So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
Читать онлайн книгу.
things happened to three people I love. But partly I just have to watch that I don’t over-do, because I get exhausted and then resent it—which I hate because then I’m not helping anyone.
We each set up terms of emotional engagement. We listen for bells signaling an “attachment alert.” In response, we extend our attachment here, decrease it there, to maintain those terms. Consciously or not, we try to avoid feelings of anxiety, fear, or sadness, which tell us when we have reached our symbolic limit. It is our desire to avoid those feelings that motivate us to work as hard as we do to set up the right degree of attachment to the world.
Most of the time, we do not notice what sets off our moments of attachment alert, nor could we coherently describe the exact terms of emotional engagement that these alerts help us maintain. It is only when we cross over one of the invisible boundaries between emotionally engaged enough and not enough that we find ourselves estranged—or, like Grace, in the company of others who are. An attachment alert goes off inside us not so much in response to what we are feeling as much as in response to how much we feel anything at all. As intimate life moves into the market, we continually ask just where, on the banks bordering this wide channel, it feels right. As the market frontier moves, so too does the language, the way of thinking and talking about relations, and the feeling rules that influence just what degree of attachment “feels right.”
In recent years, we have seen a rapid growth in personal services such as that which Evan offered Grace. Childcare workers, potty trainers, closet organizers, photo album assemblers, personal shoppers, physical trainers, eldercare workers, and grave beautification services now do what families, friends, and neighbors used to do in many communities (or which might not have gotten done at all). Such services save time, provide skill, and often help. But they also separate us from the acts by which we used to say how much we care. They shake up our terms of emotional engagement. This shake-up can alienate us from ourselves and others, but more often it sets us to doing the strangely invisible work of shoring up our bonds, in order to keep our personal life personal.
TWOCan Emotional Labor Be Fun?
In his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes the hapless worker in a London pin factory standing for hours measuring pin after pin. In the 1867 first volume of Das Capital, Karl Marx takes us into the grueling twelve-hour day of a worker spinning, weaving, and dyeing wool in a Manchester cotton mill. For both authors, the iconic laborer was a man doing physical labor in a dreary factory. For Marx, the grim nineteenth-century factory—with its poor lighting, long hours, and low pay—oppressed the manual worker, whose focus on one tiny part of a larger process of production made him feel alienated from the things he made and from himself. For Smith, the pin-maker’s tedious task was the downside of a division of labor that nonetheless benefited the whole world. The Highland sheep-herder, living far from city factories, mastered many more skills and more greatly enjoyed his work than the city pin-maker, Smith noted, but he lived in a poorer world.
Neither Smith, who extolled the virtues of capitalism, nor Marx, its most powerful critic, could have envisioned the new iconic worker: a female service worker doing emotional labor. Nanny, childcare worker, nursing home attendant, call center employee, waitress, teacher, nurse—all such workers maintain voice-to-voice or face-to-face contact with clients and, in the course of doing so, perform emotional labor. This is the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for a job either by evoking or suppressing feelings—a task we accomplish through bodily or mental acts.1
Service jobs vary. For the psychotherapist, emotional labor requires years of training, a formal degree, and is central to the job; for the hairdresser, manicurist, physical trainer, wedding planner, or bartender—emotional labor requires no training or degree and is largely optional.2 One married mother of two in California told me in an interview I conducted for The Outsourced Self, “I have three mothers: my physical trainer, my masseuse and my psychotherapist. I’ll be going to them all until I die or they do.” In confessing a strong attraction to an older male colleague, she appealed to them all for advice: “My physical trainer is telling me, ‘He’s trying to seem cool because he’s so into you.’ My masseuse is telling me to take a vacation, and my therapist is helping me examine my marriage.”3
Some workers are superb natural therapists, while others do it poorly. Some manage emotion workers (head nurses, for example), while others are those managed by them (the nurses under supervision). Some work in teams; others alone. But for all of them, the same question comes up: Can emotional labor be fun? Or in a deeper sense, can it be meaningful?4
One can enjoy emotional labor immensely, I think, provided one has an affinity for it and a workplace that supports that affinity. Of the American childcare and eldercare workers I’ve interviewed, most expressed an affinity for the work they did. One nanny told me, “I’m a kid person. I climb right into the sandbox. I couldn’t handle working with the elderly.” I also heard eldercare workers express a special affinity for work with the elderly. “The lady I take care of reminds me a lot of my grandma,” one worker declared, “and I’m not one for kids.” Other workers were first drawn to their job on pragmatic grounds—the pay, the commute, the hours, or the availability of work—but later came to enjoy it.
But by itself, affinity does not tell us how much a worker loves her job. That is because we bring to work a certain idea about what it would take to love the job. Contained in that idea is what aspect of ourselves we wish to have affirmed, and people differ in what that aspect is. One person may be most gratified by the ability to provide for her family (a pragmatic source of meaning), or to serve God (devotional), or to seek opportunity (entrepreneurial), to overcome challenges (self-challenging), to exhibit great skill (professional pride), or to demonstrate one’s character as trustworthy, reliable, and helpful (to be a good person).5 Most of all, many care workers feel gratified by the pleasure they give others.6
A meaningful job is one thing; an easy job is another. A child erupts in a wild tantrum. A patient glares in a flash of paranoia. A confused client delivers a slap in anger. In such cases, work is not easy. But skilled emotion workers develop the art of appraising unwelcome events and know when and how to detach themselves from the display while remaining attached to the client. Indeed, many take special pride in handling really tough clients. A tantrum winds down. A paranoid flash subsides. An elderly person is soothed. The caregiver feels gratified in accomplishing these ends.
Some discover a yet deeper source of gratification. In an eight-city study, the sociologist John Baugher asked hospice workers how they decided to work with the dying and what effect it had on them. They spoke of the surprising joy they found in the experience of dropping social convention. Little things—conversational pleasantries, the time of day, disarray on a bedside table—ceased to matter. In the presence of a dying person, they felt welcomed, accepted, and trusted. Rather than feeling strained, many workers—Christian, Buddhist, atheist—felt a sense of peace and awe that they had stood by a person’s side at his or her passing. For them, emotional labor opened up a channel for the experience of awe in the face of the ultimate in human vulnerability.7
Satisfaction did not depend on having the perfect client. “A lot of my co-workers want to avoid Alzheimer’s patients,” one eldercare worker explained, “but I like working with them. I work with one man who doesn’t remember a thing that happened yesterday. He lives in a just-now world. But when I fixed him a steak today, he loved it. I’ve learned to enjoy him in a just-now way.”
An emotion worker is obliged to attune herself to a client’s needs, to empathize with the client, and to manage her own emotions in the course of doing so. She may get bad news from home: a child falls ill, a house is robbed. Or she may become aware of her client’s unpleasant bodily odor, or be jarred by his or her erratic behavior. Often the care worker makes herself into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has called “a holding environment”—an ambience sealed against disturbing leakage of anxiety, anger, envy, or sadness, for these might make the patient feel agitated, threatened, or unsafe.8 Emotional labor implies directionality, intention, and effort; it is, in that sense, real work.9 Just as a professional singer takes pride in her highly trained