The Alienated Heart: Hochschild's 'emotional labour' thesis and the anticapitalist politics of alienation.(Arlie Russell Hochschild)(Critical essay)

Introduction: A very political theory

It is difficult to overestimate the enduring influence of the emotional labour thesis found in Arlie Russell Hochschild's seminal work, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (2003 [1983]). Debates on emotional labour continue to turn on this pioneering contribution (Bolton, 200y), and yet it is an unlikely candidate to have won such a high profile. Published in the harsh, neoconservative climate of Reagan's USA, the book resolutely exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the expanding demand for the commodification of emotions in the form of customer service. Thus, The Managed Hearts core arguments and political conclusions are highly relevant to today's anticapitalist movement with its slogan of 'our world is not for sale', underpinned by its damning analyses of neoliberalism, corporate power and consumerism.

Since The Managed Heart, Hochschild's emotional labour thesis has spawned an immense range of studies that reach far into the world of work beyond her original study of flight attendants and debt collectors. These, which Bolton (2005: 53) has referred to pejoratively as an 'emotional labour bandwagon', include studies of nurses, Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists, holiday representatives, call-centre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others (see Steinberg & Figart, 1999; Bolton, 2005). While these studies vary in the degree to which they follow Hochschild in her explicit condemnation of emotional labour, they tend to contain an implicit acceptance of its exploitative and subordinating nature. Some have extended Hochschild's thesis to include additional dimensions, as in Witz et al.'s (2003) addition of aesthetic labour, which stresses the increasing commodification of service workers' appearance and sexuality as 'display'. Most notable has been the development of a feminist dimension to emotional labour debates, which centres on the socially reproduced, gendered commodification of emotion in organisations, and on the related feminisation of most service work (see Fineman, 2005; Colley, 2006; Lewis & Simpson, 2007). Thus James (1989, 1992), in her pioneering studies of cancer nurses' emotional labour, developed a feminist orientation in her analysis of the source, maintenance and commodification of compassion in the 'caring workplace'. (1)

What underpins Hochschild's politicised critique in The Managed Heart (2) is the pivotal role played in it by her application of Marx's alienation theory. This is borne out by the central argument of some of Hochschild's critics, who seek to blunt her critique by rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of the alienation workers suffer through the commodification of their emotions. They argue instead that customer service interactions are double-edged in that they possess the potential to be subjectively satisfying as well as distressing for the worker (Wouters, i989; Tolich, 1993; Korczynski, 2002). In essence, they reject the notion that the experience of having one's emotions commodified is intrinsically alienating. Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing movement towards the rejection of 'emotional labour' as a meaningful category of wage labour (see Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Bolton, 2005; Lewis & Simpson, 2007), on the basis that not all emotions are commodified in the labour process, and that Hochschild's application of alienation in this context implies that workers are rendered powerless. Consequently, Hochschild's 'emotional labour' theory is now challenged by a growing usage of Bolton's (2005) alternative, largely depoliticised thesis on 'emotion management' in organisations. This argues that emotion workers exercise a significant degree of emotional free choice because of the very limited extent to which their emotions can be commodified. Therefore, they enjoy a largely unalienated experience of the labour process. To date it has been Hochschild's opponents, rather than those who wish to build on her thesis, who have recognised her understanding and use of alienation as pivotal, and who have thereby subjected it to sustained criticism (e.g. Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Bolton, 2005).

Although it has been condemned as absolutist, Hochschild's application of alienation theory is nevertheless not thorough. (3) She restricts her explicit theorisation to the two of Marx's 0975 [1844]) four dimensions that are specific to the workplace: product alienation and labour process alienation. The first deals with workers' loss of control over and ownership of their labour product, and the second with the removal of their control over the labour process. However, while alienation has its source at the point of production, Marx's remaining two dimensions relate to the wider corrosive effects of alienation in society, and should not be separated from the first two (Yuill, 2005). These dimensions human nature alienation and fellow beings alienation (including commodity fetishism)--deal with the way the suffusion of the commodity form and market relations through society severely distort our self-knowledge, social relations and understanding of the world. While these dimensions are occasionally implicit in Hochschild's analysis, she does not explore them as wider social dimensions of alienation contributing to and compounding the direct commodification of workplace emotions. In not doing so, she stops short of theorising alienation as generic to capitalist society (Meszaros, 2005 [1970]; Billig, 1999). This effectively localises the existence of alienation to workplace social relations. Furthermore, The Managed Heart is devoid of an explicit class analysis. This undermines Hochschild's argument in explaining individual and collective responses, including resistance by emotional labourers. She compounds this weakness with an insufficiently dialectical analysis (Rees, 1998) whereby she is unable to capture the complexity and potential of contradictory dimensions in the emotional labour process (Sturdy, 098; Taylor, 1998). Thus Hochschild inadequately theorises the way workers are shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capitalism (Lukacs, 1974; Heller, 1978).

The combination of under-theorisation and theoretical gaps generates weaknesses in her overall thesis that leave it open to more valid criticisms than partisan claims of absolutism. In particular, Hochschild is criticised for her tendency to dichotomise the distinction between the private self and the commodified public self (Wouters, 089; Barbalet, 2001; Bolton, 2005); and for overestimating the degree of managerial ownership and control of workers' emotions (Ashworth & Humphreys, 093; Barbalet, 2001 Bolton, 2005; Theodosius, 2006), as a consequence of which she presents frontline workers as 'crippled actors' (Bolton & Boyd, 2003).

Whatever the weaknesses in Hochschild's thesis, it is neverthless 'one that clearly politicises our understanding of emotion at work' (Fineman, 2005: 6). What follows is a critical defence of Hochschild's emotional labour thesis at a time when there are growing efforts to reject its Marxian core of alienation theory, and to diminish its political content. Accordingly, this article aims to defend the thesis as a valuable contribution and a significant building block for a still thin Marxist debate on emotional labour. (4) It begins with an exposition of Hochschild's thesis, followed by an analysis of the 'emotional labour' concept against each of Marx's four dimensions of alienation. Central to this assessment is the question of the adequacy of her theorisation of worker's resistance arising from the alienation of emotional labour, and how it can be strengthened and developed within the classical Marxist tradition (see Rees, 1998).