Emotional labor refers to the process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines. Hochschild's (1983) The Managed Heart ...introduced this concept and inspired an outpouring of research on this topic. This article reviews theory and research on emotional labor with a particular focus on its contributions to sociological understandings of workers and jobs. The sociological literature on emotional labor can be roughly divided into two major streams of research. These include studies of interactive work and research directly focused on emotions and their management by workers. The first uses emotional labor as a vehicle to understand the organization, structure, and social relations of service jobs, while the second focuses on individuals' efforts to express and regulate emotion and the consequences of those efforts. The concept of emotional labor has motivated a tremendous amount of research, but it has been much less helpful in providing theoretical guidance for or integration of the results generated by these bodies of work.
To manage the onslaught of continuously unfolding information in our complex environments, we adults are known to carve up our continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as ...event segmentation. This segmentation directly shapes how our everyday experiences are construed: content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state, which is then dropped after an event boundary. The greater accessibility of event-specific information has been shown to influence—at its most basic level—how information is processed and remembered. However, it is as yet unknown if accessibility is similarly influenced by event boundaries in children, who are still developing the working memory capacity and semantic knowledge thought to support event segmentation. Here, we tested seven- to nine-year-old children's and adults' recognition of objects experienced either within or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and faster to correctly recognize objects that last occurred within events versus across event boundaries. We, however, additionally observed an interaction such that children's access to recent experience was less influenced by event boundaries than adults'. Thus, while the spontaneous segmentation of complex events emerges by middle childhood, event structure shapes the active contents of children's minds less reliably than adults'.
Change is never linear, all-encompassing, or necessarily forward moving. In this essay, I explore the pace, prospects, and pathways for change in work, family, and gender at the societal and ...organizational levels. After a lengthy period of sustained progress, movement toward greater gender equality has slowed. This slowing has been accompanied by new cultural narratives about gender and gender inequality. These narratives have also penetrated organizations, which have their own change dynamics. Gender issues in the academy have received renewed attention in recent years as part of the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE initiative. Drawing from my own and others' research, I explore how academic leaders' narratives about work, family, and gender can slow or undermine change efforts. By deflecting responsibility for change to individual faculty, leaders' willingness, capacity, and resolve to act are weakened. Gender narratives are a central ingredient in the broader system of societal and organizational practices that reproduce inequality.
Corporate mission statements are ubiquitous, but their relationship to organizational practices, especially those noted for their high quality, remains a subject of debate. We use the case of ...work—life practices in publicly traded financial services firms to illustrate an innovative method for studying this issue. Overall, we find variation in the mission statements of firms in the same organizational field. We also find relationships between these statements and high-quality investment in work—life practices, as recognized by Working Mother magazine and Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini. The mission statements of firms recognized for their work—life initiatives were more likely than those of competitors to emphasize the value of employees and less likely to stress shareholder value. We identified four types of mission statements, a pattern which may reflect the dual influences of distinctive organizational commitments and pressure from institutional actors. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on work—life initiatives, strategic implementation, and organizational theory.
This study compares work–family policy use among low wage, predominately female call center workers and their more highly paid managers. Both formal policies and the informal work–family arrangements ...that employees negotiate with their supervisors were examined. Consistent with the work devotion perspective, it was found that formal work–family policies are more widely used among hourly workers than managers, and those with better performance evaluations are less likely than their otherwise similar coworkers to use formal work–family policies. The ability to negotiate informal work–family arrangements and use them as a supplement to formal policies is also important to workers in this study, especially women with children and those providing care to people with special needs. Access to informal arrangements may be limited to the high performers, however. Overall, this research suggests that the work devotion framework, which derives from studies of elite workers, may be more broadly applicable than previously assumed.
This article analyzes the effects of workplace social context on managers' and professionals' use of work-family policies in a financial services corporation. These official policies are ambiguous ...and contested and, as institutional theory implies, may fail to become fully implemented. We use a multilevel model to determine the individual-level and work group-level factors that affect respondents' policy use. In addition to individual-level factors, the social context of the workgroup affects employees' decisions to use work-family policies. We find support for our hypotheses stressing the social resource of power and protection: employees are more likely to use these policies if they work with powerful supervisors and colleagues, who can buffer them from perceived negative effects on their careers.
Long Work Hours and Family Life Wharton, Amy S.; Blair-Loy, Mary
Journal of family issues,
03/2006, Letnik:
27, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Work-family conflict is a pressing research and policy issue. The authors extend previous scholarship on this issue by studying elite employees’worries about the effects of longwork hours on those in ...their personal life. This issue is researched cross-nationally in a sample of managers and professionals based in the United States, London, and Hong Kong, all of whom work for one division of a high-commitment, global, financial services firm. Hong Kong respondents are more likely than those in the United States and in England to worry about work-family conflict when controlling for job and family characteristics. The authors argue that the meaning of family varies by national context, in part because of the emphasis in Hong Kong on the extended family as a robust institution with intense ties and obligations. In all three countries, women experience higher levels of work-family conflict than men do.
The Sociology of Arlie Hochschild Wharton, Amy S.
Work and Occupations,
11/2011, Letnik:
38, Številka:
4
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Arlie Hochschild is one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her many contributions include her research on emotion and emotion work, the gender division of labor in ...the household, work–family relations, and the global dimensions of carework. A less visible aspect of Hochschild’s career involves her efforts to nurture, encourage, and engage those inspired by her work. This essay examines Hochschild’s influence as revealed in a new book on work and family life edited by two of her former students. The book offers a look at “Hochschildian sociology” as practiced by those who have expanded and built on her ideas.
During the last half of the 20th century, married women with children moved into the labor force in large numbers. This change, which occurred throughout the industrialized world, dramatically ...altered work, family, and gender roles. Working parents today juggle demanding jobs and busy family lives and find it increasingly difficult to balance these activities. Work‐family conflict has become a pressing social issue. This article examines four areas of social science research on work and family, including: work‐family conflict, spillover, and multiple roles; work‐family policies in organizations; effects of work on family life; and cross–national research on work and family. Although much is known about all of these topics, more research is needed to address the work‐family challenges of the 21st century.
