‘I Can't Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity,Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’

The growth of the ‘service economy’ has coincided with the large‐scale detachment from the labour market of low‐skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low‐skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry‐level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working‐class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low‐skilled service work as a future source of employment.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

The Art of Pacifying an Aggressive Client: ‘Feminine’ Skills and Preventing Violence in Caring Work

This article explores the complex interconnection between gender and emotion in the context of client‐perpetrated violence at work, focusing on interviews with and writings by Finnish nurses and social workers to discuss the ‘feminine’ emotional skills that are supposed to prevent violence. The social formation of these skills is analysed with the concept ‘emotional habitus’: emotional skills derive from the socially acquired disposition to manage emotions according to the gendered values of caring work. Emotional habitus, based on the internalized, second‐nature sense of emotional management, is shown to both persuade and enable employees to use emotional skills as assets for negotiating violence. This article discusses the potentiality for active agency enabled by skilful emotional management in violence prevention, bearing in mind the gender inequalities and internal contradictions connected to the social formation and practice of those skills.     

We’re Decent People: Constructing and Managing Family Identity in Rural Working‐Class Communities

Using grounded theory methodology, I establish family identity management as an important type of invisible work that connects women's household‐based domestic activities with community members’ perceptions and treatment of them and their family members. Detailed observations of household routines and family interactions, as well as in‐depth interviews with working‐class women living in two rural trailer park communities, provide insight into the meanings women assign to this labor, and their motivations for performing this work. I describe the strategies that women use to accomplish the work, examine how the work supports family life and child development, and explain how the residential environment influences the organization and accomplishment of this work.     

Working‐Class Jobs and New Parents' Mental Health

Little research has explored linkages between work conditions and mental health in working‐class employed parents. The current study aims to address this gap, employing hierarchical linear modeling techniques to examine how levels of and changes in job autonomy, job urgency, supervisor support, and coworker support predicted parents' depressive symptoms in a sample of 113 dual‐earner couples interviewed five times across the transition to parenthood. Increases in job autonomy and decreases in job urgency predicted fewer depressive symptoms in fathers at 1 year postpartum. For mothers, coworker support predicted fewer depressive symptoms, and supervisor support mitigated the negative effects of job urgency on depressive symptoms. Higher work hours coupled with low job urgency predicted declines in mothers' depressive symptoms across the first year of parenthood. Our findings suggest that interventions that lead to greater autonomy, less job urgency, and more supportive work relations may enhance employee well‐being among working‐class families.     

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender,Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.     

Beyond ‘anti‐smacking’: challenging parental violence and coercion

The anti‐smacking lobby concentrates on persuading parents not to smack and persuading the government to prohibit smacking by law. There is much evidence that smacking children is unnecessary and dangerous, and yet smacking continues to be widely practised and accepted in Britain. Our literature review found two underlying reasons for this contradiction: beliefs that children are ‘human becomings’ rather than full human beings and support for ‘parents’ rights' over children's human rights. We suggest that the anti‐smacking lobby's important work will have limited effect until it tackles these two issues, and make comparisons with debates on domestic violence against women to illustrate our argument. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

More than ‘information provider’ and ‘counselor’: Constructing and negotiating roles and identities of nurses in genetic counseling sessions

This paper contributes to research on genetic counseling by exploring the complexity of this activity from the angle of identity construction. We argue that an analysis of the processes through which healthcare providers construct and negotiate their roles and identities in these encounters may contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of genetic counseling. Drawing on more than 150 video‐recorded genetic counseling encounters between nurses and clients in Hong Kong, we illustrate that the discursive processes involved in the construction of the nurses' identities are complex, overlapping and at times contradictory as the nurses respond to the (sometimes) competing norms and expectations of their institution, their clients and their own. They manage to solve these tensions by drawing on the roles traditionally assigned to nurses in these encounters such as information provider and counselor, as well as creating the new roles of co‐decision maker and cultural broker/mediator.     

‘From awareness to practice’: children,domestic violence and child welfare

This paper traces the development of social care practice in relation to child witnesses of domestic violence. It suggests that this development has been dominated by subsuming the needs of these children into a child protection process. The paper outlines how this has led to significant (but often unclear) legal and policy initiatives which have failed, as yet, to be translated into practice. The paper argues that there are a number of important reasons why child witnesses of domestic violence should not always be assumed to need the response of a child protection system and that a future practice, legal and policy response should be based on a wider understanding of their needs. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Violence,self-discipline and modernity: beyond the ‘civilizing process’

Norbert Elias's writings on the development of self-constraint and its relationship to state formation are examined in the light of anthropological and historical critiques of his arguments and data. It is argued that state formation should not be seen as essential to self-discipline; that Elias's view of the development of self-constraint rests on a limited reading of the historical evidence on medieval personality and behaviour; and that many other aspects of the history of European society apart from ‘lengthening chains of interdependency’, such as bureaucracy and individuality, should be examined in order to explain modern self-discipline.     

Shame and the city – ‘looting’, emotions and social structure

The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological‐situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame‐rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not have a theory of violence in itself but treats the connections between shame‐rage and violence as largely self‐evident. While emotions such as shame have agental properties, as Scheff and others argue, these need to be situated within structural and cultural conditions that are likely to evoke shame. Moreover, to develop Scheff's approach further, violence needs to be understood as being communicative and invoking normative justifications, which mediate the effects of shame‐rage. This analysis is developed with reference to recent instances of collective disorder, especially the English riots in August 2011, which is based on published research and media accounts from participants. The acquisition of consumer goods through ‘looting’ was public performance in spaces where a ‘moral holiday’ permitted a brief revaluation of the social order. Through this example the article shows how an underlying configuration of inequality, exclusion and shame coalesced into events in which the violence was a form of performative communication. This articulated ‘ugly feelings’ that invoked normative justification for participation, at least at the time of the disturbances. The discussion provides an integrated account of structural‐emotional conditions for violence combined with the dynamics of situated actions within particular spaces. It aims to do two things – to provide a framework for analysing the structural and affective bases for violence and to offer a nuanced understanding of ‘violence’ with reference to public disorder.     

The hostile environment,Brexit, and ‘reactive‐’ or ‘protective transnationalism’

The ‘reactive transnationalism hypothesis’ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property ‘back home'. While this represents an example of ‘reactive transnationalism', we argue that ‘protective transnationalism’ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work.     

Claiming Competence: Biographical Work among Victim‐Advocates and Counselors

Advocates and counselors at agencies that assist victims of domestic violence and sexual assault argue that they are especially suited to help their clients develop safe and practical strategies to protect themselves from further abuse. Yet the backstage of these agencies can depict a reality of confusion, doubt, and sometimes fear—especially when clients’ cases do not go according to plan. Data collected from in‐depth interviews and participant observation over fourteen months show how advocates and counselors engaged in “biographical work” (Gubrium and Holstein 2000) to construct coherent and consistent narratives as competent service providers in the aftermath of their clients’ unanticipated outcomes. Calling on different discursive strategies accessible to them according to their position within the agency, both groups were able to interpret negative results as beyond their responsibility. However, the counselor's rhetoric of “professionalism” proved more effective in this regard compared with the advocates’ “empowerment.”     

Gender,Work, and Intimate Violence: Men's Occupational Violence Spillover and Compensatory Violence

Researchers have rarely studied the effects of occupations on intimate violence, only occasionally distinguishing between blue‐collar and white‐collar work, and generally finding higher rates of reported abuse in the former group. This research incorporates ideas from feminist, work‐family, and power or resource theories to examine the potential effects of occupations on men's violence toward wives and cohabiting female partners. Data from the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) were analyzed using logistic regression techniques. Hypotheses related to occupational spillover and compensation were tested with results suggesting that men in physically violent, female‐dominated, professional specialty, and dangerous occupations are more likely to use violence against female partners, net of other commonly hypothesized predictors. The findings suggest that more detailed occupational data should be collected in future intimate violence research.     

‘It's Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical findings contribute to the sex‐as‐labour debate and add to the sociological literature regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Grounding the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emotional labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a self‐protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain clientele. Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prostitution under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of conforming to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural ideals of the male client.     

‘Between authenticity and pretension’: parents', pupils' and young professionals' negotiations of minority ethnic middle‐class identity

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, ‘middle‐class’ individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle‐class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. ‘Authentic’ middle‐classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle‐class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘pretension’ and ‘misrecognition’.