Emotional Labour in Criminal Justice and Criminology

Jake Phillips, Jaime Waters, Chalen Westaby, Andrew Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429619106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book is the first volume to explore criminal justice work and criminological research through the lens of emotional labour. A concept first coined 30 years ago, emotional labour seeks to explore the ways in which people manage their emotions in order to achieve the aims of their organisations, and the subsequent impact of this is on workers and service users.

The chapters in this edited collection explore work in a wide range of criminal justice institutions as well as the penal voluntary sector. In addition to literature review chapters which consolidate what we already know, this book includes case study chapters which extend our knowledge of how emotional labour is performed in specific contexts, and in relation to certain types of work. Emotional Labour in Criminal Justice and Criminology covers topics such as prisoners who die from natural causes in prison, to the work of independent domestic violence advisors and the use of emotion by death penalty lawyers in the US.

An accessible and compelling read, this book presents ground-breaking qualitative and quantitative research which will be critical to criminologists, criminal justice practitioners, students of criminology and academics in the fields of social policy and public service.

Part One

Chapter 1

Introduction

Why study emotional labour in criminal justice and criminology

Jake Phillips, Chalen Westaby, Andrew Fowler and Jaime Waters

Introduction

Emotional labour, a term coined by Hochschild (1983) in her seminal work A Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, alerts us to the ways in which people are required to manage and display their emotions in order to achieve the goals of the organisation that they work for. Although initially developed in the context of the private sector and with a focus on how emotions can be appropriated and deployed for the purpose of profit, more recent academic attention has focused on the ways in which professionals and those working in public services use emotional labour as part of their work. This body of knowledge has explored the reasons for using emotional labour in public services, its impact in terms of effective governance as well as on the consequences of that emotional labour on employees. Emotional labour brings to the fore the relational element of public service with a focus on trust and the role of the ‘encounter’ between state and citizen. In this chapter, we begin by providing an overview of what emotional labour is in order to lay some definitional groundwork for subsequent chapters. We then discuss why emotional labour is particularly pertinent to the field of criminal justice and criminology and finish by providing an overview of the structure of the book.

The concept of emotional labour

Emotional labour is ‘the management of a way of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display…which is for a wage’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7fn). The fact that emotions are being managed for a wage is central to Hochschild’s definition of emotional labour because it illustrates the way in which human feelings are increasingly being commodified by organisations. However, as we see in this volume, this definition has been stretched in recent years to include work that is done for other non-pecuniary benefits. Workers engaging in emotional labour are expected to control their own, and others, feelings. This requires effort, planning, time and knowledge (Morris & Feldman, 1996; Skilbeck & Payne, 2003).

As is readily recognised with physical work, emotional labour can be hard work. Hochschild (1983) provides three criteria which must be fulfilled in order for a worker to engage in emotional labour:

First...face-to face or voice-to voice contact with the public. Secondly, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person…Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of the employees. (1983: 147)

The first criterion means that workers must interact directly with people as part of their job for emotional labour to be possible. When emotion management moves into the public domain emotions become commodified and so emotional labour primarily occurs in ‘frontline’ or customer-facing roles. That said, jobs can demand emotional labour between employees within an organisation. For example, the secretary may need a pleasant disposition towards the attorneys they assist and, doing so, must perform emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983: 148).

The second criterion required for an employee to perform emotional labour is that the worker is expected to manage their emotions as well as the emotions of the recipient of their emotional display. For example, police officers regularly have to control their own feelings, as well as the general public with whom they are required to interact, and ‘who are often at their worst-injured, upset or angry’ (Martin, 1999: 561). We can start to see that, given the nature of work within the field of criminal justice and criminology, where extreme emotions such as despair, anger and revulsion are commonly felt, the expectation to manage the emotional displays of both the worker and the recipient is often particularly challenging.

Although the original studies on emotional labour focused on the need for face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact as paramount to a job requiring emotional labour, in recent years, modern information technology has developed which serves to replace or enhance human services and these kinds of jobs are being seen to demand emotional labour (Froehle, 2006; Jin & Oriaku, 2013). Consequently, studies are now beginning to be conducted on the effects of automation on emotional labour and the emotional labour expectations of online customer service workers. For example, in his study of tutors based in a private European online tutoring centre, Webb (2012) discovered that while the amount of online interaction is to some extent limited, tutors still engaged in considerable emotional labour with learners. In a separate example, Ishii and Markman (2016) found that online service workers engaged in emotional labour and in particular were expected to display positive emotions to customers when they were aggressive or they demanded additional attention.

The third criterion for emotional labour is that the employer must have a certain amount of control over the emotional displays of the worker. The focus of Hochschild’s initial study was the commodification of emotion by organisations in relation to ‘frontline’ human service workers such as air stewards and bill collectors. This has led some to argue that professionals cannot perform emotional labour because they have a much higher degree of autonomy.

Hochschild’s (1983) focus on control over worker’s emotional activities through training and supervision precluded a number of job roles such as those inhabited by ‘professionals’. These workers were seen differently because they are not considered to be performing whilst under the direct supervision of a superior. This narrow definition of who can do emotional labour has been challenged by a considerable body of work on the emotional labour of public service workers (Guy et al., 2008; Mastracci et al., 2012).

Whilst professionals are self-regulating – i.e. workers can use discretion and have autonomy in how they work – they are also governed by formalised codes of practice that prescribe universal standards (Harris, 2002). This unique form of standard setting has an impact on the nature of the emotional labour performed. Such workers might be described as ‘privileged emotion managers’, in contrast to the ‘emotional proletariat’ (Orzechowicz, 2008: 143 and 144, cited in MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996). Orzechowicz (2008) suggests that these types of workers conform to informal emotional labour expectations, based on codes of practices and professionals socialisation. The use of the term ‘privileged emotion managers’ suggests that workers who self-supervise are considered to be affluent and implies that their ‘income and reputation might decrease the impressiveness of the “exploitation” and the “costs” of emotional labour, and that is perhaps why they are excluded’ (Wouters, 1989: 100). That said, workers in what Wouters (1989) describes as ‘the true professions’, such as lawyers, social workers and therapists who are not directly supervised, can be seen to possess stronger emotional management skills than those who are closely supervised. Indeed, the changing nature of service work provided by professionals have been called upon to become more ‘customer focussed’ and management have attempted to directly control the professional’s ‘feeling rules’. It might be argued that professionals– and, for the purposes of this volume, criminal justice practitioners – are not as far away from the service workers in Hochschild’s study as we might think. This is important because emotional labour is about the commodification of emotion by organisations and is thus ‘sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value’ (Hochschild, 1983: 198, 7fn).¹

Drivers of emotional labour

How people know what emotional labour to perform is a key question posed by scholars in this field. The answer lies, to some degree, in Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules; ‘rules or norms according to which feelings are judged appropriate to accompanying events’ (1983: 59). Some researchers prefer to use the term display rules instead of feeling rules (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Morris & Feldman, 1996; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1989). This term is more attuned to emotions that are publicly displayed rather than the internal feelings of the worker (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Consequently, display rules can be defined as ‘behavioural expectations about which emotions ought to be expressed and which ought to be hidden’ (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1989: 8), and therefore ‘provide standards for the appropriate expression of emotions in the job, emphasising the publicly observable side of emotions rather than the actual feelings of employees’ (Diefendorff & Richard, 2003: 284).

Feeling rules or display rules are further divided into three types: societal, organisational and occupational norms (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). Societal display rules play a role in shaping the performance of emotional labour as they:

guide interpersonal behaviour in all cultures and provide general rules regarding how and what emotions should be expressed in the work environment. This is because the expression of emotion in organizational roles is influenced by the more general norms of the culture in which the organization is based. (Mann, 1997: 5; see also Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993)

Organisational feeling rules are rules or guidelines, the purpose of which is to achieve the aims and objectives laid down by the organisation (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Occupational norms derive from ‘occupational communities’:

who consider themselves to be engaged in the same sort of work; who identify (more or less positively) with their work; who share with one another a set of values, norms, and perspectives. (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984: 287)

These occupational cultures establish cultures which are based on codes of practice which dictate proper and improper behaviours, and develop task rituals and work codes for certain routine practices (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984). According to Ashforth and Humphrey (1993), organisational and occupational feeling rules are generally in alignment.

The performance of emotional labour

Emotional labour ‘requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ through the use of one of two types of acting: deep acting or surface acting (Hochschild, 1983: 7).

Surface acting

Surface acting is where a worker simulates the emotions to be displayed in order to produce a desired emotional reaction in another person. This way of performing emotional labour results in the emotion that is being displayed differing to the one(s) being felt. For example, Per-Ake Nylander et al. explore the use of surface acting by Swedish prison officers. They maintain that this type of acting is the predominant mode of performing emotional labour in security wings of prisons, with the often-expected requirement that Swedish prison officers ‘wear a mask’ and ‘simulate behaviours they did not feel’ (2011: 475). Similarly, Bhowmick and Mulla (2016) discuss surface acting as a useful strategy for Indian police officers who are required to engage in negative emotional displays such as anger and intimidation over attempting to change inner emotions which brings with it the risk of emotional alignment with those negative emotions.

Deep acting

Deep acting is where a worker engages in the emotional display either directly or indirectly through the alignment of inner feelings with emotional labour expectations. This can be achieved through either invoking those emotions through experience or through a trained imagination. In this way, the worker regulates their emotions in order to harmonise them with those expected by the organisation (Grandey et al., 2007a, b; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987).

This type of acting has been further divided into two types of deep acting. The first, active deep acting, is akin to the description above, and requires the worker to expend effort in order to invoke the expected emotions. An example of this type of deep acting can be seen in the study of probation practitioners by Fowler et al. (2018), where one participant states that:

no two lives are identical but…everyone’s got some sort of life experience, whatever that may be…and I think that’s how you, you know, you kind of click into those, those feelings and those, your own background to be able to say, well, you know it wasn’t always easy for me but, you know, look at, this is how you do it…

The ‘clicking into’ those feelings is an active way of engaging in deep acting for this probation practitioner in order to empathise with their clients. Passive deep acting, meanwhile, is where a worker may already feel the emotion expected in a certain situation and so requires no conscious effort to align their feelings with expected emotional displays (Bono & Vey, 2005; Kruml & Geddes, 2000). For example, Bruhn et al. (2012) describe situations where Swedish prison officers engage in passive deep acting in particular wings, such as the treatment wing. Prison officers working in this wing were able to develop more personal relationships with prisoners, and therefore displayed genuine anger when prisoners did not behave appropriately. Even though there is some degree of alignment between displayed and felt emotion in these examples, it is important to note that there is still...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Index