The Managed Heart

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, was first published in 1983.^[1] In it, she documents how social situations influence emotions through the experiences of flight attendants and bill collectors.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

First edition
Author	Arlie Russell Hochschild
Language	English
Genre	Nonfiction social science
Publisher	The University of California Press
Publication date	1983, with reissues in 2003 and 2012
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	9780520272941 (2012 release)

A 20th Anniversary edition with a new afterword added by the author was published in 2003. It was reissued in 2012 with a new preface. It has been translated into German (Campus Press), Chinese (Laureate Books, Taipei, Taiwan), Japanese (Sekai Shisosha, Kyoto, Japan), Polish (Polish Scientific Publishers PWN), and French (La Découverte, 2017). Hochschild's text is seminal and scholars like Sarah J. Tracy and Stephen Fineman have expanded on her concept of emotional labor.

Theoretical background

Main articles: Feeling rules and Emotion work

The book is an expansion on theoretical concepts that Hochschild first described in 1979.^[2] Using Goffman's dramaturgical theory, she describes how different social situations have different emotional norms. When a person's feelings do not fit the norms of the situation, people engage in practices to bring them into agreement through a combination of cognitive, bodily, or expressive techniques. Surface acting involves simply pretending to feel what one does not, primarily through body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. These rules vary based on the social group one is a part of.

Emotional labor in the workplace

Flight Attendants

Hochschild's primary example describes the emotional norms in the workplace of female flight attendants. In order to sell passengers the experience of good customer service, the attendants were expected to remain calm and cheerful.

Bill Collectors

Rather than the pleasant demeanor expected of flight attendants, the occupational norms for bill collectors were to maintain a suspicious view of debtors in order to get them to pay more effectively. Collectors are pushed to deflate the debtor's status through increasing their own, using a variety of cognitive and verbal ways to trick debtors or withhold empathy from them. Collectors were expected to do this even if they did not truly side with the company they were collecting payment on behalf of.

Reception and influence

Hochschild's book constituted a major development in symbolic interactionism and the sociology of emotions, having influenced the work of scholars such as Nancy Whittier^[3] and Kari Norgaard.^[4]

In 1983, the book received the Charles Cooley Award, given by the American Sociological Association. It also received an honorable mention for the C. Wright Mills Award.^[5]

References

1. Hochschild, Arlie Russell (1983). The managed heart : commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520054547. OCLC 9280843.
2. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049.
3. Whittier, Nancy 2001. "Emotional Strategies: The Collective Reconstruction and Display of Oppositional Emotions in Movement against Child Sexual Abuse." in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements edited by Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta.
4. Norgaard, Kari Marie (2011). Living in denial: climate change, emotions, and everyday life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01544-8.
5. "The Managed Heart Commercialization of Human Feeling, Updated with a New Preface". University of California Press. Retrieved May 16, 2024.