University of California Los Angeles The Importance of Emotions, Stimulus & Response Paper In a paragraph of at least 12 sentences, define the term/concept

University of California Los Angeles The Importance of Emotions, Stimulus & Response Paper In a paragraph of at least 12 sentences, define the term/concept, explain its significance (why is this important?), connect it to a reading, and provide at least one example.

1. The “Nature” and “Nurture” of emotions. —

2. Hochschild’s “Emotion work/labor.”

3. Reconstruction/Resocialization of the self.

4. Stimulus—Interpretation—Response.

5. Emotion and Race

i will post the reaing in a minute ______
__
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FEELING MANAGEMENT
From Private to Commercial Uses
If they could have turned every one of us into sweet quiet
Southern bette.c with velvet voices like Rosal’tn Carter, this zc
what they would want to stamp out on an assembly tine.
—flight attendant, Delta Airlines
On PSA our smiles are notjust painted on.
So smite your way
from L.A.
To San Francisco.
—
PSA radio jingle
When you see them receiving passengers with that big smite, I
don’t think it means anything. They have to do that. It’s part
of theirjob. But now fyou get into a conversation with a
flight attendant. welt. no. I guess they have to do
that too.
.
.
.
.
.
—Airline passenger
[When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are
set by management, when workers have weaker rights to
courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting
are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for
empathy and warmth are put to corporate us what hap
pens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her
face? When worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of
service work, what can a person learn about herself from her
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feelings? And when a worker abandons her work smile, what
kind of tie remains between her smile and her self?
Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes
to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened man
agement realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard
to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive disso
nance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is
at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and
feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce
this strain by pulling the two closer together either by
changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When
display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to
change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they
sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.
Take the case of the flight attendant. Corporate logic in
the airline industry creates a series of links between compe
tition, market expansion, advertising, heightened passenger
expectations about rights to display, and company demands
for acting. When conditions allow this logic to work, the
result is a successful transmutation of the private emotional
system we have described. The old elements of emotional
exchange—feeling rules, surface acting, and deep acting—
are now arranged in a different way. Stanislavski’s f moves
from stage to airline cabin (“act as if the cabin were your own
living room”) as does the actor’s use of emotion memory. Pri
vate use gives way to corporate use.
In the airline industry of the 195 Os and 1960s, a remark
able transmutation was achieved. But certain trends, dis
cussed later in this chapter, led this transmutation to fail in
the early 1970s. An industry speed-up and a stronger union
hand in limiting the company’s claims weakened the trans
mutation. There was a service worker “slowdown.” Workedup warmth of feeling was replaced by put-on smiles. Those
who sincerely wanted to make the deeper offering found
they could not do so, and those who all along had resisted
feeling Management. From Private to Commercial Uses
91
company intrusions on the self came to feel some rights to
freedom from it. The job lost its grip. When the transmuta
tion succeeded, the worker was asked to take pride in mak
ing an instrument of feeling. When it collapsed, workers
came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated,
and susceptible to damage.
BEHIND THE DEMAND FOR ACTING
“A market for emotional labor” is not a phrase that company
employees use. Upper management talks about getting the
best market share of the flying public. Advertising personnel
talk about reaching that market. In-flight service supervi
sors talk about getting “positive attitude” and “professional
service” from flight attendants, who in turn talk about “han
dling irates.” Nevertheless, the efforts of these four groups,
taken together, set up the sale of emotional labor.
The purpose of Delta Airlines is to make a profit. To
make a profit, Delta has to compete for passenger markets.
Throughout the postwar years, for example, Delta com
peted with Eastern Airlines for markets along routes they
both serviced. (It now shares 80 percent of its routes with
Eastern.)’ The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), established
in 1938 in recognition of the national importance of air
transport and the threat of monopoly, was granted authority
to control market shares and prices. Until 1978 it established
uniform prices for airline tickets and sharpened competi
tion by offering parallel route awards. Companies competed
by offering more frequent flights, more seats, faster flights
(fewer stops), and—what is most important here—better
service. After 1978 the airlines were deregulated and price
wars were allowed.2 Yet a brief price war in 1981 and an
other shake-out of weaker companies has been followed by a
general rise in prices. As it was before deregulation, service
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may again become a main area of competition. When corn
pet]tion in price is out, competition in service is in.’
The more important service becomes as an arena for
coietition between airlines, the more workers are asked to
do public relations work to promote sales.’Employees are
continually told to represent Delta proudlEAl1 Delta work
ers once received, along with their paychecks, a letter from
the president and chairman of the board asking them to put
Delta bumper stickers on their cars. The Delta jogging Club
(which included two vice-presidents) once ran a well-publi
cized 414-mile marathon from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson,
Mississippi, to commemorate Delta’s first commercial flight.
Virtually every employee is asked to be “in sales.”
But of all workers in an airline, the flight attendant has
the most contact with passengers, and she sells the company
the most. When passengers think of service they are un
likely to think of the baggage check-in agent, the ramp at
tendant, the cabin clean-up crew, the lost and found person
nel, or the man down in commissary pouring gravy on a long
line of chicken entrées. They think of the flight attendant.
As one Delta official explained: “for each hour’s work by a
flight attendant, there are 10.5 hours of support time from
cabin service, the billing department, maintenance, and so
on. Altogether we spend 100 hours per passenger per flight.
But the passenger really has prolonged contact only with
the flight attendant.”
As competition grew from the 1930s through the early
1970s, the airlines expanded that visible role. Through the
1950s and 1960s the flight attendant became a main subject
Despite Fierce competition in some arenas, airlines cooperate with each other.
According to the airlines, Flying is safe but, in fact, airplanes occasionally crash.
When they do, the efforts of their public relations offices call for surface acting and
sometimes border on illusion making. For example, the head of Delta’s public rela
tions office received a call during my office visit. “A crash in Mexico City? Seventythree died? It was a DC— 10, too?” He turned to me after hanging up. “After that
last Eastern crash, I was getting 150 calls a day. We don’t have any DC 10’s, thank
God. But I try to keep the press off of Eastern’s back. I sa ‘Don’t mention those
planes.’ Eastern does the same for us when we’re in trouble.”
*
—
feeling Management: from Private to Commercial Uses
93
of airline advertising, the spearhead of market expansion.*
The image they chose, among many possible ones, was that
of a beautiful and smartly dressed Southern white woman,
the supposed epitome of gracious manners and warm per
sonal service. t
Because airline ads raise expectations, they subtly rewrite
job descriptions and redefine roles. They promise on-time
service, even though planes are late from 10 to 50 percent of
the time, industrywide. Their pictures of half-empty planes
promise space and leisurely service, which are seldom avail
able (and certainly not desired by the company). They prom
ise service from happy workers, even though the industry
spcedup has reduced job satisfaction. By creating a discrep
ancy between promise and fact,They force workers in all capac
ities to cope with the disappointed expectations of customers.
The ads promise service that is “human” and personal.
The omnipresent smile suggests, first of all, that the flight
attendant is friendly, helpful, and open to requests. But when
words are added, the smile can be sexualized, as in “We really
move our tails for you to make your every wish come true”
(Continental), or “Fly me, you’ll like it” (National). Such innu
endos lend strength to the conventional fantasy that in the ah
anything can happen. As one flight attendant put it: “You
have married men with three kids getting on the plane and
suddenly they feel anything goes. It’s like they leave that real
ity on the ground, and you fit into their fantasy as some geisha
girl. It happens over and over again’
When an airline commands a market monopoly, as it is likely to do when it is
owned by a government, it does not need to compete for passengers by advertising
friendly flight attendants. Many flight attendants told me that their counterparts on
Lufthansa (the German national airlines) and even more on El Al and Aeroflot (the
Israeli and Russian national airlines) were notably lacking in assertive friendliness.
t A black female flight attendant, who had been hired in the early 1970s when
Delta faced an affirmative action suit, wondered aloud why blacks were not pic
tured in local Georgia advertising. She concluded: “They want that market, and
that market doesn’t include blacks. They go along with that.” Although Delta’s cen
tral offices are in Atlanta, which is predominantly black, few blacks worked for
Delta in any capacity.
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So the sexualized ad burdens the flight attendant with an
other task, beyond being unfailingly helpful and open to re
quests: she must respond to the sexual fantasies of passen
gers. She must try to feel and act as if flirting and
propositioning are “a sign of my attractiveness and your sex
iness,” and she must work to suppress her feelings that such
behavior is intrusive or demeaning. Some have come to see
this extra psychological task as a company contrivance. A
flight attendant once active in Flight Attendants for Wom
en’s Rights commented: “The company wants to sexualize
the cabin atmosphere. They want men to be thinking that
way because they think what men really want is to avoidfear
offlying. So they figure mild sexual arousal will be helpful in
getting people’s minds off of flying. It’s a question of dollars
and cents… Most of our passengers are male, and all of the
big corporate contract business is male.*
The advertising promises of one airline tend to redefine
work on other airlines as well. So although Delta’s advertis
ing has assiduously avoided explicit sexualization of the role,
Delta’s flight attendants must cope with the inflated image of
th flight attendant put out by other companies There may
well be an economic pattern to sexual innuendo in these
ads: the economically marginal companies seem to aim a
sexual pitch at the richest segment of the market, male busi
nessmen. United Airlines, which was ranked first in reve
nues in 1979, has not attached suggestive words to the fe
male smite; but Continental, ranked tenth, and National,
ranked eleventh, certainty have. But in any case, when what
Doris Lessing has called a fantasy of “easily available and
guiltless sex” is encouraged by one airline, it is finally at
tached to air travel in general.
As the industry speed-up and union pressure have re
duced the deep acting promised and delivered in American-
feeling Management. from Private to Commercial Uses
95
based companies, there are signs that the same corporate
logic that reached its nadir in the 1950s in the United States
is now emerging abroad. fortune, in an article about Singa
pore International Airlines entitled “An Airline Powered by
Charm” (June 18, 1979), notes:
[SIAs] advertising campaign glamorizes the cabin hostess as “the
Singapore girl.”.. To convey the idea of in-flight pleasure with
a lyrical quality, most SIA ads are essentially large, soft-focus
color photographs of various hostesses. In a broadcast com
mercial a crooner sings: “Singapore girl, you look so good I
want to stay up here with you forever.” [The chairman of SIA
has said] “We’re fortunate in having young people who get a
Western education, speak English, and still take an Asian atti
tude toward service.”
.
.
*
Many workers divided male passengers into two types: the serious business
man who wants quiet, efficient, and unobtrusive service; and the “sport” who wants
a Playboy Club atmosphere.
This may be the service-sector version of a “runaway shop’
including not only runaway-shop labor (“with an Asian atti
tude toward service”) but “runaway” imagery to advertise it.
We might add that the first, and nonsexual, significance
of the advertised smile—special friendliness and empathy—
can also inflate the expectations of passengers, and there
fore increase their right to feel disappointed. Ordinary
niceness is no longer enough; after all, hasn’t the passenger
paid for extra civility? As every flight attendant knows well,
she can expect to face surprisingly deep indignation when
her expressive machine is idling or, worse yet, backfiring.
BEHIND THE SUPPLY Of ACTING: SELECTION
Even before an applicant for a flight attendant’s job is inter
viewed, she is introduced to the rules of the game. Success
will depend in part on whether she has a knack for perceiv
ing the rules and taking them seriously. Applicants are
urged to read a preinterview pamphlet before coming in. In
the 1979— 1980 Airline Guide to Stewardess and Steward Ca
reers, there is a section called “The Interview.” Under the
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subheading “Appearance,” the manual suggests that facial
expressions should be “sincere” and “unaffected.” One
should have a “modest but friendly smile” and be “generally
alert, attentive, not overly aggressive, but not reticent ei
ther” Under “Mannerisms’ subheading “Friendliness’ it is
suggested that a successful candidate must be “outgoing but
not effusive,” “enthusiastic with calm and poise,” and “viva
cious but not effervescent.” As the manual continues: “Main
taining eye contact with the interviewer demonstrates sin
cerity and confidence, but don’t overdo it. Avoid cold or
continuous staring.” Training, it seems, begins even before
recruitment.
Like company manuals, recruiters sometimes offer advice
on how to appear. Usually they presume that an applicant is
planning to put on a front; the question is which one. In of
fering tips for success, recruiters often talked in a matter-offact way about acting, as though assuming that it is permiss
able if not quite honorable to feign. As one recruiter put it “I
had to advise a lot of people who were looking for jobs, and
notjust at Pan Am… And I’d tell them the secret to getting
ajob is to imagine the kind of person the company wants to
hire and then become that person during the interview. The
hell with your theories of what you l)eheve in, and what your
integrity is, and all that other stuff You can project all that
when you’ve got thejob.”
In most companies, after the applicant passes the initial
screening (for weight, figure, straight teeth, complexion, fa
cial regularity, age) he or she is invited to a group interview
where an “animation test” takes place.
At one interview session at Pan American, the recruiter (a
woman) called in a group of six applicants, three men and
three women. She smiled at all of them and then said:
“While I’m looking over your files here, I’d like to ask you to
turn to your neighbor and get to know him or her. We’ll take
about three or four minutes, and then I’ll get back to you.”
Immediately there was bubbly conversation, nodding of
.
feeling Management: from Private to commercial Uses
97
heads, expansions of posture, and overlapping ripples of
laughter. (“Is that right? My sister-in-law lives in Des Moines,
too!” “Oh wow, how did you get into scuba diving?”) Al
though the recruiter had simply asked each applicant to
turn to a neighbor, in fact each woman turned to her nearest
man “to bring him out.” (Here, what would be an advantage
at other times—being the object of conversational atten
tion—became a disadvantage for the men because the task
was to show skill in “bringing Out” others.) After three min
utes, the recruiter put down her files and called the group to
order. There was immediate total silence. All six looked ex
pectantly at the recruiter: how had they done on their ani
mation test?
The recruits are screened for a certain type of outgoing
middle-class sociability. Sometimes the recruitment litera
ture explicitly addresses friendliness as an act. Allegheny
Airlines, for example, says that applicants are expected to
“project a warm personality during their interview in order to
be eligible for employment’ Continental Airlines, in its own
words, is “seeking people who convey a spirit of enthusiasm.”
Delta Airlines calls simply for applicants who “have a
friendly personality and high moral character.”
Different companies favor different variations of the ideal
type of sociability. Veteran employees talk about differences
in company personality as matter-of-factly as they talk about
differences in uniform or shoe style. United Airlines, the
consensus has it, is “the girl-next-door,” the neighborhood
babysitter grown up. Pan Am is upper class, sophisticated,
and slightly reserved in its graciousness. PSA is brassy, fun
loving, and sexy. Some flight attendants could see a connec
tion between the personality they were supposed to project
and the market segment the company wants to attract. One
United worker explained: “United wants to appeal to Ma
and Pa Kettle. So it wants Caucasian girls—not so beautiful
that Ma feels fat, and not so plain that Pa feels unsatisfied.
It’s the Ma and Pa Kettle market that’s growing, so that’s why
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they use the girl-next-door image to appeal to that market.
You know, the Friendly Skies. They offer reduced rates for
wives and kids. They weed out busty women because they
don’t fit the image, as they see it.”
Recruiters understood that they were looking for “a cer
tain Delta personality’ or “a Pan Am type:’ The general pre
requisites were a capacity to work with a team (“we don’t look
for chiefs, we want Indians”), interest in people, sensitivity,
and emotional stamina. Trainers spoke somewhat remotely
of studies that indicate that successful applicants often come
from large families, had a father who enjoyed his work, and
had done social volunteer work in school. Basically, however,
recruiters look for someone who is smart but can also cope
with being considered dumb, someone who is capable of giv
ing emergency safety commands but can also handle people
who can’t take orders from a woman, and someone who is
naturally empathetic but can also resist the numbing effect
of having that empathy engineered and continuously used
by a company for its own purposes. The trainees, on the
other hand, thought they had been selected because they
were adventurous and ambitious. (“We’re not satisfied with
just being secretaries’ as one fairly typical trainee said. “All
my girlfriends back in Memphis are married and having ba
bies. They think I’m real liberated to be here:’)
The trainees, it seemed to me, were also chosen for their
ability…
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