UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONS

Understanding Organisations



Understanding Organisations

Introduction

The term "emotional labour" was first proposed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983 in her book “The Managed Heart”. She described it as a "control senses to create a publicly observable facial expressions and body.” In other words, it is the work that you do with your feelings, and not the hands. Emotional labour is a big part of the work in creating works of art, generosity and creativity.

In contrast, the concept of “value aesthetic "refers to the value of what causes an object to be a" work of art.” Aesthetics examines the reasons and aesthetic emotions as well as different forms of art. Aesthetics is defined as a domain of philosophy that studies the art and its qualities, such as beauty, eminent ugliness or dissonance.

In a globalized labour market, trends of industrial employment reduction and growth of service sector have become common in the recent times. This trend has resulted in the emotional component becoming essential characteristic for assessing the quality of the service and customer satisfaction. This, in turn, requires the worker to undergo continuous processes of social interaction and emotional management as part of their role and occupation.

According to Hochschild, aesthetic labour is thus characterised by a "transmutation", that is, the transfer of emotions from private to public. Emotions, which are normally held in the private sphere, are managed and marketed by the company in the public space. The smile of the hostess, for example, is no longer her as her employed have transformed it into something that is public.

In organisations where workers are in continuous interaction with the public, emotions are the subject of behavioural scripts, which are prewritten by the organisation management, which elaborates rules and presentation of self by an employee. If the employee strictly follows the script of behaviour, always smiling to the customer and made an effort to listen, it is the act that is imposed by the company over that employee and it is aimed at achieving "customer satisfaction" and meeting their expectations. In many companies, the emotions are not specified: they are in fact implied, or learned by experience. These are the practices that are normally referred to as aesthetic or emotional labour in which the style or emotions of the employees are a part of the corporate strategy. This strategy implies that how employees look and act are as much part of the overall corporate environment as the furniture used in the company or the background music (Warhurst, and Nickson, 2007785-798).

This paper aims at discussing the different aspects of emotional and aesthetic labour while emphasizing mainly upon the social impacts of the relatively new and emerging “aesthetic economy” in order to address the following question:

To what extent do you think that aesthetic and emotional labour represents excessive control of the labour process and infringes the social contract?

Discussion

Employers have long been concerned about the emotional expressions and appearance of the employees. A renowned scholar presented strong evidence that even in the sixteenth ...