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to as a “signal function,” whereby
messages such as fear or anxiety
are relayed to the brain, indicating
the presence of danger, and so on.
Hochschild says that: “From feeling
we discover our own viewpoint on
the world.” Emotions engender a
mental component that reconciles
past events with actual situations
in which we put or find ourselves.
In addition to putting these
emotional dimensions at the heart
of social interaction, Hochschild
stresses the myriad ways in which
emotions are mediated and shaped
by wider processes. Society and
culture intervene in the emotional
economy of the individual through
socialization. For example, through
primary socialization people learn
to make sense of their emotions
and, with varying degrees of
success, manipulate and manage
them. Hochschild is saying that
emotions are not simply things that
happen to passive human actors.
Rather, individuals are actively
involved in producing and creating
their feelings and emotions.
Emotional work and rules
As individuals, claims Hochschild,
we “do” emotions. Feeling
emotional and acting in emotional
ways is purposively enacted. She
calls this process “emotional work,”
and uses it to describe how people
alter and intensify particular
feelings, while simultaneously
trying to suppress unpleasant
emotions. She identifies three main
ways that people work to produce
emotion: cognitive emotional work,
bodily emotional work, and
expressive emotional work.
In cognitive emotional work,
individuals use images, ideas,
and thoughts in order to call forth,
or stifle, the various emotions
associated with those ideas. Bodily
emotional work refers to any
attempt to control the physical
reaction accompanying a particular
emotional state, such as sweating
when anxious, or shaking when
angry. Expressive emotional work
involves attempting to manage
the public display of particular
emotions with a view to realizing
a specific feeling, or set of feelings.
The purpose of Hochschild’s
typology of emotions is to highlight
the extent to which individuals are
actively involved in shaping and
managing their inner emotional
states in order to call forth certain
feelings. Earlier work in this area
focused on outward appearances:
the physical behavior and verbal
cues we use to communicate
emotions; what Hochschild refers to
as “surface acting.” She extends her
analysis to focus on “deep acting,”
referring to “method acting” when
trying to explain it: “Here, display
is a natural result of working on
feeling; the actor does not try to
seem happy or sad but rather
expresses spontaneously, as the
Russian theater director Constantin
Stanislavski urged, a real feeling
that has been self-induced.”
It is not Hochschild’s intention
to suggest that people consciously
manipulate or deceive one another,ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
Many women work in service-
industry jobs, where employers ask
them to exude real emotion to satisfy
customers. All in the line of, as
Hochschild puts it, “being nice.”although this is always possible.
She is attempting to demonstrate
the ways and extent to which
people interact and work together
to define a particular social
situation and how, in turn, this
feeds back into, and intimately
shapes, their emotional states.
Hochschild maintains
that rationalization and the
marginalization of the more
emotional aspects of human
behavior have meant that the
often tacit rules that underpin
interpersonal conduct have begun
to develop in new directions. To
explain this, she introduces the
notion of “feeling rules.” These
are socially learned and culturally
specific norms that individuals
draw upon in order to negotiate and
guide the display and experience
of emotions and feelings. In modern
capitalist societies, there are two
types: display rules and emotional
rules. Display rules are, like
“surface acting,” the outward...the action is in the body
language, the put-on sneer, the
posed shrug, the controlled
sigh. This is surface acting.
Arlie Russell
Hochschild