Reflections on The Managed Heart
What are our feelings trying to tell us?
“What am I really feeling?” This deceivingly simple question is how Arlie Russell Hochschild ends The Managed Heart. Hochschild is widely recognized as coining the term “emotional labour”, which she fleshed out in this book; first published in 1983, this book continues to become more relevant with the rise of the service sector, and pressure to secure “human” jobs.
Why isn’t it obvious what we are feeling anymore? Hochschild says that to do “emotional labor”, we have to dig deep to “induce or suppress feeling”, and express it in ways that make others feel cared for and safe.1 And by digging deep, it becomes less and less clear what we authentically feel and what is connected to our performance of emotional labour.
For example, if one has to smile frequently at work, and smiling signals your brain to release feel-good chemicals, how is one to know if/when one is really happy? And what if one has to smile at work when one feels disrespected, undervalued, or humiliated? The ruptures that arise within us have real impacts on our sense of self, physical health, and wellbeing.
Hochschild’s point is that our feelings, our real feelings, are trying to tell us something. What are yours trying to tell you? How might those messages help us transform our workplaces?
Notes
- Hochschild AR. 2012. The Managed heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. P. 7.
