The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, was first published in 1983. A 20th Anniversary edition with a new afterword added by the author was published in 2003. It was reissued in 2012 with a new preface. It has been translated into German (Campus Press), Chinese (Laureate Books, Taipei, Taiwan), Japanese (Sekai Shisosha, Kyoto, Japan), Polish (Polish Scientific Publishers PWN), and French (La Découverte, 2017). Hochschild's text is seminal and scholars like Sarah J. Tracy and Stephen Fineman have expanded on her concept of emotional labor.
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, was first published in 1983. A 20th Anniversary edition with a new afterword added by the author was published in 2003. It was reissued in 2012 with a new preface. It has been translated into German (Campus Press), Chinese (Laureate Books, Taipei, Taiwan), Japanese (Sekai Shisosha, Kyoto, Japan), Polish (Polish Scientific Publishers PWN), and French (La Découverte, 2017). Hochschild's text is seminal and scholars like Sarah J. Tracy and Stephen Fineman have expanded on her concept of emotional labor.
I enjoyed reading this a lot. The use of feeling for one’s job is widespread, and the author analyses the consequences greatly: What does it mean when it is sold that you are not only smiling but that you “actually mean it”? – Not just the body (as the person who feeds the machine in a factory) is cashed in on, but also the very emotions of the person working. This does not only apply to friendly feelings; debt collectors also are valued for “actually meaning it”.
