Work that requires producing a prescribed feeling in others extracts a cost from the worker's own emotional life.
Hochschild's 1983 study of flight attendants trained to feel, not merely display, warmth toward passengers. Surface acting produces strain; deep acting produces a different problem, the loss of access to one's own feeling.
In practice
- A call-centre agent required to sound delighted for eight hours arrives home without access to their own mood.
- A nurse who must be calm through a shift of distress finds the calm has become automatic and the distress is deferred, not absent.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline