emotional labor

• emotional labour

Coined by American professor and author Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1983 in her book The Managed Heart.[1]

emotional labor (uncountable)

1. The act of managing feelings and displaying certain expressions in order to meet the requirements of a job.
   • 1983, Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press:

     It was that “pinch,” or conflict, between such feelings and the pilot’s Call for authenticity that led me to write down in my own notebook, "emotional labor."

   • 2007, Helena Wulff, editor, The Emotions: A Cultural Reader, Berg Publishers, →ISBN, page 88:

     Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate, roughly one-third of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor.

   • 2016, Michael G. Pratt, Majken Schultz, Blake E. Ashforth, Davide Ravasi, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity‎, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:

     Further, theory on emotional labor—or organizationally mandated “rules” requiring employees to engage in “surface acting, deep acting, and the expression of spontaneous and genuine emotion” […] suggests that such emotional expectations create pressure to identify with one's work role.

2. Jobs which require such management and display. (Can we add an example for this sense?)
   • 2015, Alicia Grandey, Deborah Rupp, William Bice, “Emotional labor threatens decent work: A proposal to eradicate emotional display rules”, in Journal of Organizational Behavior, →DOI, page 770:

     In emotional labor jobs (Hochschild 1983), emotional displays are a matter of survival rather than personal choice, as job security and pay are dependent on them.

3. The display and management of emotion in non-professional, interpersonal relationships; emotion work.
   • 2018, Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Navigating and Redefining Emotional Labor for Good:

     The divide in who does what when it comes to housework persists because of our gendered expectation for women to perform emotional labor. We are the ones who decide whether to do a task ourselves or to delegate it to someone else, and doing physical labor is often the easier road.

   • 2018 November 14, Kristin Wong, “There’s a Stress Gap Between Men and Women. Here’s Why It’s Important.”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     Like domestic labor, emotional labor is generally dismissed and not labeled work, but research shows it can be just as exhausting as paid work. Emotional labor can lead to insomnia and family conflict, according to a study published in Personnel Psychology.

   • 2018 November 26, Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’”, in The Atlantic‎:

     One of the biggest shifts is that much of the conversation about emotional labor has left its original sphere of the workplace and moved to the home.

• emotional work
• interactional shitwork

• have a nice day syndrome