To thwart cynicism about the living room analogy, to catch it as it collapses in the face of other realizations, the company eye shifts to another field of emotion work—the field in which flight attendants interact with each other. This is a strategic point of entry for the company because if the com­pany can influence […]

Even before an applicant for a flight attendant’s job is inter­viewed, she is introduced to the rules of the game. Success will depend in part on whether she has a knack for perceiv­ing the rules and taking them seriously. Applicants are urged to read a preinterview pamphlet before coming in. In the 1979—1980 Airline Guide […]

“A market for emotional labor” is not a phrase that company employees use. Upper management talks about getting the best market share of the flying public. Advertising personnel talk about reaching that market. In-flight service supervi­sors talk about getting “positive attitude” and “professional service” from flight attendants, who in turn talk about “han­dling irates.” Nevertheless, […]

FEELING MANAGEMENTFrom Private to Commercial Uses If they could have turned every one of us into sweet quiet Southern belles with velvet voices like Rosalyn Carter, this is what they would want to stamp out on an assembly line. —Flight attendant, Delta Airlines On PSA our smiles are not just painted on. So smile your […]

Both straight and improvisational exchanges presuppose a number of ways to pay psychological dues. For example, we may simply feign the owed feeling, sometimes without in­tending to succeed; or we may offer the greater gift of trying to amplify a real feeling that we already have; or we may try to reframe an event and […]

When I was in boarding school we had a housemother named Miss Mallon. She was sofanatically religious she would tell children that their parents would go to hell. Because of this and other things, she was fired. All the girls in my dorm cried and carried on when they heard the news. I was supposed […]

A bride and a mourner live out roles that are specific to an occasion. Yet the achievements of the heart are all the more remarkable within roles that last longer and go deeper. Par­ents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and best friends expect to have more freedom from feeling rules and less need for […]

A feeling itself, and not simply the way it is displayed on face and body, can be experienced as misfitting a situation in a surprising number of ways. We can suggest a few of them by considering how one might feel at a funeral. A funeral, like a wedding, symbolizes a passage in rela­tionships and […]

A restless vitality wells up as we approach thirty. — Gail Sheehy Measuring experience against a normative model set up by doctors, people will be as troubled by departures from the norm as they are troubled by [Gail Sheehy’s] “predictable crises" themselves, against which medical norms are intended to provide reassurance. — Christopher Lasch Since […]

The stage actor makes the finding and expressing of feeling his main professional task. In Stanislavski’s analogy, he seeks it with the dedication of a prospector for precious metal. He comes to see feeling as the object of painstaking internal mining, and when he finds it, he processes it like gold. In the context of […]