ABSTRACT
Sociologists have increasingly recognised that people have emergent identities rather than fixed and relatively unchanging personalities. Work orientations need to be understood in relationship to people's self-identities and the social-identities and personas that are discursively available to them as they go about their personal identity work. Angst and emotion come into every kind of work, whether it be the unhappy experiences of people working in 'dead end jobs' or the relatively privileged work of managers. In an increasing proportion of jobs people are required to engage in emotional labour and, indeed, aesthetic labour. But people's emotions, experiences and satisfactions are not influenced by work in isolation. The emotion management of the staff was influenced 'by emotion rules deriving from prior socialization processes and experiences, the wider organization, the unit manager, colleagues, customers, and self-regulation, rather than by explicit emotion rules acquired through training'.
