Meaning
Work that requires managing your own emotions, and the feelings you display to others, as part of doing the job - for example a flight attendant who must stay warm and calm regardless of how she feels. In looser everyday use it also covers unpaid effort of caring, soothing and mood-management in relationships, though that broader sense departs from the original academic definition. Academic register in its original sense; in everyday use it usually carries a critical or complaining tone about unfair, invisible effort. Regional use: General English; British spelling 'labour', American 'labor'.
Origin
The term was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. She defined it as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display, sold for a wage, and built the analysis on fieldwork with flight attendants trained to smile and bill collectors trained to be firm. She distinguished 'surface acting' (faking the display) from 'deep acting' (actually inducing the feeling). Later scholars such as Steinberg and Figart traced the concept's development in a 1999 paper, 'Emotional Labor Since The Managed Heart'. In the 2010s the phrase escaped academia via journalism and social media, broadening to describe invisible emotional work in private life - a shift commentators, including Hochschild herself, have noted as a departure from the original wage-labor meaning.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- affective labour
- doing the emotional labour
- emotional labor
Usage Examples
- Nurses perform constant emotional labour, comforting patients while managing their own distress.
- Being the only woman on the team meant she handled the emotional labour of smoothing over every conflict.
- His point was fair, but the emotional labour of staying friendly through the whole negotiation exhausted him.