant norms of the workplace, the more profits can be gathered in by the organisation. Goffman (1967) explains the harmony that generally exists between people in terms of concepts like deference and avoidance of shame or stigma. No workplace can ever monitor its workers 100% of the time, and yet by and large people interact productively and in tune with the needs of the organisation: “mutual conformity and respect lead to pride and fellow feeling, which lead to further conformity, which leads to further positive feeling, in a system that seems virtually automatic.” (Scheff, 1988, p. 397) This system can also be described, following Foucault and Durkheim, as a form of control: “social control involves a biosocial system that functions silently, continuously, and virtually invisibly, occurring within and between members of a society.” (Scheff, 1988, p. 405) In the workplace there are all the usual social control mechanisms at work, because people form social groups, but there are additional controls linked to the particular demands that job roles have on people. These roles change behaviour because people present themselves differently when they assume a professional position: “When they issue uniforms, they issue skins” (Goffman, 1974) This is true to some extent in all jobs, but in those where emotional labour is required, the requirement goes more than skin deep. (Hochschild, 1979) Section 3. Emotion The work of Goffman underpins a great deal of our current understanding of emotion and how it operates in human society. Goffman’s model for describing this is to regard individuals as “actors” who have a continuous job of deliberately managing the impression that they hope to make on observers in the world around them. For Goffman the individual modifies his or her behaviour, including non-verbal signals like smiles or frowns, in order to fit in with society and accomplish various kinds of transactions with other people, who are likewise each maintaining their own outward impression. Social interaction thus is like a kind of market in which social exchanges of various sorts occur according to set rules which people have internalized and willingly adhere to. In this model feelings may prompt the actor to behave in a certain way, but the actor can overrule this prompting and substitute a different kind of behaviour which is regarded by the individual and by others as more appropriate to the situation. The need to keep going a consistent and smooth “presentation of the self” (Goffman, 1969) is what keeps emotions in check most of the time. It is important also to recognise that the absence of visible clues in individuals can be deceptive: “In this context apparently ‘unemotional’ is very emotional.” (Craib, 1995, p. 156) Hochschild asks important questions about the nature of human emotions and the way that they are experienced and expressed in daily life. A fundamental question is whether our emotions are governed by rules. It is clear that most of the time people behave in the way that they are expected to behave, according to the situation that they currently find themselves in: “rules seem to govern how people try or try not to feel in ways ‘appropriate to the situation.’ (Hochschild, 1979, p. 551) This ability we have to exercise some control over our own feelings in order to respect these unwritten rules of society is called “emotion management” or “emotion work” or “deep acting,” all of which highlights the two layers of influence on our feelings: one from outside ourselves, and another one which we consciously or unconsciously exercise on ourselves. Scholars differ in the emphasis that they give to each of these layers. Scholars with an emphasis on the natural sciences and psychology stress the physical, organismic dimension of feelings, suggesting that much animal and human behaviour is due to instinctive responses over which we have little or no control. Others with a more sociological approach, and a differentiated psychological view of the id, ego and superego perceive an interaction between outside stimuli and the thoughts of the individual and emphasize the way that feelings are experienced and crucially also controlled by that individual by means of more or less conscious intrapsychic events. Another way of describing these two approaches is to use the language of “nature” and “nurture”, as in the work of Elias: “In the case of human adults, the steering of conduct generally can never be attributed to either nature or to nurture alone. It is always the result of an intimate interweaving of learned and unlearned processes.” (Elias, 1991, p. 113) Following Elias’ way of thinking, there are always three components to human emotions: “a somatic, a behavioural and a feeling component” (Elias, 1991, p. 117) and some of these are shared with the higher animals. With increasing maturation, however, the expression of emotions becomes more sophisticated in humans, for example from the innate smile that babies produce when they see a face approaching, to the many and various types of adult smiling that can exist, depending on the situation and the intentions of the smilers. There is undoubtedly some value in both models, and an interesting parallel is drawn by Hochschild between the “deep acting” method of Stanislavsky and the “surface acting” of more traditional British theatre. The former requires film and theatre actors to guide their memories and feelings in such a way that real emotions are engendered, and they then act out what these feelings prompt them to do, while the latter focuses on consciously imposing control over the body in such a way that the demeanour expresses the emotion that is required for each succeeding situation. (Hochschild, 1979, p. 558) These two approaches are in practice not mutually exclusive, and one can think of examples where one or the other is the better descriptor for what is happening in society. The whole process of managing emotions can be described as “emotional work”, and it ranges from simple suppression of emotions in order to fit in with a group situation, to a much more directive influence upon the self or upon another person or other people to change both how that person or persons feel(s) and to influence what they do. Whenever a gap exists between what a person feels or what that person wants to feel or ought to feel, there is an area for emotional work to step in and eliminate this dissonance. A key factor in deciding what kind of emotion is appropriate for a given situation is the way that the individual frames the situation. An example might be the way that people react to government decisions to commit troops to activities in another country. For some people the only “correct” response is a patriotic one, while others may frame this as an unjustified invasion, warranting resistance and political engagement. In each case there are ideological norms involved, one of patriotism, and another of pacifism, and these overarching norms prompt the people to respond with different emotions and behaviours. There are many situations in daily life where people know very well what the societal norm is, and they conform to this norm and most, if not all of its rules, but underneath reserve a layer of distancing. An example of this might be a child who is angry at certain parental restrictions but decides to go along with them, and even show good grace, in the certain knowledge that this will trigger emotional or other kinds of rewards. Learning how to conform, how to maintain one’s own perspective on the rules, and how to find ways of resisting some rules, and of switching to different frames, are some the key tasks of the adolescent growing up. Section 4. Emotion in the context of work. Open expression of emotion tends to be suppressed in a work situation, where traditions and expectations such as professionalism, detachment and self- control are the unspoken norm. Paradoxically, however, there is often a requirement to bring emotional work into the normal workplace, for example in jobs such as sales and customer care where certain attitudes and behaviours such as smiling, courtesty and the maintenace of a pleasant and positive tone are essential. A very common experience of workers in service industries is the need to deal with difficult or aggressive people, and do this in such a way that the worker’s own feelings and instinctive reaction to retaliate in a similar way are suppressed, while at the same time an impression of patience is manufactured in order to deal with the situation. This is a heavy burden for workers, and Korczynski notes that “The pain occasioned by irate customers is made shaper because customers are also a key source of meaning and pleasure in service jobs.” (Korczynski, 2003, p. 57) There are many collective and individual strategies which people use to cope with the effects of this kind of abuse, ranging from an attempt to distance oneself from the abusive person, to explicit,management led rituals of praise for good customer service intended to offset the bad experiences, and more informal collective coping mechanisms developed by workers themselves. (Korczynski, 2003) Some of these collective coping mechanisms involve sharing and commiserating with each other over bad experiences, but there are instances also of “a shared culture of cynicism toward customers” (Korczynski, 2003, p. 73) which is formed to shield customers from the effects of customer aggression. Collective responses to the negative effects of emotional work can result also in resistance to the management culture and this is an area that can affect on-going power relationships at work, especially when unions support workers in trying to address some of the sources of workplace stress which service workers endure on a daily basis. “When deep gestures of exchange enter the market sector and are bought and sold as an aspect of labor power, feelings are commoditized.” (Hochschild, 1979, p. 569) What this means is that people are required in modern jobs, and especially service jobs, to do a lot of emotion work. The rise of the middle classes in Western societies since the end of the Second World War coincides with a decline in industrial jobs, requiring physical work, and an increase in jobs where emotional work is required. Hochschild notes that the middle classes instinctively train their children for this forthcoming role in the world of work by stressing the control of feelings rather than just behaviour. This partly explains why the class divisions are so strong in society and why they tend to be perpetuated from generation to generation. Section 5: Gendered emotion and work. While all kinds of work involve some degree of emotion management, there are professions where the requirement is particularly high, such as some areas of nursing, airline service staff, and the sex industries. It is no coincidence that these are areas with very high proportions of female workers. Nurses in a special care baby unit, for example, are required to maintain a kind of “dual consciousness” in which they both maintain a distanced and non-emotional professionalism and yet at the same time offer emotional support to parents of the patients. (Lewis, 2005, p. 10) Patriarchal structures in hospitals mean that nurses are more often female, while doctors are more often male. Very often the senior medical staff are expected to maintain a more stereotypically “masculine” suppression of emotions, while nurses, who occupy a lower space in the hierarchy, are expected to do this too, but at the same time offer stereotypically “feminine” nurturing and caring functions. If nurses veer too much towards the latter, then they are perceived as incompetent, but on the other hand if they do not express caring attitudes and behaviours they are perceived as unfeminine. This illustrates the double standard that operates in a gendered workplace setting. It also explains why nurses are reluctant to engage in collective coping in the workplace and tend to seek emotional support from each other in private spaces rather than in the public areas of the workplace. This too, is a stereotypically female retreat into personal rather than professional relationships but it would be incorrect to designate this as a negative or “unprofessional” strategy. On the contrary, the nurses’ ability to switch from role to role within the job in order to meet various conflicting deep acting requirements, and then to adopt yet another role when they deal with their own emotion management outside the frontline job situation, is evidence of a highly sophisticated understanding of human behaviour. When one adds to this the widespread expectation that women should undertake most of the emotional work in the family, it becomes clear that the gender imbalance in emotional work expectations during employment creates a particularly heavy burden for women. Still more pressure upon women occurs due to cultural factors, as for example in Japan where women have comparatively low status in work, and yet fulfil many deep acting roles, and then also are required to submit to deeply patriarchal role requirements at home. Cultural macro-level factors can compound micro level factors in human work and family relationships. (Fuwa, 2004, p. 765) There is some evidence also that economic factors may work to further disadvantage women in their efforts to achieve a work-life balance that is comparable to that available to men, resulting in a situation where women are increasingly active in the workplace year on year, but the pace of change in equalizing male and female household tasks, even in countries with a strong commitment to gender equality, is decidedly “glacial”. (Crompton et al., 2005) A final example, that of sex workers, demonstrates the gendered nature of emotional labour in its most obvious form. Early theorizing of prostitution was based on biological factors such as the ability of primate females above all other species to be available for sex all year round, rather than only at specific mating seasons. (Davis, 1937, p. 744) Given this situation, it is theorized, human society has a number of institutional controls which seek to control sex in ways which further societal goals such as procreation. These include the encouragement of intimacy in dating and marriage, the prohibition of intimacy in other contexts, and a set of absolute taboos such as incest . (Davis 1937, p. 747) Prostitution on the margins of this system : “both parties use sex for an end not socially functional, the one for pleasure, the other for money.” (Davis, 1937, p. 748) The stronger a society’s controls on sexual behaviour are, the more likely it is that men will turn to prostitutes, simply because so many men are either tied to relationships which they do not find fulfilling, or because so many men cannot or do not wish to devote the time, energy and expense in sustaining socially sanctioned relationships. The implications for the female sex worker is that she steps out of socially approved status but at the same time she plays an important role in upholding the social status quo. The work that a sex worker offers is an economic transaction which caters for male desire which might otherwise be disruptive. More recent studies describe this difficult role in terms of “identity management” whereby a sex worker deliberately commodifies her body to fit the expectations of men. This is done in a way which allows the sex worker to maintain a clear separation between the self and the work persona, thus offering protection from the effects of shame and stigma, and any negative treatment experienced in the course of the work. (Sanders, 2005, p. 330) It is also, however, a business strategy, whereby women work out what is most likely to bring the desired economic rewards, and this means that their sexual labour in a gendered form “is a complex process that does not necessarily leave women as the passive recipients of male demands.” (Sanders, 2005, p. 338) On a macro level, however, there is still considerable social stigma and labelling of sex workers, even extending to the accusation that they are vectors for the transmission of HIV infection. Fieldwork repeatedly shows, however, that this is an exaggerated claim, with infection rates as low as 2.5% in 1992 in Glasgow, for example, all of whom were injecting drug users. (McKeganey et al. 1992) The facts reveal that society stigmatizes sex workers on spurious grounds, even beyond the general exclusion that they have because of their work. Conclusion This exploration of work, emotions and how these two substantive areas of sociology interrelate has shown that there is no one conceptualisation of power that explains all the different kinds of human emotional labour. Interpretations deriving from Marxist theories of class and oppression, following Foucault, illuminate some of the stigma and shame elements for us, but feminist analyses, such as that of Sanders reveal that women, for example, neither perceive themselves nor behave as victims. 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