SOC344 2020 Tut6 – Monday 12.30pm

In this week’s reading, Hochschild (1979), expressed the importance of emotional management in which we assess the appropriateness of a feeling, by making a comparison between the feeling and the situation. Emotion becomes an object of awareness when an individual does not feel as though their emotions fit the current situations. This is influenced by social rules, that is, what we should expect to feel in certain situations. There are definitely social rules of how and when we should express our emotions. There are times and places when showing your emotions are not appropriate, and times when it is expected. At work, I would say I manage my emotions half of the time. I have a hard time hiding my emotions even when the situation may not be appropriate to express them. As I work mostly with other females, I find them all to be quite similar in that we are very open about how we are feeling, and if any of us are having a bad day we are all quick to know about it. Whereas, my experience in working with males they don’t feel the need to tell everyone how they are feeling. They are more likely to work through their issues quietly and by themselves

Hochschild (1979) refers to managing our feelings is accomplished by adjusting the multiple factors that form an emotion and therefore alter the actual emotion an individual is feeling, ‘evoke, shape or supress it and bring themselves back into line with emotion norms/feeling rules (p.560-565). The workplace I feel as though we are required to represent our feelings and emotions as being positive and happy and supress how we truly feel, this is more prominent in the retail and hospitality industry. Regardless of what is occurring outside of the workplace we have to ensure our emotions are up to standard and mask our true emotions. I feel as though this can sometimes be difficult depending on your current situation, if you are stressed, upset or experiencing any kind of negative emotion, to portray that we are feeling the complete opposite within the workplace can be quite challenging. I believe gender does affect this as women are portrayed to be more emotional than men, women tend to hide emotions in the workplace such as stress, sadness boredom as well as fear whereas men hide vulnerable emotions such as loneliness and hopelessness.

Hochschild (1979) refers to managing our feelings is accomplished by adjusting the multiple factors that form an emotion and therefore alter the actual emotion an individual is feeling, ‘evoke, shape or supress it and bring themselves back into line with emotion norms/feeling rules (p.560-565). The workplace I feel as though we are required to represent our feelings and emotions as being positive and happy and supress how we truly feel, this is more prominent in the retail and hospitality industry. Regardless of what is occurring outside of the workplace we have to ensure our emotions are up to standard and mask our true emotions. I feel as though this can sometimes be difficult depending on your current situation, if you are stressed, upset or experiencing any kind of negative emotion, to portray that we are feeling the complete opposite within the workplace can be quite challenging. I believe gender does affect this as women are portrayed to be more emotional than men, women tend to hide emotions in the workplace such as stress, sadness boredom as well as fear whereas men hide vulnerable emotions such as loneliness and hopelessness.

Hochschild states in this weeks reading regardimg emotions and labour that we are stuck between social rules and the scope unto which dictates what we can and cannot show emotional wise while in public or in the duties of employment (1979, p551). Hochschild suggests that to investigate how emotions are managed from day to day, we must take on the role of an actor and labour our emotions as in work on them and have an outer display of emotion instead of an inner display (1979, p.557). This is the same with actors who put on multiple personalities to conform to the emotions and moods of the characters that they portray to deliver a "genuine" performance that could swing the emotions of the viewers. this is known as emotion work which involves changing ones emotion or feelings. This can also include the suppression of emotions within oneself as part of a deep acting that occurs in emotions work. Hochschild also speaks of feeling rules that encompasses rules on how ones emotions should be in a social groups setting (1979, p563 - 564). a couple of examples of this include a collective sadness at a funeral or a collective happiness and joy at a marriage, and to not show these emotions or display anything opposite causes that person to be outcast or looked down upon if they do not share the same emotions. On another note on emotions work, this can clearly be seen occurring in dictatorships such as North Korea upon the death of their leaders Kim il-sung and Kim Jong-Il, every citizen was expected or forced to display emotions of grief and sadness or risk being arrested or punished severely.

Hochschild introduces the concept of ‘feeling rules’ and describes them as being seen as the side of ideology that deals with emotion and feeling and explains that emotion management is the type of work it takes to cope with feeling rules. Hochschild also informs that there are two possible approaches to the social ordering of emotive experience. The first is to study the social factors that stimulate primary emotions passively undergone. The second is to study the secondary acts performed upon the ongoing “non-reflective stream of primary emotive experience”. Ultimately, the first approach focuses on how social factors affect what people feel whereas the second approach is how social factors affect what people think and do about what they feel, as acts of assessment and management. According to Goffman the way we 'manage' emotions is to interactional episode takes on the character of a mini-government. A situation that exacts from us certain “taxes" in the form of appearances which we "pay" for the sake of sustaining the encounter. Goffman also believes that if we are to understand the origin and causes of change in the “feeling rules” then we need not study the immediate situations when they show up but study changing relations between the classes and sexes. To answer the last line about our own reflection, I definitely manage my emotions when at work in my customer service job because not many people actually want to hear a real answer to their constant question of "Hows your day been?", I do it also because it is what my boss expects of me. Do I manage my emotion in other places? Yes, when at family gatherings with the whole of my extended family I manage my emotions around those who I do not like in order to "not cause a scene" (even if I want to). Does my gender affect this, yes I believe it most definitely does especially at family gatherings because its fine for the male members of my family to not be "chirpy" or to "lend a hand" and such but as soon as I do it, i must be "upset" or in a "mood".

Managing our emotions is an attempt to align how we feel with expected social guidelines; Hochschild (1979, p. 571) refers to such management as ‘feeling rules’. People who are positioned in social situations that seemingly require constant emotional management are those in working- class jobs (Hochschild 1979, p. 571) e.g. customer service roles and care work. It is universally expected that these people display happiness and enthusiasm, thus requiring the suppression of their true emotion to suit the social context that they are in. This often unpaid ‘emotional labour’ is predominately performed by women who are more likely to occupy these positions (McKenzie et al 2019, p. 675). From personal experience as a waitress I encounter many customers, specifically older men who feel entitled to certain gestures of happiness, It is my role to humor them despite often feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Emotional management is also prominent in heterosexual relationships (Duncombe and Marsden 1993). Women carry out the emotion work in the relationship and often report feeling as though their male partners lacked ‘emotional participation’ (Duncombe and Marsden 1993, p. 225). Considering this finding, what is your opinion of this quote? “Women are not rehabilitation centers for badly raised men…”

In late modern society workplace practices regarding Emotional Management tend to isolate individuals and commodify emotions. This makes the individual responsible for workplace problems that are really organisational issues, and undermines the development of collaboration between colleagues and workplace solidarity. The authors give the example of teaching in highly managerial and increasingly regulated systems. They explain that the focus on Emotional Management by individuals as a way to avoid burnout does not address structural challenges caused by the power imbalance between teachers and the institution. As the authors points out, this type of Emotional Management uses is a means of control and can be exploitive. Concepts such as resilience and emotional intelligence are exploited to benefit the organisation. Surface acting emotions that promote workplace and customer relations are distinguished from deep acting. “Deep acting is achieved when the individual reshapes their very experience of emotion so that, instead of feeling irritated they change their physiological and psychological dimension of psychological dimension of emotional experience in a given situation to match the desired commercially demanded emotion” (2019, p675). Emotional labour is often unpaid, unacknowledged and gendered. The authors correctly express concern that workplaces turning EM into an individual skill are impacting “both agency and solidarity “negatively (2019, p682). Individualising EM can cause individuals to manipulate not only their own emotions but those of others. This can disconnect them from social support and undermine the solidarity needed for collective bargaining.

How we manage our emotions is through cognitive work and emotional management to help manage emotions in life and links to gender (Hochschild 1973, pp.1-2). Cognitive work consists of attempting to “change images, ideas; or thoughts” to change the feelings and emotions that have a connection with them (Hochschild 1979, p.562). Hochschild (1979) explain that society takes a hold of our emotions through primary emotions and secondary acts, but its due to each individual how effect it may be. Emotional management consists of evocation, which focuses on bringing a need emotion forward which was originally absent, and suppression, which focuses on bringing forward an unwanted emotion forward which was originally present (Hochschild 1979, p.560). McKenzie et al. (2019) are able to highlight genders effect within emotions. The process of individual’s emotions due to gender emerge from public regulation of how individual emotion management are criticised of acceptable or unacceptable representations of self (McKenzie et al. 2019, p. 679). Reference Hochschild, AR 1979, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 551-575. McKenzie, J, Olson, RE, Patulny, R, Bellocchi, A & Mills, KA 2019, ‘Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace: A call for a new research agenda’, Sociological Review, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 672–688.

Emotional management is considered as a “commercialised, relational and (often) alienating” experience’ (McKenzie et al. 2019, p. 672). However, current Emotion Management strategies in the workplace are individualised and thus, do not consider “the structural constraints imposed by workplaces” and the interactional nature of Emotion Management, which is depleting worker solidarity (McKenzie et al. 2019, p. 676). Duncombe and Marsden (1993, p. 221) insist that gender affects one’s emotion management, especially women, considering they still perform the majority of domestic tasks and child care, and thus experience emotion work within the household. However, Duncombe and Marsden (1993, p. 221) claim that women also experience the most emotion work within the way love and initmacy is expressed and communicated in their heterosexual relationships. The recommended reading discovered that husbands lack “emotional participation” and women feel “deep disappointment” from the emotional imbalance in their relationships as the reassurance and tenderness they provide to their husbands is not reciprocated (Duncombe & Marsden 1993, p. 224-225). Considering this article was written in 1993, do you believe that women still experience the most emotion work? Or has improvements for women’s rights and the greater acceptance of males ability to show their emotions has created a more equal playing field, with both partners in heterosexual relationships expressing their love to one another?

When looking at not only how but when we manage our emotions Hochschild (1973) suggests that individuals are always working to control their emotions in order to make them ‘appropriate’ for specific situations. Such appropriate emotions are acquired through social interactions which illicit us to employ management skills whether at work, home or school. As with class and race, gender does have influence as Duncombe and Marsden (1993) point out UK women do most of the intimate emotion work within households such as caring duties as well as the support of the emotions of others. This emotional work is mostly unpaid and largely unrecognised as work at all (McKenzie, et al. 2019). This management is not only present in the home but the workplace where emotions have become ‘socially engineered’ and commodified by companies. Within this emotional labour, authenticity is essential, as it is not good enough to go through the motions, one must change their inner held feelings requiring deep acting to succeed. When it comes to my personal experience the need for emotional management has been present in customer service work where a smile must be not only displayed but felt. Feeling happy to serve every customer need, no matter how outlandish their demand, was essential to job performance. Have you experienced an inability to manage your emotions at work?

The management of oneself presupposes a human capacity to feel, and the layered structural concepts which affects the way humans think, act and personally feel is emotion; the distinction is clear the latter recognises social forces. The management of emotions notably does not only depend on “situationism” but on oneself to embody that emotion and “do” (think, act, feel) accordingly; this form of deep-acting is particular to service industries in which patrons’ expectations are friendly staff who induce senses of warmth and heartiness, entailing expressions of motherliness and caring. This can be expressed in smiles and physical contact, soft and simple language, leaning in or traits indicative of interest. These properties of motherliness and caring are important in situations where actors expect a particular milieu, so when the opposite is experienced, description of coldness, harshness and unfriendliness are evoked revealing the need for deep-acting in social situations. Moreover, it demonstrates how a social expectation is broken leading to sanctions and social chastisement. This idea posits a junction of Goffman and Hoschild where the necessity of emotions and its display and experience through an actor within a particular social context gives new understanding how power social forces are in service industries. In this junction, there is a power function where the relation between two or more actors can be disrupted by acts or emotions, not simply through an act from an actor, but an action which violates social norms. This creates potential for situations to be ‘turned-on-its-head’ enabling individuals to violate often compelling social norms and act in a contrary way. Such includes displays of great anger from a subordinate or uses of humour from individuals who outrank others, both in situations where rank and positions matter, can change the dynamic of the relationship. Thus, displays of emotionality, particularly deep-acting, where emotions influence what the actors “does” has potential to shape situations and the individual themselves.

The relationship we as a society have with mental illness is extremely contradictory as it is multifaceted. On one hand, suffering from mental health issues such as anxiety or depression has become increasingly normalised, as one in eight Australian adults are currently taking anti-depressents to help manage and regulate their moods. On the other hand mental illnesses still carry a stigma on the spectrum from being labeled as ‘weak’ when suffering issues of depression to borderline ‘subhuman’ when suffering personality disorders such as psychosis. In a loneliness epidemic, where 1 in 8 Australians are taking antidepressants, at what point do we as a society realise that this is not an individual issue. The percentage of Australians struggling with depression and anxiety is on the rise, and while Government responses including headspace, beyond blue, and medicare subsidised care plans have been put in place to help people struggling at what point do we realise that there is something very wrong with the fabric of society that is making people struggle with day to day living. Bendelow reports in this weeks reading ‘Health, Emotion and the Body’ that there is an assumption within the psychiatric community that mental illness is caused by biological malfunctioning. This assumption is what allows the sometimes extremely debilitating but relatively mild mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression to be grouped with severe psychosis. The way we talk about mental health influences attitudes and ideas around it. Would separating in language severe, lifelong diagnosis of psychosis or personality disorders and temporary, more mild mental health issues such as social anxiety result in less reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat issues like depression.

The relationship we as a society have with mental illness is extremely contradictory as it is multifaceted. On one hand, suffering from mental health issues such as anxiety or depression has become increasingly normalised, as one in eight Australian adults are currently taking anti-depressents to help manage and regulate their moods. On the other hand mental illnesses still carry a stigma on the spectrum from being labeled as ‘weak’ when suffering issues of depression to borderline ‘subhuman’ when suffering personality disorders such as psychosis. In a loneliness epidemic, where 1 in 8 Australians are taking antidepressants, at what point do we as a society realise that this is not an individual issue. The percentage of Australians struggling with depression and anxiety is on the rise, and while Government responses including headspace, beyond blue, and medicare subsidised care plans have been put in place to help people struggling at what point do we realise that there is something very wrong with the fabric of society that is making people struggle with day to day living. Bendelow reports in this weeks reading ‘Health, Emotion and the Body’ that there is an assumption within the psychiatric community that mental illness is caused by biological malfunctioning. This assumption is what allows the sometimes extremely debilitating but relatively mild mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression to be grouped with severe psychosis. The way we talk about mental health influences attitudes and ideas around it. Would separating in language severe, lifelong diagnosis of psychosis or personality disorders and temporary, more mild mental health issues such as social anxiety result in less reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat issues like depression.