GGR328H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Emotional Labor, Precarity, Call Centre
Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017
GGR328H1
LECTURE 4
Interactive Service Work & Aesthetic Labour
LECTURE 4 OUTLINE
- What are interactive service jobs?
- Who gets interactive service jobs?
- What is the nature of work in the service sector?
- What are the possibilities for improving service work?
SERVICE JOBS
• 2 million workers in Canada make less than $15/hour
• increased Precarity
INTERACTIVE SERVICE OCCUPATIONS
• Central emphasis on face-to-face contact
• Activities providing customer service such as caring, communicating, serving, selling
• Ability to adopt certain habits, emotions, dispositions important in service work
What are these service jobs?
• Interactive service occupations
• Unique type of work – service sector is all about serving a customer
Ex. Call centre worker, face-to-face service worker in a mall or restaurant, personal care
worker, etc.
• These jobs involve communicating with and serving people, selling goods and services,
etc.
• Central emphasis on face-to-face contact
• Activities providing customer service such as caring, communicating, serving, selling
• Ability to adopt certain habits, emotions, dispositions important in service work
ARLIE HOSCHILD, THE MANAGED HEART (1983)
• EMOTIONAL LABOUR = staff learning to manage their emotions in order to project a
particular image of themselves and the organization they work for
• EMOTIONAL DISSONANCE = transmutation of private emotional sphere into public
realm
- Commercialization of feeling
- Increases potential for alienation
- Pretending deeply leads to an alteration of the self
- Emotional labour not simply staged performance of smiles, it is an achievement
of a mindful, feelingful self
• AESTHETIC LABOUR = embodied capacities and attributes that enable a worker to
look good and sound right for a job (Entwistle and Wissinger, 2010)
- Foregrounds embodiment
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Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017
- Service depends on “performative styles of the flesh”, as well as the manufacture
of feeling
- Can be conflicts between commodified body, lived body, and feelingful
environment of the self
- Need to consider combined effort of body/self in the production of workplace
identities
- Body as both an externalized object to be worked on by the self, as well as an
integral aspect of the self
- The effort to keep up appearances is emotional and physical
Who gets these service jobs?
• Many employers of service workers don’t care about the personalities of these workers
• It can be invasive to have to bring one’s private self into the public realm
- Commercialization of feeling
- Increases potential for alienation
- Pretending deeply leads to an alteration of self
- Emotional labour
- Aesthetic labour
***in personal work essay, can discuss emotional and aesthetic labour
• Getting service jobs is also often gendered
A FEMINIZATION OF WORK
• Women are more likely to work in interactive service jobs
• Led to a feminization of work (in congruence with the rise of the service sector)
a) Increasing rates of participation for women
b) Growth of occupations relying on attributes traditionally associated with femininity -
such as sociability, caring, and servicing
- Qualities seen as “natural”, but they are culturally constructed
- Greater emphasis on personality, body, dress, appearance in work
- In a range of jobs, men and women perform an aesthetics of femininity
Ex. Linda McDowell (feminist geographer), Capital Culture examined men in
high-level banking positions and how in the “old days” no one cared how the men
working in banks looked, but now that has transformed – men employed in banks
in London, England’s capital banking district have to buy their suits from the right
places, work out and have good bodies, and present themselves very well
- This poses a challenge to the ideas of Taylor – mind and body are not two
separate kinds of jobs – now, even the mindful jobs give greater importance to the
bodies
- Poses a challenge to disembodied rational worker
- Inseparability of bodily performance and product being sold
- Not all men are making the transition successfully
Ex. films Eight Mile and Fight Club (a lot of men are being left out in this service
work, and now young working-class men are finding it difficult to integrate into
both the low- and high-end service jobs, especially because they tend to challenge
masculinity)
• Linda McDowell (2009)
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Document Summary
Service jobs: 2 million workers in canada make less than /hour increased precarity. Interactive service occupations: central emphasis on face-to-face contact, activities providing customer service such as caring, communicating, serving, selling, ability to adopt certain habits, emotions, dispositions important in service work. Interactive service occupations: unique type of work service sector is all about serving a customer. Pretending deeply leads to an alteration of the self. Service depends on performative styles of the flesh , as well as the manufacture of feeling. Can be conflicts between commodified body, lived body, and feelingful environment of the self. Need to consider combined effort of body/self in the production of workplace identities. Body as both an externalized object to be worked on by the self, as well as an integral aspect of the self. The effort to keep up appearances is emotional and physical. Who gets these service jobs: many employers of service workers don"t care about the personalities of these workers.