Arlie Hochschild Analysis

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Work Live or Live to Work?: Arlie Hochschild’s Theories on Labor With the job market becoming increasingly competitive, the interactions between an employee and their customers, clients, or colleagues continues to have a substantial impact on how successful they will be in their field of work. As the role of the employee changes, workers will be required to complete certain tasks that they may not have initially expected. Arlie Hochschild, one of the major sociologists associated with symbolic-interaction theory, speaks about the employee’s changing role. In her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild expands upon Karl Marx’s thoughts from Das Kapital by analyzing a unique conundrum that employees face when trying to balance emotion work with emotional labor. Whereas emotion work refers to the emotions expressed in our private lives amongst family and friends, emotional labor is the emotions one publicly displays that produce a positive state of mind in …show more content…
On the one hand, Hochschild’s analysis of the working conditions of flight attendants has inspired studies that examine the roles of nurses, retail workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists, and waiters. Additionally, theorists such as Anne Witz, Chris Warhurst, and Dennis Nickson have expanded upon Hochschild’s research, by coming up with aesthetic labor, which discusses the commodification of service workers’ appearance and sexuality as ‘display.’ However, other theorists have criticized Hochschild’s theory, believing that not all emotions are alienated and not all workers are powerless in how they can express themselves. In fact, in response to Hochschild’s theory, Sharon Bolton came up with the emotional management theory, which states that workers are able to freely manage their emotions because of the limited extent their emotions can be commodified (Brook,
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