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reassured, happy, and at ease.
By evoking in passengers positive
emotional states and feelings of
comfort and safety, Delta believed
it could secure the loyalty and
future custom of passengers.
Ingenious and innovative as the
corporate philosophy might at first
seem, Hochschild argues that the
deep acting and emotional labor
demanded of flight attendants
was ultimately damaging to
their psychological well-being.
Constantly having to control,
manage, and subvert their own
feelings, while simultaneously
working to produce and display
a range of positively authentic
emotions, proved harmful.
She identified two particularly
negative consequences arising
from long-term emotional labor.
First, the fusing together of the
flight attendants’ private sense of
selfhood with their public self—the
roles they played as attendants—
was liable to lead to emotional and
psychological burnout. Second, a
sense of self-estrangement often
occurred: trying to manage the
very real disparity between their
personal feelings and the emotional
states they strived to evoke in
passengers, typically led to one of
two outcomes among them—either
they began to resent themselves
emotionally or they developed
resentment for the job.
Hochschild claims that even
if individuals actively engage
in strategies aimed at self-
preservation, resenting the work
as opposed to themselves, the net
result is the same. The emotional
and psychological well-being of
the individual is harmed, with
the result they feel increasingly
alienated from their innermost
self and their emotions too.Gender inequality
As a feminist sociologist,
Hochschild’s study of Delta also
provides a window onto the ways
in which wider gender inequalities
are sustained and reproduced
within US society. Since the 1960s,
increasing numbers of women haveARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
Many nurses claim their emotional
labor is invisible to some colleagues.
They give loving, daily care to patients,
often in an attempt to compensate for
the insensitivity of more senior staff.entered into the workforce, with
many joining the burgeoning
service industries. For Hochschild,
this is not necessarily a positive
development, because it serves
to push the highly uneven division
of emotional-labor characteristics
of modern capitalist society further
in the direction of women. In
making this argument, Hochschild
claims that women are more
inclined to make a resource out
of feeling, which they in turn
sell back to men. Although the
increasing numbers of working
women seem to testify to a shift
in the occupational status of
women in modern society, a closer
examination of the statistics shows
that women are far more likely
than men to work in the service
industries—most retail associates,
call-center operators, and hotel
and bar staff are women.
Within modern capitalist
society, it falls to women to
undertake the vast majority of the
total emotional labor. In the long
term, this is a negative andWomen make a
resource out of feeling
and offer it to men.
Arlie Russell
Hochschild