Alienated Heart: Hochschild's 'emotional labour' thesis and the anticapitalist politics of alienation, The

Capital & Class, Summer 2009 by Brook, Paul

Abstract

Arlie Russell Hochschild's influential emotional labour thesis in The Managed Heart (1983) exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the commodification of human feelings as customer service, and complements contemporary anticapitalist writing with an enduring influence and political relevance that is underpinned by Hochschild's application of Marx's alienation theory. Critics have sought to blunt the politics of her thesis by rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of workers' alienation. But her application of alienation theory is not thorough, since her explicit usage of it is limited to only two of Marx's four dimensions, and thus it stops short of theorising alienation as generic to society. This undermines Hochschild's argument on emotional labourers' resistance, since she inadequately captures the way workers are shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capitalism. The continuing political potency of her thesis requires that it should be defended and strengthened.

Introduction: A very political theory

It is difficult to overestimate the enduring influence of the emotional labour thesis found in Arlie Russell Hochschild's seminal work, The Managed Heart Commercialization of Human Feeling (2003 [1983]). Debates on emotional labour continue to turn on this pioneering contribution (Bolton, 2005), and yet it is an unlikely candidate to have won such a high profile. Published in the harsh, neoconservative climate of Reagan's USA, the book resolutely exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the expanding demand for the commodification of emotions in the form of customer service. Thus, The Managed Hearh core arguments and political conclusions are highly relevant to today's anticapitalist movement with its slogan of 'our world is not for sale', underpinned by its damning analyses of neoliberalism, corporate power and consumerism.

Since The Managed Heart, Hochschild's emotional labour thesis has spawned an immense range of studies that reach far into the world of work beyond her original study of flight attendants and debt collectors. These, which Bolton (2005: 53) has referred to pejoratively as an 'emotional labour bandwagon', include studies of nurses, Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists, holiday representatives, callcentre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others (see Steinberg & Figart, 1999; Bolton, 2005). While these studies vary in the degree to which they follow Hochschild in her explicit condemnation of emotional labour, they tend to contain an implicit acceptance of its exploitative and subordinating nature. Some have extended Hochschild's thesis to include additional dimensions, as in Witz et al.'s (2003) addition of aesthetic labour, which stresses the increasing commodification of service workers' appearance and sexuality as 'display'. Most notable has been the development of a feminist dimension to emotional labour debates, which centres on the socially reproduced, gendered commodification of emotion in organisations, and on the related f�minisation of most service work (see Fineman, 200J; Colley, 2006; Lewis & Simpson, 2007). Thus James (1989, 1992), in her pioneering studies of cancer nurses' emotional labour, developed a feminist orientation in her analysis of the source, maintenance and commodification of compassion in the 'caring workplace'.'

What underpins Hochschild's politicised critique in The Managed Heart' is the pivotal role played in it by her application of Marx's alienation theory. This is borne out by the central argument of some of Hochschild's critics, who seek to blunt her critique by rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of the alienation workers suffer through the commodification of their emotions. They argue instead that customer service interactions are double-edged in that they possess the potential to be subjectively satisfying as well as distressing for the worker (Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Korczynski, 2002). In essence, they reject the notion that the experience of having one's emotions commodified is intrinsically alienating. Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing movement towards the rejection of 'emotional labour' as a meaningful category of wage labour (see Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Bolton, 2005; Lewis & Simpson, 2007), on the basis that not all emotions are commodified in the labour process, and that Hochschild's application of alienation in this context implies that workers are rendered powerless. Consequently, Hochschild's 'emotional labour' theory is now challenged by a growing usage of Bolton's (2005) alternative, largely depoliticised thesis on 'emotion management' in organisations. This argues that emotion workers exercise a significant degree of emotional free choice because of the very limited extent to which their emotions can be commodified. Therefore, they enjoy a largely unalienated experience of the labour process. To date it has been Hochschild's opponents, rather than those who wish to build on her thesis, who have recognised her understanding and use of alienation as pivotal, and who have thereby subjected it to sustained criticism (e.g. Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Bolton, 2005).