New Perspectives on ‘Feeling Rules’

Toward an Autonomy on Emotional Labor

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of ‘feeling rules’ and to situate the autonomy on emotional labor. In the sociology of emotion, it is often said that ‘feeling rules’ determines one's emotional experience. People who do emotional labor suffered negative emotional experience determined by ‘feeling rules’. However, is such a determinist perspective correct? In this paper, I try to re-examine the concept of ‘feeling rules’ by relativizing the traditional determinist perspective, and proposing a way for the autonomy of emotional labor.