Both psychoanalysts and actors, from different perspectives, have spoken about a “false self,” which is a disbelieved, un­claimed self, a part of “me” that is not “really me.” To the psy­choanalyst, the false self embodies our acceptance of early parental requirements that we act so as to please others, at the expense of our own […]

Estrangement from display, from feeling, and from what feel­ings can tell us is not simply the occupational hazard of a few. It has firmly established itself in the culture as permanently imaginable. All of us who know the commercialization of hu­man feeling at one remove—as witness, consumer, or critic — have become adept at recognizing […]

Massive people-processing—and the advanced engineering of emotional labor that makes it possible —is a remarkable achievement. It is also an important one, for a good part of modem life involves exchange between total strangers, who, in the absence of countermeasures and in the pursuit of short­term self-interest, might much of the time act out suspicion […]

In a social system animated by competition for property, the human personality was metamorphosed into a form of capital. Here it was rational to invest oneself only in properties that would produce the highest return. Personal feeling was a handicap since it distracted the individualfrom calculating his best interest and might pull him along economically […]

Regardless of gender, the job poses problems of identity. What is my work role and what is “me”? How can I do deep acting without “feeling phony” and losing self-esteem? How can I redefine the job as “illusion making” without becoming cynical? (See Chapter Six.) But there are other psychological issues a flight attendant faces […]

Given this relation between status and the treatment of feel­ing, it follows that persons in low-status categories—women, people of color, children—lack a status shield against poorer treatment of their feelings. This simple fact has the power to utterly transform the content of a job. The job of flight at­tendant, for example, is not the same […]

With the growth of large organizations calling for skills in personal relations, the womanly art of status enhancement and the emotion work that it requires has been made more public, more systematized, and more standardized. It is per­formed by largely middle-class women in largely public — contact jobs. As indicated in Chapter Seven (and Appendix […]

Middle-class American women, tradition suggests, feel emo­tion more than men do. The definitions of “emotional” and “cogitation” in the Random House Dictionary of the English Lan­guage reflect a deeply rooted cultural idea. Yet women are also thought to command “feminine wiles,” to have the ca­pacity to premeditate a sigh, an outburst of tears, or a […]

Emotional. 2. subject to or easily affected by emotion: She is an emotional woman, easily upset by any disturbance. Cogitation. 1. meditation, contemplation: After hours of cogitation he came up with a new proposal. 2. the faculty of thinking: She was not a serious student and seemed to lack the power of cogitation. —Random House […]

What a person does at work may bear an uncanny resem­blance to the “job description” of being the child of such a worker at home. Big emotion workers tend to raise little ones. Mothers and fathers teach children letters and numbers and manners and a world view, but they also teach them which zone of […]