The Dark Side of Emotional Labour

Jenna Ward, Robert McMurray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134094226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Dark Side of Emotional Labour explores the work that the rest of society would rather not think about, the often unseen work that is emotionally disturbing, exhausting, upsetting, and stigmatising. This is work that is simultaneously undesirable and rewarding, work whose tasks are eschewed and yet necessary for the effective function of individual organisations and society at large.

Diverse and challenging, this book examines how workers such as the doorman, the HR manager, the waiter and the doctor's receptionist experience verbal aggression and intimidation; how the prison officer and home carer respond to the emotions associated with physical violence, and; how the Samaritan, banker and veterinarian deal in death and despair. It also considers how different individuals develop the emotional capital necessary to cope with the dark side of emotional labour, and how individuals can make sense of, and come to take satisfaction and pride in, such difficult work. Finally, the book considers what is to be done with darker emotional work, both in terms of the management and care of those labouring on the dark side.

Challenging and original, this book gives a voice to those who undertake the most demanding work on our behalf. It will be of interest to researchers and students of organisation studies and its related fields, and to every one of us who is called on to work or manage on the Dark Side.

1 Introduction

10.4324/9780203383131-2

‘What I envy you, sir, is the luxury of your own feelings. I belong to a profession in which that luxury is sometimes denied us.’

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (1857[1996]:299)

‘You created my job, you created me. To you, I am a robot in uniform. You press the button and when you call me to the scene you expect results. But I’m also a man. I even have a heart.’

Vincent Maher, policeman (Terkel, 1974:137)

It is more than 30 years since the publication of Hochschild’s seminal book The Managed Heart (1983). Since then the term ‘emotional labour’ has become common in academic disciplines as varied as organisational studies, critical management studies, human resource management, nursing, psychology and sociology. This ‘bandwagon’ phenomenon (Bolton, 2005) has had the positive effect of rapidly developing the subfield of work-based studies of emotion and enriching our knowledge of emotions at work. Less welcome have been the ‘semantic morass’ (McClure & Murphy, 2008:105), oversights, oversimplification and myopic focus on certain sectors and certain types of emotional offering that have served to stifle the continued progression of the field (Callahan & McCollum, 2002). This is exemplified by the preoccupation with flight attendants, the symbolic ‘smile’ and empathetic emotional labour, and the relative neglect of those such as debt collectors and the antipathetic emotional labour (Korczynski, 2002) that characterises key aspects of their work. Both positive and negative forms of emotional labour were introduced in Hochschild’s original empirical work, yet the latter, along with other, darker elements of emotional labour, remain underresearched and underdeveloped.

We take Hochschild (1983) as both starting point and referent for our focus on ‘the dark side’ of emotional labour. Following recent academic (e.g. Donkin, 2001; Letiche, 2009; Linstead et al., 2014; McCabe, 2014) and popular interest (e.g. Vey, 2005), we explore work that the rest of society would rather not think about: work that is emotionally disturbing, wearing, deeply upsetting, stigmatising and yet necessary for the effective function of specific organisations and society at large (McMurray & Ward, 2014). In so doing we draw on examples from our own research across the public, private and voluntary sectors to analyse the experiences of bankers, nurses, veterinarians, receptionists, police officers, airline staff, home care workers, Samaritans, directors of human resources, prison officers, door staff, school teachers and hotel workers. By including such a broad range of individuals we not only widen the fairly narrow empirical focus of the emotional labour fieldwork to date but also attend to Hughes’s (1984) call to look for those factors that both separate and cut across different occupations whether they be humble or proud. To this end we explore how workers as diverse as the bouncer, the HR manager, the waiter and the doctor’s receptionist experience verbal aggression and intimidation; how the prison officer and the home carer respond to the emotions associated with physical violence; and how the Samaritan, the banker and the veterinarian deal with death and despair. We also consider how different individuals develop the emotional capital necessary to cope with the darker side of emotional labour and how occupational members make sense of and come to take satisfaction and pride in such difficult work.

We begin this chapter with a brief overview of some of the emergent literature on the ‘dark side’ of organisations, paying particular attention to the ways in which the metaphor has been used in mainstream and more critical bodies of literature. In acknowledging the variety of appreciations and perspectives of what might constitute the ‘dark side’ of organisational practices, process and experiences, we turn to focus on their applicability to the emotional labour thesis specifically. The popularity of the emotional labour construct has led to it being studied in more subject areas than we could name, but they include sociology, psychology, nursing studies, pedagogy and social psychology. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that there are potentially many ‘dark sides’ of emotional labour that have been commented on. In presenting a cross-disciplinary review of the extant literature, we briefly map out four more well-rehearsed critiques which throw the emotional labour construct in what could be argued to be ‘the darkness’. Specifically, we discuss ‘darkness’ in relation to emotional labour discourse as exploitation, as alienation, as dissonance and as gendered accounts. In so doing, we seek to highlight a very different appreciation of the ‘dark side of emotional labour’, one that is experientially uncomfortable, challenging, unspoken and even hidden. From this alternative vantage point, we get to hear the lived experiences, the pain, the joy and the indifference associated with undertaking work that the rest of society would rather not know much about. This text, then, seeks to move the debate on through a combination of our own empirical research and existing studies to demonstrate the complexity and prevalence of emotion management that is being carried out in various work contexts. Moreover, we consider what is to be done with darker emotional work, in terms of both the management of such work and the care of workers labouring on the dark side of emotional labour.

The ‘dark side’

The ‘dark side’ metaphor emerged most visibly in the 1990s as a critical response to frustrations with mainstream managerialism’s reluctance to address difficult ethical, political and ideological issues that arise within and from organisational practices, process and experiences ( Linstead et al., 2014). Over time, interest in the ‘dark side’ of organisations has grown, and the field has attracted a range of scholars who self-identify an interest in the exploration and understanding of the phenomenon. It is now generally accepted that there is a dark, negative or asocial side to organisations (Linstead et al., 2014; Banjeree & Linstead, 2001; Klein, 2007; Vaughan, 1999; Griffin & O’Leary-Kelly, 2004). However, what constitutes darkness, why it occurs and with what consequences are issues that serve to identify emerging tropes in the way the ‘dark side’ of organisations is conceptualised and understood.

Mainstream approaches characterise the ‘dark side’ of organisations as incidents, experiences or behaviours that are perceived to be ‘abnormal, by-product(s) of dysfunctional relations (McCabe, 2014:255). Here, then, the ‘dark side’ is itself abnormal and dysfunctional in that it runs counter to managerialist ideologies of control. For Vaughan the study of the dark side is ‘how things go wrong in socially organized settings’ (1999:273), usually as a consequence of mistakes, misconduct and disasters. In the managerial, functional literature, these incidents are attributed to a lack of conformity and ineffective leadership, resulting in deviations from the formal design, goals and standards of the organisational context (Vaughan, 1999). In this regard, ‘better organisational performance’, more ‘effective management’ and more ‘compliant employees’ would eradicate the ‘dark side’.

Muhr and Rehn (2014) complicate the simplicity of such functionalist arguments, however, by demonstrating that organisations can utilise and have utilised organisational atrocities for their own gain, despite having no part in their making – something they refer to as ‘managing the external dark side as a productive resource in the form of brand image’. In their article they use the Body Shop’s capitalisation on international atrocities against women to build a positive, antithetic brand identity as an example of these types of behaviours.

More critical approaches to the study of the ‘dark side’ offer a more complex understanding of what might constitute ‘dark’ organisational behaviours, choices and experiences within workplace settings from a variety of perspectives. Despite the diversity of approaches and conceptualisations of ‘darkness’ from critical scholars, there is an assumption that most share: the dark side is a ‘condition or consequence of the normal, functional dynamics of how organisations operate in a capitalist system’ (McCabe, 2014:255). Consequently, rather than perceiving, researching and conceptualising the ‘dark side’ as abnormal, dysfunctional and something to be eradicated, this body of work embraces it as a lived reality of contemporary organisational life. Perhaps the most dominant critical view of the ‘dark side’ is that which takes issue with the ‘incipient totalitarianism’ (Willmott, 1993:515) of the capitalist labour process, in which managerial control has continued to extend beyond the physical labour process to include individual subjectivity. Here, then, total quality management, business process re-engineering and normative and neo-normative controls (Fleming, 2013) could all be attributed to the dark side as they seek to colonise employee subjectivity as a resource to be manipulated for organisational benefit.

Of course, emotional labour fits neatly into this analysis, for Hochschild (1983) makes it very clear that her observations were of an extension of managerial control beyond physical labour to that which was once a private part of the self – individual emotion. These types of (ethical) concerns are the focus of labour process analyses of emotional labour in which ‘darkness’ is exploitation and alienation. So too are the psychological consequences of performing emotions that are inauthentic to a ‘real feeling’. In this latter sense, ‘darkness’ is presented in the literature in terms of dissonance. Finally, work that involves ‘emotion’ has been positioned as ‘women’s work’, which has cast a long, dark shadow over the study and practice of emotional labour; hence, we argue that gendered accounts of emotional labour can also be read as a form of ‘darkness’. We briefly introduced these well-rehearsed critiques later; however, our interpretation of the ‘dark side of emotional labour’ is one that is more aligned to McCabe’s (2014:258) appreciation of the ‘dark side’ organisation in that it ‘should not simply be equated with the violation of corporate rules but may indeed result from conformity with them and so actions must be assessed against their human costs’. Consequently, our study focuses on what McCabe (2014) would call ‘victims of the dark side’, but victims who are able to talk to the ways in which they can they take pride and satisfaction in difficult, dirty and disconcerting emotional work that most of us would rather not acknowledge has to be done. In this way, we do not construct all emotional labourers as victims; rather, we give voice to the multiplicity and complexity of the work they do and how they feel about it.

Darkness as exploitation

Hochschild (1975, 1979, 1983, 1989) presents emotional labour as the rational commodification of what was once seen, and perhaps should be, a private part of our selves: our feelings and emotions. Presenting work-based narratives from both airborne cabin crew and land-based debt collectors, Hochschild demonstrated ways in which the terms ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ labour did not adequately describe the work undertaken in these job roles. She convincingly presented the argument that employee emotions had become subject to managerial remote control, that both the men and women she interviewed and observed were, in effect, selling an emotional part of their selves to their employing organisations in exchange for a wage. She accordingly deployed the term ‘emotional labour’ to designate:

the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange-value… This labour requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.

(Hochschild, 1983:7, emphasis in original)

As a sociologist, Hochschild self-identified the origin of her thoughts on emotional labour in her reading of Marx. Though this has been disputed (e.g. Brook, 2009; Bolton, 2009) she herself contends that organisations commodify individuals’ emotions in return for a wage to the extent that particular emotions come to have ‘exchange value’. This process of commodification is seen by Hochschild to be in line with Marx’s depiction of the labour process as exploitative in terms of the capitalist extraction and accumulation of surplus value. This perceived economic exploitation was compounded, for Hochschild, by fear that employer control over formally private parts of the self could have negative psychological and physiological consequences for the worker. In this sense, emotional labour’s ‘dark side’ came in the form of economic, political, health and moral concerns.

Hochschild’s book (1983) was intended to act as the opening rather than the concluding statement on emotional labour. She was aware of the potential limitations of her carefully selected empirical samples of flight attendant and bill collectors. For this reason she encouraged further research into the effects and varieties of emotional labour by modestly suggesting that The Managed Heart aimed only to ‘introduce the concept of “emotional labour” and “feeling rules” (the norms which govern emotional labour), and the “emotional exchanges” on which these bear’ (Hochschild, 1989:441). Over the next 30 years the challenge of better understanding emotions at work was taken up across a range of disciplines in a variety of different ways.

Darkness as alienation

Neofunctionalists were energised by the concept of feeling rules, emphasising the rule-governed aspect of micro-interactions to elucidate the multidimensional nature of service interactions. Human capital economists warmed to the transactional approach toward emotions, while labour process researchers saw it as an extension to the new vocabularies of (de-)skilling, control and resistance that they had been developing post-Braverman (1974). Yet much of this work interpreted the emotional labour thesis pessimistically (Wouters, 1989a, b). Accordingly, between 1983 and 1989 both the psychological and the sociological literature focused attention on the negative consequences of performing emotional labour in very narrow terms. Burnout, emotional exhaustion, alienation, depersonalisation, stress, depression and self-estrangement were all offered as potential consequences of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Ashforth & Tomiuk, 2000). The commodification of private emotions and sentiments was argued to leave the emotional labourer with an unstable self-identity, unsure of who they were, ‘estranged or alienated from an aspect of self’ (Hochschild, 1983:7). Much but not all of the psychological literature on emotional labour still retains this focus, establishing relationships between the performance of (different types of) emotional labour...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Paid to scare or care? The invisibility of antipathetic emotional labour
• 3 Absent emotion? Remaining neutral in the face of abuse
• 4 Dealing in emotional dirty work
• 5 Emotional pain and the threat of toxicity
• 6 Emotional capital: exposure, experience and praxis
• 7 Emotional labour and the ethics of care
• References
• Index