Blackwell Reference Online

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Emotion, hence emotion work, has been considered in the work of many early sociologists, such as Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber (see Barbalet 2002; Turner 2006 ), but it was not until Hochschild's work in the 1970s and 1980s that a sociology of emotions was taken seriously. Although today's researchers do not always agree with Hochschild on a precise definition of emotions, or how best to study them, there is general agreement that emotions are socially defined, made meaningful within sociohistorical situations, and critical to any analysis of social interaction. Drawing on the symbolic interactionist perspective and the rich heritage of Mills and Goffman, Hochschild (2003) states that an emotion has a signal function that communicates information telling us where we stand in relation to the situation, to social expectations, to ourselves, and to other actors. Furthermore, emotions are managed (emotion work) through situationally and culturally relevant feeling rules so that ideally each encounter with others receives its expected and appropriate amount of feeling. Emotion work, according to Hochschild, is the management of one's emotions in private contexts, in contrast to emotional labor which is the management of feeling in public contexts. Context gives meaning to the exchange value of emotional labor (managing self and others’ emotions as an aspect of one's labor power; commercialization ... log in or subscribe to read full text