Emotional Labor

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild first introduced the phrase “emotional labor” in 1983 from her famous book, The Managed Heart. (Steinberg and Figart 1999, pp561) Steinberg and Figart also implies that this concept was built up by the interview of flight attendant of Delta Air Lines, which specifically emphasize on the incumbents who provides relational rather than the task-based area of work in the service economy. Without doubts, Arlie Hochschild’s contributions to sociological theories are significant, which provided a foundation for people to study and research the cases and issues related to interactions in daily life. She founded the famous emotional study and clarified the elements of emotional labor in the service economy. Hochschild later put effort on the work and family issues, which provided contemporary expressions of work and family have mixed and reversed themselves in their significance and meaning in people’s conception. The scholarly influence of the work of Hochschild is significant, by incomputable citations in sociological study. However, her work still contains a lots of conception issues. However, since her study is fresh in sociological theory, there is still a lack of theories and works to support her perspectives. Nevertheless, this paper will attempt to put effort for a critical analysis of Hochschild’s theory and evaluate the influences of her work to sociological theory. Firstly, the paper will list out the key concepts and ideas that have been comprised in Hochschild’s theory. The second part will carry out the major influences of Hochschild’s thesis, which will provide a clear view on how her thesis affect other aspects of studies. The third part will list out the critisms of Hochschild’s thesis, which might bring mistakenly conception to other academics who interested in interaction issues. Finally, there will be a conclusion drawn in the end of the paper.

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