Is smiling part of the job?
In a growing share of jobs, producing an affective state is part of the task. A sociologist named this in 1983, and research has measured since then what it costs.
A study that became a category
Arlie Hochschild published in 1983 The Managed Heart. She followed the training of flight attendants at an American airline, attended the sessions where they learn to smile, observed the instructions for dealing with difficult passengers.
Her thesis is that emotion there is not a side aspect of the work but part of the product sold. The airline does not only sell transport, it sells an atmosphere, and that atmosphere is manufactured by employees who are asked to feel, not only to display.
The counterpoint rarely cited
The book contains a second study, among agents charged with collecting debts. They are asked for the opposite emotion: firmness, cold distance, controlled hostility. The symmetry is decisive, because it shows that what is prescribed is not kindness but an affective state of whatever kind.
This point prevents a falsely benevolent reading of the concept. Emotional labour is not the human part of work: it is the extension of the employer's control to a domain the contract does not mention.
Surface acting, deep acting
Hochschild distinguishes two ways of holding the role. Surface acting consists in displaying the expected emotion without feeling it. Deep acting consists in working on oneself in order to feel it genuinely, by picturing the customer's situation for instance.
Reviews published around 2010 covering three decades of work converge: surface acting is consistently associated with higher emotional exhaustion, deep acting much less so. Causality remains hard to establish, since already exhausted people may resort more to the former for lack of energy.
The variable is the gap
What research calls emotional dissonance is the gap between what is felt and what must be shown. The larger it is, the longer it is held, and the less margin the person has to step away from it, the higher the reported fatigue indicators rise.
The consequence is organisational before it is individual: the variable that can be manipulated is not the employee's capacity to act, but the display requirement itself, its duration, and the autonomy left to suspend it.
What the French framework says
Article L. 4121-1 of the French Labour Code requires the employer to take the measures necessary to ensure the safety and protect the physical and mental health of workers. This obligation covers psychosocial risks, whose assessment must appear in the single risk assessment document.
Emotional demand is today one of the families of psychosocial risk factors recognised by French prevention bodies. It is therefore described as a characteristic of the post, which places it on the side of work organisation rather than of people's temperament.
Key points
Emotional labour designates the production, for pay, of the affective state expected by the organisation.
Surface acting is associated with more exhaustion than deep acting, at comparable demand.
Emotional demand is a characteristic of the post, not a trait of the employee.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test