ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the literature on emotion labor, from its coining in the early 1980s to the research it has spawned over the last several decades in a variety of fields, including education. To account for the processes by which individuals experience, monitor, assess, transform and/or maintain their emotions in response to social situations and norms, sociologist Arlie Hochschild first proposed emotion management. Hochschild proposed three techniques of emotion management: cognitive, bodily, and expressive. The chapter focuses on emotion management and its related ones: feeling rules, surface acting, deep acting, and, then, emotion labor, the term Hochschild proposed after the others. It also takes up modifications to and critiques of Hochschild's emotion-labor concepts, highlighting ones concerned with workplace identities as multiple and contested rather than fixed, that is, a poststructural approach to emotion labor. The chapter also contrasts structural and poststructural understandings of emotion labor.
