Trolley Dolly or Skilled Emotion Manager? Moving on from Hochschild's Managed Heart

Citation

Bolton SC & Boyd C (2003) Trolley Dolly or Skilled Emotion Manager? Moving on from Hochschild's Managed Heart. Work, Employment and Society, 17 (2), pp. 289-308. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017003017002004

Abstract
This article examines emotion in organizations and the emotion management skills organizational actors possess. While Hochschild's (1983) seminal work on emotional labour is perhaps one of the greatest contributions to our understanding of emotion in organizations, this article challenges key tenets of Hochschild's thesis and goes on to offer an evolved analysis of emotional labour and alternative conceptualizations of organizational emotionality. Using comparable data, this article depicts airline cabin crews as skilled emotion managers who are able to juggle and synthesize different types of emotion work dependent on situational demands. In addition, the capacity for cabin crews to resist and modify the demands of management and customers acts to further contradict Hochschild's claim regarding the 'transmutation' of feelings.

Keywords
cabin crew; emotional work; Hochschild

Journal
Work, Employment and Society: Volume 17, Issue 2

People

Professor Sharon Bolton

Emeritus Professor, Management, Work and Organisation