In a section inDas Kapitalentitled “The Working Day,” Karl Marx examines depositions submitted in 1863 to the Children’s Employment Commission in England. One deposition was given by the mother of a child laborer in a wallpaper factory: “When he was seven years old I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day. . . . I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked,...

One day at Delta’s Stewardess Training Center an instructor scanned the twenty-five faces readied for her annual Self-Awareness Class set up by the company in tandem with a refresher course in emergency procedures required by the Federal Aviation Administration. She began: “This is a class on thought processes, actions, and feelings. I believe in it. I have to believe in it, or I couldn’t get up here in front of you and be enthusiastic.” What she meant was this: “Being a sincere person, I couldn’t say one thing to you and believe in another. Take the fact of my sincerity...

We all do a certain amount of acting. But we may act in two ways. In the first way, we try to change how we outwardly appear. As it is for the people observed by Erving Goffman, the action is in the body language, the put-on sneer, the posed shrug, the controlled sigh. This is surface acting.¹ The other way is deep acting. Here, display is a natural result of working on feeling; the actor does not try toseemhappy or sad but rather expresses spontaneously, as the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski urged, a real feeling that has been...

Since feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance toward it is one of culture’s most powerful tools for directing action.¹ How do we sense these scripts or, as I shall call them, feeling rules? In this chapter we discuss the various ways in which all of us identify a feeling rule and the ways in which we discover that we are out of phase with it—ways which include noting the duration, strength, time, and placement of a feeling. We explore the areas of love, hate, grief, and jealousy, to which these private rules apply....

All of us try to feel, and pretend to feel, but we seldom do so alone. Most often we do it when we exchange gestures or signs of feeling with others. Taken together, emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange make up our private emotional system. We bow to each other not only from the waist but from the heart. Feeling rules set out what is owed in gestures of exchange between people. They enable us to assess the worth of an outward tear or an inward attempt to feel sad for the Miss Mallons in our lives. Looking at...

When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face? When worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of service work, what can a person learn about herself from her feelings? And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile...

The corporate world has a toe and a heel, and each performs a different function: one delivers a service, the other collects payment for it. When an organization seeks to create demand for a service and then deliver it, it uses the smile and the soft questioning voice. Behind this delivery display, the organization’s worker is asked to feel sympathy, trust, and good will. On the other hand, when the organization seeks to collect money for what it has sold, its worker may be asked to use a grimace and the raised voice of command. Behind this collection display the...

More emotion management goes on in the families and jobs of the upper classes than in those of the lower classes. That is, in the class system, social conditions conspire to make it more prevalent at the top. In the gender system, on the other hand, the reverse is true: social conditions make it more prevalent, and prevalent in different ways, for those at the bottom—women. In what sense is this so? And why?

Both men and women do emotion work, in private life and at work. In all kinds of ways, men as well as women get into...

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that personality was becoming a form of capital he was writing about eighteenth-century Paris, long before there were stewardess training schools and long before the arts of bill collecting were standardized and mass produced.¹ If Rousseau could sign on as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines in the second half of the twentieth century, he would doubtless be interested in learning justwhosecapital a worker’s feelings are and justwhois putting this capital to work. He would certainly see that although the individual personality remains a “medium of competition,” the competition is no longer...