Love's Labours Redressed: Reframing Emotional Labour as an interactive process within Service Work

Emotional labour was conceptualised by Hochschild [1] as a form of oppression on the service worker devised by a capitalist society; where workers' physical actions and emotions were managed by their organisation. Although persuasive and revealing, there is a clear need for a more updated approach. It will be suggested that there has been little investigation into understanding the interactive nature of emotional labour eg. The emotions of the manager and the recipient and their effect on the emotional labourer and their performance. Moreover, there needs to be a distinction between the different types of emotional labourer, the waitress being different type of service worker to the nurse. (While this distinction is discussed in detail by Tang [2], for the purposes of this paper, the emotional labourers are the teacher or the nurse(1) rather than the waitress or sales assistant.) This paper reviews the literature surrounding the effect of interaction on emotional labour performance and proposes that reframing emotional labour as an interactive concept has implications for emotional labour performance and design within nursing and teaching.(2)