ABSTRACT
This chapter turns the attention to ‘affective labour’ in service work and state bureaucracies by taking Arlie Hochschild’s, The Managed Heart, as a starting point for a more detailed discussion of emotion management and emotion work in service professions of the market economy. The chapter elaborates on the book’s notion of affective labour, which emphasises the relational character and the connective, emancipatory potential of affectivity in ‘embodied capitalism’ as well as its exploitative dimensions. Our discussion of neoliberal changes of service work, such as flexibilization, precarisation, and the erosion of boundaries between work and private life, results in a critical reflection of governance and subjectivation at the workplace and its gender implications. The chapter examines affective labour and affective subjectivation of service workers in the private sector but also similar business-like transformations of affective work and processes of affective governmentality at state administrations. In conclusion, neoliberal affective subjectivation at the workplace generates precarious, but nonetheless competitive, entrepreneurial and gendered selves.
