The Managed Heart

The Managed Heart The Managed Heart Commercialization of Human Feeling Twentieth Anniversary Edition With a New Afterword ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England 0 1983, 2003 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1940- The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling / Arlie Russell Hochschild. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-23933-4 (alk. paper) 1. Emotions-Economic aspects. 2. Work-Psychological aspects. 3. Employee motivation. BF531.H62 2003 152.4 dc21 2003042606 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992 (R 1997) (Pumnnencr cfPaper). @ For Ruth and Francis Russell Contents Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE/PRIVATE LIFE 1 Exploring the Managed Heart ................. 3 2 Feeling asclue ............................. 24 3 Managing Feeling ........................... 35 4 Feeling Rules. .............................. 56 5 Paying Respects with Feeling: The Gift Exchange .......................... 76 PART TWO/PUBLIC LIFE 6 Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses ...................................... 89 7 Between the Toe and the Heel: Jobs and Emotional Labor .................................... 137 8 Gender, Status, and Feeling. ................... 162 9 The Search for Authenticity ................... 185 Afterword to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition .................................... 199 viii Contents APPENDIXES A . Models of Emotion: From Darwin to Goffman .... 211 B . Naming Feeling ............................. 233 C . Jobs and Emotional Labor ..................... 244 D . Positional and Personal Control Systems ......... 252 Notes ......................................253 Bibliography to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition .......................... 277 Bibliography ................................ 287 Index ......................................317 Preface I think my interest in how people manage emotions began when my parentsjoined the U.S. Foreign Service. At the age of twelve, I found myself passing a dish of peanuts among many guests and looking up at their smiles; diplomatic smiles can look different when seen from below than when seen straight on. Afterwards I would listen to my mother and father interpret various gestures. The tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese con- sul, and the prolonged handshake of the French economic officer, I learned, conveyed messages not simply from person to person but from Sofia to Washington, from Peking to Paris, and from Paris to Washington. Had I passed the peanuts to a person, I wondered, or to an actor? Where did the person end and the act begin? Just how is a person re- lated to an act? As a graduate student at Berkeley some years later, I was excited by the writings of C. Wright Mills, especially his chapter in White Collar called "The Great Salesroom," which I read and reread, I see nowT,in search of answers to those abiding questions. Mills argued that when we "sell our personality" in the course of selling goods or services we engage in a seriously self-estranging process, one that is increasingly common among workers in advanced capitalist systems. This had the ring of truth, but something was missing. Mills seemed to assume that in order to sell personality, one need only have it. Yet simply having personality does not make one a diplomat, any more than having muscles makes one an athlete. What was missingwas a sense of the active emotional labor involved in the selling. This labor, it seemed to me, might be one part of a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system-a system composed of individual acts of x Preface "emotion work," social "feeling rules," and a great variety of exchanges between people in private and public life. I wanted to understand the general emotional language of which diplomats speak only one dialect. My search soon led me to the works of Erving Goffman, to whom I am indebted for his keen sense of how we try to control our appearance even as we unconsciously observe rules about how we ought to appear to others. But again, something was missing. How does a person act on feeling-or stop acting on it, or even stop feeling? I wanted to discover what it is that we act upon. And so I decided to explore the idea that emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it. As I explain for specialists in Appendix A, I extend to all emotions the "signal function" that Freud reserved for the emotion of anxiety. Many emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expecta- tions with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. It is this signal function that is impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and trans- formed into emotional labor for a wage. These questions and ideas were developing, then, when I went out to try to get behind the eyes of flight attendants and bill collectors, female workers and male, as each moved through a day's work. The more I listened, the more I came to appreciate how workers try to preserve a sense of self by circumventing the feeling rules of work, how they limit their emotional offerings to surface displays of the "right" feeling but suffer anyway from a sense of being "false" or mechani- cal. I came to understand, too, that the more deeply a commercial system carves into the private emotional "gift exchange," the more receivers and givers alike take up the extra work of discounting what is impersonal in order to ac- cept what is not. I think all this has helped me interpret the smiles I now see around me at eye level. A. R. H. Acknowledgments Warm thanks to those who helped: To Jeffrey and Judie Klein for their bracing but loving advice on a misty first draft; to Todd Gitlin for unfolding and hanging out my ideas with me; to Anne Machung for her support and won- drous line-by-line work in red ink; and to Ann Swidler who has shown me over the years the joys of an easy weave between personal friendship and intellectual life. To Mike Ro- gin, who over the years has probed my thinking and pointed to ellipses in it, even while mopping up spilt lemonade or tying children's shoelaces at the zoo. To Neil Smelser, one- time teacher and long-time friend, for an enormously help- ful twenty-page commentary on an early draft. To Rusty Si- monds for incisive help, and to Metta Spencer, for her commitment to the ideas and her skill at playing the devil's advocate. And thanks to Joanne Costello and Jezra Kaen for early research assistance, and to Steve Hetzler and Rachael Volberg for help later on. For careful typing, my thanks to Pat Fabrizio, Francisco Medina, and Sammie Lee. My brother, Paul Russell, has taught me a great deal about emotion one way and another. I cherish his kindness and deep intellectual engagement. It continually amazes me that two people from the same family, both interested in emotion can have such different things to say about it. Yet, I have learned a great deal from his thinking-some of which is to be found in his papers listed in the Appendix. I'm also grate- ful to Aaron Cicourel and Lillian Rubin, who pushed for revisions when I thought I was finished but wasn't. And what can I say about Gene Tanke? His editing was brilliant. My only regret is that we had to exclude that additional appen- xii Acknowledgements dix he proposed of observations and quotes "that just wouldn't fit." I feel very indebted to the many flight attendants and bill collectors who shared their time, their experience, their meetings, and their homes with me. I want to thank those in charge at Delta Airlines, who allowed me into their world in the faith that I meant well. In particular, I want to thank Mary Ruth Ralph, the head of Delta's Stewardess Training Center; she may not agree with everything I have written, but this book is written in honor of her and those she trains. My special thanks also to Betsy Graham, for the late-night taping sessions, the network of friends she opened up for me, and the three boxes of notes and mementos, which still grace my closet floor. I owe most to my husband Adam, who took to peering behind airline ticket counters to see what notices companies posted for their agents, who endlessly listened, and at each draft scoured my prose. Among his comments, my favorite is a picture he drew in the margin of an early draft, beside the phrase "shroud of salient ambiguity." It showed a ghost (as ambiguity) in a hill of straw (as salience); a tiny figure sailing through this ghost-in-the-hill, labeled "salientee." The phrase is gone, but the image of the "salientee" sailing across the page, the love and the laughs are with me still. My eleven-year old son David also read most of the typescript and tagged more than one elephantine phrase with the comment, "Sorry, Mom, I don't speak Martian." I love them and thank them both very much. And thanks to Gabriel, who can help next time. PART ONE Private Life EXPLORING THE MANAGED HEART The one area of her occupatzonal lzfe zn whzch she mzght be "jiree to act," the area of her own personnlzty, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequtous znctrument by whzch goods are dzrtr~buted.

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