Outline the two key models Hochschild draws upon for her work. Explain her emotion-management model being sure to define and differentiate between emotion work and emotional labor. Finally explain feeling rules and where they fit into her other concepts.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In developing her theory of emotions, Hochschild draws from two distinct approaches. The first, which she labels the “organismic model,” focuses on how emotions are rooted in an individual’s biological or psychological makeup. The second, the “interactional model,” stresses the role of social processes in shaping self-consciousness. The organismic model is derived primarily from the writings of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and William James (1842–1910). For Darwin emotive gestures—that is, emotional expressions—are largely universal, as we all can be traced to the same ancestral gene pool. For his part, Freud connects emotions to instinctual drives, namely Eros (love or creation) and Thanatos (death or destruction). Freud also assigns an important “signal function” to anxiety, a function that would become central to Hochschild’s theory of emotions. However, what Freud reserves primarily for anxiety, Hochschild extends to all emotions, arguing that the entire range of emotive experiences—from joy to sadness, pride to shame—serve as signals through which we fit our prior expectations to our present situation. The “interactional model” is expressed in the work of a number of figures including John Dewey (1859–1952), George Herbert Mead, Hans Gerth (1908–1978) and C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman. These theorists all share a conception of the individual as an active, conscious participant in the production and reproduction of social life—a view that provides a critical point of departure for Hochschild’s own emotionmanagement perspective. Emotions are viewed, instead, as intimately connected to our conscious perceptions and interpretations of the situations in which we are involved. Emotions are directly tied to behavior; they are experienced as the body physiologically readies itself to engage in action. In addition to providing an orientation toward action, emotions also possess a cognitive component in the form of a “signal function.” In this way, emotions spring from our attempts to reconcile our prior expectations with the actuality of events. In an important sense, we “do” emotions in the form of emotion work. This refers to efforts to alter (i.e., manage) the intensity or type of feelings one is experiencing. Emotion work involves attempts to either evoke particular feelings we want or think we should experience as well as attempts to suppress the experience of undesired feelings. Directly related to the notion of emotion work is emotional labor, in which one’s deep acting is sold for a wage. Thus, inner feelings are managed in order to produce an outward display as part of one’s job. Feeling rules are the shared, social (collectivist) conventions that determine what we should properly feel in a given situation (the “direction” of emotions), how intensely we should feel it (the “extent”), and how long we should feel (the “duration”) (2003:97). They form the taken-for-granted backdrop (nonrational) according to which we manage our emotions and assess the emotive expressions of others.