Emotional Labor Revisited

A Case Study of Care Laborers

Abstract

　This study of paid care laborers shows how effective the notion of emotional labor can be when one considers the emotional labor process. "Emotional labor" is "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" and "sold for a wage" (Hochschild 1983: 7), and is believed to have a close relationship with such negative psychological consequences as burnout and emotive dissonance. The mechanism involved in this relationship is, however, rather unclear, and students of emotional labor in the United States have been addressing it through analyses of the emotional labor process. On the other hand, scholars in Japan have overlooked the importance of the emotional labor process, and tend to emphasize only the psychological consequences of emotional labor. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to re-evaluate the effectiveness of Hochschild's original notion of emotional labor, and to show the importance of considering the emotional labor process when examining emotional labor.