Hochschild’s Reading
Based Hochschild’s article (7), emotional labor entails the procedure of controlling expressions and feelings to administer the emotional needs of a job. Employees are required to manage their feelings when they interact with the superiors, co-workers, and customers. Various job roles involve emotional labor such as nurses, social workers, waiters, doctors, flight attendants, etc. Arlie Hochschild (7) adds that the emotional labor requires the personnel to regulate reactions such as behaviors and facial displays in public or in the workplace. Closely related to the term is emotion management or work that entails the acts performed in private spheres such as during interactions with allies and family or at home.
Hochschild (8) provides three prominent mechanisms that people can utilize to regulate their feelings. They include expressive, bodily, and cognitive. For mental emotion management, the individual tries to transform thoughts, ideas, and images in the hopes of eliminating the feelings that involve the elements. For instance, a person may associate a particular event or picture with happy thoughts; hence, when in devastating situations the individual can attempt to recall the image or event. Bodily emotion management involves changing the physical signs to generate desired feeling. For example, a person can take constant deep breathes to maintain calmness.
Emotional work that is expressive entails changing non-verbal cues or expressions to transform inner emotions. For instance, an individual may attempt to smile to indicate happiness. Workers come across emotion management when their feelings do not coincide with a particular occasion. According to Hochschild (8), when managers develop emotional management it generates situations where emotion work can be exchanged in the job area. Work that involves emotional labor requires face-to-face interactions, the worker may introduce an emotional condition to the client, or allows the boss to exercise a certain degree of control or authority over the emotional aspects of the employees.
Hochschild (18) looks at the emotional labor involved in the airline sector. Flight attendants deliver an emotional experience to their customers. Hence, they must master the ability to suppress emotions of anger, annoyance, or irritation as well as deference feelings. Another example of a job that needs emotional labor and management is wait staffing. The wait staff has a sense of subordination to the buyers. In their work, they come across people with different personalities, values, and backgrounds. The wait staff thus has to regulate their emotions depending on the particular customers they are serving. Since the employers cannot strictly regulate the activities of the waiters, they are expected to manage their feelings by themselves. Once, they learn how to control their emotions, the wait staff obtains precedence over the customers.
Ronai and Ellis’s Reading
Erotic dancing can be classified as a confidence sport or game that relies heavily on emotional labor. The dancers are expected to suppress and display certain feelings to acquire financial inducements. The individuals counterfeit the expression of intimacy to benefit the clients and themselves. In the study conducted by Ronai and Ellis (277), the strippers who perform in club stages act out for the tips. They ensure that they strike eye contact with the customers to indicate interest in them. The dancers are also allowed to offer personal or private dances to people for extra money. The dances are a source of income for the participants; hence, they do everything in their power to secure their jobs by incorporating emotional labor into the activities they undertake.
The importance of emotional labor in erotic dancing is to make the customers feel special, important, desirable, and sexy enough to request for personal acts. The sexually charged expressions and looks should seem genuine since to purchase the dancers, the men have to feel that they are interested and attracted to them. The eye contact should be convincing and the smile should be believable. The aspect is specifically the case for the individuals who are regular customers because they present an essential source of payment for the individual dancers. In addition to expressing genuine emotions while dancing, the dancers are supposed to suppress or control their emotions while interacting with the customers (Ronai and Ellis, 287).
The dancers should not consider feelings such as boredom or unattractiveness as well as various aspects of the clients’ lives. The condition is critical in case the dancers have children or are married. The two attributes can hinder the opportunities for the dancers to appear sensual and sexy. Emotional labor also plays a fundamental role in regulating the feelings of the customers or managing interactions to ensure that they remain within their constraints to prevent risky occurrences. According to Ronai and Ellis (296), the dancing activities may appear like economic transactions but they are still psychological particularly for the clients. The job also has emotional costs such as offensive actions, rejection, and stigmatization.
Ronai and Ellis (296) are keen to highlight that stripping may pay well for a service duty, but the costs can sometimes be extreme. The dancers maintain the standards women are held in the society that values females based on their seductiveness and attractiveness. The aspect may not fade away anytime soon regardless of feminist remarks. The dancers acquire money, attention, and validation for their displays with the belief that they are simply doing what every woman out there does only slightly more. Hence, they continue to apply emotional management to obtain the benefits involved in stripping at the expense of costs of the loss of dignity and reputation.
Works Cited
Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkley: University of California Press, 1983.
Ronai, Carol and Ellis, Carolyn. Turn-ons for Money: Interactional Strategies of the Table Dancer. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18: 3, 1989.
