ABSTRACT
Emotional labor has for decades been addressed in tourism studies and tourism management. Coined by Arlie Hochschild, the concept has been discussed in relation to tourism and hospitality service work and has predominantly been regarded as a clear-cut social interaction between employee and customer with an employer in the background. Emotional labor is something that has to be formalized in a certain way in order to be addressable from a managerial rationality. However, in contemporary capitalism, with the rise of neoliberalism, the experience economy and the sharing economy, the clear-cut interaction mentioned above does not apply to the same degree. The employee can just as well be his or her own employer, and at the same time find himself or herself regulated by mobile technologies and digital software characteristic of sharing economy platform arrangements. Emotional labor as a societal phenomenon needs to be rethought. To some degree this has been done in tourism studies, but this research is still in its infancy. In particular, there is a lack of more nuanced takes on emotional labor in the tourism sharing economy. This chapter offers such a take on emotional labor, highlighting the emotional labor of being an Airbnb host as a case.
