Winyann and Affective Performance among Female Thai Flight Attendants

Building on Hochschild's concept of emotional work and Sarah Ahmed's theory of affective economy, this paper examines the ways in which female Thai flight attendants mobilise winyann—a Buddhist notion of soul, but applied to airline professionalism—to perform their duties and manage work-related crises. Ethnographic evidence shows that Buddhist concepts of soul and suffering are used to transcend difficult situations in the air, paradoxically creating value for the corporation while still allowing women to experience personal integrity through embodied performances of affect in their professional lives.     

The Exchange of Aesthetics: Women's Work and ‘The Gift’

Drawing on empirical research data on the work of flight attendants, this paper will explore Marcel Mauss's theory of ‘gift’ exchange relations, with particular reference to his concern with the ‘exchange of aesthetics’ (Mauss 1954), as an analytical model which may contribute to our understanding of ‘women's work’ in contemporary Western societies, of which, we shall argue, the work of female flight attendants is a notable example. It will begin by locating the authors' analytical and theoretical concerns with ‘women's work’ within the context of recent empirical research. It will then go on to outline briefly a Maussian model of exchange relations and to identify the potential utility of this analytical model for the study of women's work. This paper then goes on to offer an analytical account of empirical research into the work of flight attendants and to analyse the ways in which airline service provision constitutes a critical case study of women's work, certain elements of which involve a form of ‘gift’ exchange relations which operate, not as an alternative to, but inside — and in the interests of — commodity exchange relations. Finally, in the light of recent feminist work, this paper will conclude by suggesting the wider implications of this analytical model for the study of gender and work.     

Sexual Harassment of Women Working as Room Attendants within 5‐Star Hotels

Given the gendered power relations and the isolated nature of women hotel room attendants' working environments, guest‐initiated sexual harassment experienced by room attendants is a significant, under‐investigated problem. This study of women attendants' experiences of sexual harassment was conducted in 5‐star hotels located on the Gold Coast — a notable tourism destination — of Queensland, Australia. Adopting a socialist–feminist critical theory epistemological perspective, the study used a qualitative constructivist grounded theory methodology. The research reveals the pervasiveness of sexual harassment experienced by women hotel room attendants. In particular, this study illuminates the varied forms, meanings and consequences of sexual harassment in a particular organizational context. In focusing on the interacting effects of the gendered nature of the hotel workplace and the hotel workplace culture, the near‐complete ‘normalization’ of sexual harassment within the hotels is revealed. This outcome is a source of considerable concern, with implications for the industry, for employment relations institutions and for public policy.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

‘Who's Got the Look?’ Emotional,Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes.     

Group Couples' Intervention to Improve Sexual Health Among Married Women in a Low‐Income Community in Mumbai,India

This article describes the design and implementation of a group couples' intervention focused on improving women's sexual health as a component of a multilevel community, clinical, and counseling intervention project conducted in association with a gynecological service in a municipal urban health center in a low‐income community in Mumbai, India. The group couples' intervention involved four single‐gender and two mixed‐gender sessions designed to address the dynamics of the marital relationship and establish a more equitable spousal relationship as a means to improve women's sexual and marital health. Involvement of men presented a major challenge to couple's participation. For those couples that did participate, qualitative findings revealed significant changes in couple and family relations, sexual health knowledge, and emotional well‐being.     

The Role of Social Context in Students' Anticipatory Reaction to a “Fighting Word”

Abstract

On May 11, 1996, ValuJet flight 592 crashed in the Florida Everglades killing all 105 passengers and five crew members. The technical cause of the crash was a fire that erupted after one or more oxygen generators exploded in a cargo compartment. Governmental investigations have indicated that both ValuJet and SabreTech (an airline maintenance company) failed to comply with a host of regulations concerning the presentation, storage, and transportation of hazardous materials by air. More generally, however, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been found to be negligent in its oversight of airlines by not adequately monitoring the general safety of commercial aircraft as well as by its refusal to institute safeguards and guidelines that would have protected passengers and crews from crashes like that of flight 592. This paper follows the tradition of state-corporate crime theorizing and research by identifying the organizational and structural forces that contributed to the ValuJet crash. This includes an examination of the FAA's contradictory roles as both regulator and supporter of the airline industry, as well as a discussion of both ValuJet's and SabreTech's violations of federal air safety regulations.     

More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives. Organizations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non‐humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some non‐human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organizations. More‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organizational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalized others, human and non‐human.     

Lifestyle, harassment at work and self-assessed health of female flight attendants, nurses and teachers

Health-related lifestyle, harassment at work, and self-assessed health of female flight attendants in comparison to that of female nurses and female primary school teachers were surveyed. A higher proportion of flight attendants than nurses or teachers were smokers, 26% vs. 15% and 17% respectively; and consumed alcohol at least once a week, 40% vs. 21% and 16%. Repeated sexual harassment at work was more common among the flight attendants, 31% vs. 8% and 4%; whereas bullying, physical violence and threats were less prevalent among the flight attendants (12%) than among nurses (19%). Flight attendants were on average somewhat taller, but weighed on average less, 63.8 kg vs. 72.4 kg and 72.7 kg respectively. Repeated exposure to sexual harassment, bullying, violence and threats was related to less physical and psychological well-being in all the groups. Teachers scored on average significantly lower than did the flight attendants on general health and physical well-being, while nurses did not.     

Introduction to Roundtable on Global Woman

For this roundtable discussion of Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild's anthology, Global Woman, the editors of SGS asked five psychoanalytic thinkers to comment on the collection. That highly important volume has as its theme the global transfer from the Third World to the First World of female labor forces that work in the sex trade or become mail-order brides, maids, nannies, and other kinds of caretakers. Ehrenreich and Hochschild then respond to the psychoanalytic essays. The introduction discusses some of the themes raised both in the book and in the responses. It highlights some of the places where a psychoanalytic and a sociological view complement each other and places where they might clash. The roundtable raises two important questions: what can psychoanalysis contribute to understanding the intrapsychic and interpersonal dislocations wrought by globalization; and what is globalization's effect on the practice of psychoanalysis?     

Emotional labour in the classroom: A psychoanalytic perspective

This article explores the nature of the emotional labour that teachers perform in their daily professional lives. It reviews the work of the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in order to assess how applicable her account of the nature of emotional labour is to the world of the classroom. It suggests that her account focuses on emotional labour as exploitative, and therefore ignores its rewarding dimensions. It argues that the Object Relations psychoanalytic tradition offers a richer account of emotional life in general, and emotional labour in particular. Object Relations theory is applied to describe the emotional labour of the teacher. Four observations of teachers at work in their classrooms are presented and analysed. The article aims to show how the unconscious dynamics of recognition and mis-recognition underpin success or failure at effective teaching and learning in the classroom.     

Local Labour Markets,Organizations and the Distribution of Family‐responsive Benefits in the USA

Family‐responsive benefits have important consequences for workers balancing work–family demands. Previous research on the distribution of family‐responsive benefits has focused on intra‐organizational determinants or general labour market characteristics, at the expense of local labour market factors. We address this deficiency by analysing a unique random sample of US work establishments nested in their local labour markets. Specifically, we ask whether, net of establishment and local labour market characteristics, women's local labour market standing influences the prevalence of family‐responsive benefits. The results indicate that women's labour market status, measured with a composite of occupational gender integration, aggregate educational attainment and percentage of women in managerial roles, has a strong positive net effect on the prevalence of family‐responsive workplace benefits. However, no significant interaction between women's status and establishment‐level characteristics was found. Our findings highlight the importance of local labour markets in the distribution of family‐responsive benefits across organizations.     

Reli(e)ving the Past: Emotion Work in the Holocaust's Second Generation

Although most studies of the Second Generation typically account for their social psychological orientations by relying on psychiatric and psychological models, I propose an alternative “listening” to this cohort. I analyze in‐depth interviews by adopting Hochschild's insights on emotion work as a sensitizing framework and suggest that (1) four interrelated types of “deep acting” they continuously feel compelled to perform can account for the psychological “symptoms” commonly attributed to them and (2) these types of deep acting constitute adjustments and reactions to problematic emotional dynamics characterizing their survivor families. I conclude with a discussion of the reciprocal effects of this emotion work.     

From Transgression to Suppression: Implications of Moral Values and Societal Norms on Emotional Labour

This article endeavours to develop a conceptual perspective of moral values and societal norms, and how they impact on emotion regulation within employment contexts. The article draws on social psychology and emotional labour literature to explore the concept of contextual emotional labour. I argue that the conflicting requirements of one's societal and employment contexts may require one to transgress one's moral values to fulfil job requirements. I also argue that it is important to examine the aversive state(s) that may follow one's transgression and how this is managed in the workplace.     

Chinese Male Peasant Workers and Shifting Masculine Identities in Urban Workspaces

A key feature of China's internal rural–urban migration is the transformation of work from a rural‐based agricultural sector to urban‐based industrial and service sectors. This article critically examines the interplay between urban work and accompanying social relations in the workplace (that is, service and low‐skilled manual jobs) and the (re)construction of male peasant workers' subjectivities and identity formation. The qualitative data from the men's life histories suggest that familial gender practices, conceptualized as an appropriation of the traditional Confucian ‘father–son’ relationship, are of importance in shaping the men's occupationally located shifting identities in traditional urban ‘female’ jobs. This exploratory study aims to examine complex and multilayered accounts of rural–urban labour migration, in terms of how the men accommodate themselves to the city, involving both material constraints (structure) and creative cultural practices (agency). Their biographical transformations are located within wider socioeconomic and political transformations associated with China's current modernization project, of which they are a major constitutive component.     

Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.     

The gentle exercise of male power in rural Argentina

Why do women choose their own subordination, and how are their choices linked to structural characteristics of society and to conceptions and ideologies of gender? These are the central questions in this paper based on fieldwork in Santa Cecilia, a farm community in the northern part of Santa Fe province in Argentina. It portrays how power is exercised in face‐to‐face interaction between men and women, on the basis of the existing sexual division of labour in the household and in society at large, and on men's privileged access to crucial resources (material as well as organizational and ideological). It is significant that men's control over resources and women is not associated with conflict and grievances, but is based on shared values. It is argued that masculinity is hegemonic, and the paper aims at revealing the processes whereby hegemonic masculinity “naturalizes” gender inequality.     

Workers with disabilities and the challenges of emotional labour

This paper explores the implications of emotional labour for workers with disabilities, drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 59 respondents who had disabilities and who worked in service sector occupations. The analysis illustrates that employer demands for emotional labour may prove difficult for workers with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric diagnoses, learning difficulties and physical impairments. Analysis also points to the ways in which the non‐accommodating nature of many workplaces often forces workers with disabilities to engage in ‘extra’ emotion work in the interests of fitting in and concealing/ downplaying their impairments.     

‘A great job and a family’: work narratives and the work and family interaction

This article investigated how work narratives of dual-earner families are materially and symbolically configured in discourses of reconciliation of work and home life. Following critical studies of the work–family interaction, this research takes into consideration symbolic and social structures and tries to look into the interrelation of factors such as job resources, job satisfaction, levels of autonomy with the self-esteem and sense of ‘self’ which parents derive from their paid work. Hochschild's concept of ‘emotional culture’ is used to explore how parents' experience of work is intertwined to their occupational groups and how it is associated with different narratives of work–family interaction. This study is conducted through qualitative methods, using in-depth semi-structured interviews on a sample of 27 dual-earner families. The data collected are composed of in-depth accounts that are then examined through the method of narrative analysis. The data indicate that, for divergent occupational levels, work generates different material and symbolic resources, which account for divergent narratives of work and home. The sociological analysis of occupational levels with the associated emotional culture of work and family then provides an exploratory model for understanding the links between social class and work–family interaction.     

Using Emotional Labor to Create and Maintain Relationships in Service Interactions

This article investigates the complex relationships between service workers and customers in both luxury and nonluxury retail settings. Though much of the sociological research on sales and service work concentrates on relatively low‐status positions, this research explores the importance of the service worker as expert and artisan. Using the concept of emotional labor introduced by Hochschild, this study examines whether emotional labor, in certain service and sales contexts, can be used to create and maintain relationships between employees and customers. This research suggests a more complete theoretical understanding of service work as well as practical policy implications applicable to such concerns as turnover and morale, training and orientation, and communication and supervisory strategies.