The Managed Heart

Introduction

Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, based the book on fieldwork at Delta Airlines’ training centre and among flight attendants, and compared them with debt collectors, whose job is to inspire fear. Drawing on Goffman, but also on Freud and on Stanislavski’s method acting, she distinguishes surface acting, in which one displays a feeling one does not have, from deep acting, in which one works on oneself to actually feel it. Every society has “feeling rules” about what one ought to feel; in service work these rules are set by employers, and the worker’s smile becomes part of the product. The concept of emotional labour has since been applied to nursing, teaching and care work.

Connections

Builds on

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life1956 · Erving Goffman