emotional labor

Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed Allison Daminger (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) about her new book, What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. The book examines how partners split “cognitive labor”, or, the mental effort that goes into running a household. This includes “anticipating issues, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring the results.” While most couples in the study aimed for a 50/50 split of household labor, Daminger found that cognitive labor was typically imbalanced. Among heterosexual couples, women tend to take on more cognitive labor.

Allison Daminger

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University. Ruth Braunstein (Associate Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University) appeared on WUSA9 to discuss the broader pattern of political violence in the United States. Braunstein commented that political violence has a “tremendous chilling effect on people’s willingness to go into political life, to stand up and speak out for what they believe in.” She also discussed how distrust in political institutions may lead some individuals to violence, which can further erode trust in insituions–a “vicious cycle.” Braunstein also expressed concern to the New York Times that Kirk’s murder could mobilize right-wing groups (including militia organizations): “All it will take is the slightest hint from the political leaders, including the president, but also anyone else, that this is the moment that they’re needed.”

Ruth Braunstein

Laura Garbes (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota) wrote an op-ed for the Minnesota Star Tribune discussing how ‘elitism’ in public media stems from a lack of public funding. “Due to decades of budget cuts led by Republican administrations, public radio has become reliant on a set of mostly white, affluent donors for its financial survival,” Garbes explains. Programming, then, is catered to donor-listeners, leaving behind working-class audiences.

Laura Garbes

Protests are sweeping across France as a part of the Block Everything Movement–a campaign driven by anger over major cuts to public spending. The movement began online among right-wing voices, but has since been embraced by the political left. Quentin Ravelli (Sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research) discussed the movement’s lack of a clear political identity in an RFI article: “Many movements avoid being labelled left or right. This isn’t just strategic: participants often feel that consensus around economic demands matter more than political allegiance. Urgent issues like public services, wages or inflation are seen as priorities.” The movement is drawing comparisons to the 2018 Yellow Vest Movement. Antoine Bristelle (Sociologist at the Jean Jaures Foundation) commented on the demographic differences to The Gazette: “In the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement, we had a rather vulnerable France that was struggling to make ends meet, a lot of workers, a lot of retirees. Whereas here, in terms of age, it’s many young people [that have] a certain vision of the world where there is more social justice, less inequality and a political system that functions differently, better,” Bristielle said.

Quentin Ravelli

Musa al-Gharbi (Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University) wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post on the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. Al-Gharbi argues that the administration undermined its own efforts after Columbia University complied with its directives: “[I]t responded to Columbia’s show of weakness by turning the screws further [… and] ratcheted up demands on other universities as well.” This shows other universities that quick compliance is not rewarded, giving them little choice but to fight back. “And now that Harvard has chosen the path of resistance, other institutions will probably follow its lead.”

Musa al-Gharbi

The Atlantic ran a story discussing how America is in a phase of “grandparenthood,” in which grandparents play a significant role in raising their grandchildren. The article featured research from Madonna Harrington Meyer (Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University), describing how some grandparents want to be involved in their grandchildren’s lives, but are attempting to set boundaries on that involvement. They may use strategies such as committing to help on certain days (“I’m a Wednesday grandma.”) or committing to “fun time.” However, boundary setting often fails, and grandparents take on a significant parenting workload. Harrington Meyer also describes how some grandparents delay retirement or take on debt to financially support their grandchildren.

Madonna Harrington Meyer

Near the end of 2024, Walmart released a handbag similar to the luxury Hermès Birkin bag. Aarushi Bhandari (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Davidson College) and Parul Bhandari (Director of Studies in Sociology University of Cambridge) appeared on The Conversation Weekly podcast to discuss conspicuous consumption and the Birkin bag as a cultural symbol. “You need to have a record of spending tens of thousands of dollars even before you’re offered to buy one. But spending that money doesn’t automatically mean you get a bag,” Aarushi Bhandari explained. “You have to develop a relationship with a sales associate at a particular Hermès store and the sales associate really gets to decide, if there’s availability, whether or not you get offered a bag.” Parul Bhandari described how owning a Birkin bag is a “ticket of entry into the global elite” and–for many women–a way to display their husband’s affection: “ Not only from the point of view of money, because obviously this bag is extremely expensive, but also because it is difficult to procure.” The bag becomes a symbol of both wealth and effort within a marriage. Aarushi Bhandari became fascinated with responses to the “Wirkin” (Walmart Birkin) bag. Many online commenters critiqued spending thousands on handbags and praised the Wirkin as an accessible alternative. Bhandari sees this as an example of anti-elitism.

Aarushi Bhandari and Parul Bhandari

The New York Times ran a story on how most people go to civil court (for example, in family law, housing, or debt cases) without legal representation. “Courts were not designed for people,” Rebecca Sandefur (Professor of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University) commented. “The processes that you have to navigate to use [the court system] were implemented for a very narrow part of the population that invented them and speaks in Latin and knows what pleading is.” The article cited Sandefur’s research showing that having a lawyer increases odds of success in civil court and that many people with problems they could address in court often don’t make use of the legal system.

Rebecca Sandefur

“In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth.” In an article for the Atlantic, Ellen Cushing explores this common sentiment and why there are so many conflicts over how to properly load the dishwasher. Michelle Janning (Professor of Sociology at Whitman College) commented that “our homes and our home possessions and what meaning we ascribe to them is one of the most personal things we can experience.” Our homes are a sacred place and a representation of ourselves–this extends to the technologies within our homes. “The strong opinions associated with how to [load the dishwasher] could be people trying to retain some semblance of control in a world where technological devices are doing things so much for us,” Janning commented. “I do wonder if there’s a little bit of fear of losing the humanity associated with our domestic lives.”

Michelle Janning

After the holidays, many parents breathe a collective sigh of relief. The holidays and their many challenges — travel, presents, and time with extended family — are so stressful that they make people wonder whether raising children has always been this hard. A recent The New York Times piece by Claire Cain Miller confirms that parenting has indeed gotten more time-consuming and expensive. Miller draws upon an arsenal of sociological research to illustrate how and why parenting has become so relentless.

Much of the pressure parents feel stems from wanting to pass on advantages to their children — especially since American children today are less likely to be as affluent as their parents. According to Phillip Cohen,

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases. The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

As a result, parents use “intensive parenting,” a child-rearing style that demands a great deal of their own time and resources. Sharon Hays’ describes intensive parenting as “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive.” And according to Jennifer Glass, intensive parenting is rooted in the American view of child rearing as an individual — not societal — task, though it has begun to gain popularity in England and Australia.

But not all parents engage in these efforts equally, nor are they expected to. Jessica Calarco explains that intensive parenting allows affluent white mothers to ensure their children remain advantaged in society. Middle-class black mothers also use intensive parenting strategies, but for different reasons. According to Dawn Dow,

“They’re making decisions to protect their kids from early experiences of racism. It’s a different host of concerns that are equally intensive.” 

The demands of intensive parenting affect mothers’ lives far more than fathers. Liana Sayer’s research on American time use diaries shows that the time women spend parenting cuts into their sleep, time alone with their partners and friends, leisure time and housework. Moreover, while fathers today have increased the amount of time they spend with their children, mothers still spend significantly more.

So, drawing on research by over a dozen sociologists, Miller shows us that we are not wrong to find intensive parenting problematic. Not only does this parenting style disproportionately burden lower income families — and mothers in particular — but we’re not even sure it is effective in passing advantages on to the next generation. By stressing the importance of individualistic approaches to parenting, we fail to seek structural solutions that could ease the burdens of working mothers. In the words of sociologist Caitlyn Collins, intensive parenting “distracts from the real questions, like why don’t we have a safe place for all kids to go when they’re done with school before parents get home from work?”

For many people, coining a term and having it become part of common conversations would be a huge achievement. But such popularity sometimes means that these terms lose their original meanings. This is what happened to Arlie Hochschild’s term, “emotional labor.” Initially coined to identify what is so exhausting about jobs such as flight attendants, nursing home attendants, and child-care workers, emotional labor is increasingly used as a catch-all term for mental work, care work, or any burdens that disproportionately fall on women.  

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Arlie Hochschild reminds us of the core definition of emotional labor:

“Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings . . . The point is that while you may also be doing physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for your capacity to manage and produce a feeling.”

In addition to a lack of a social-class perspective in the recent usage of the concept — in one example, emotional labor was used to describe calling the maid — Hochschild contends that emotional labor may be overextended in ways that are unproductive, particularly during important conversations about alienated labor and household responsibilities. Some of her other books, including The Second Shift and The Time Bind, are more relevant to the uses of emotional labor that are fundamentally talking about household responsibilities and family dynamics. While Hochschild appreciates the attention to her work, she also believes maintaining analytic precision is essential — especially in mobilizing the concept of emotional labor to recognize inequality and alienation in the workplace.

“We’re trying to have an important conversation but having it in a very hazy way, working with [a] blunt concept. I think the answer is to be more precise and careful in our ideas and to bring this conversation into families and to the office in a helpful way…If you have an important conversation using muddy ideas, you cannot accomplish your purpose. You won’t be understood by others. And you won’t be clear to yourself.”

Princess Jasmine fell for Aladdin, even after his Prince Ali façade failed. Lady Sybil Crawley married the family chauffeur Tom Branson, despite his socialist views and Irish, working-class origins. Richard Gere scaled a fire escape to retrieve his “Pretty Woman.” Typically, sociologists say, marrying across class differences happens much less frequently in real life than in popular culture. Jessi Streib, however, wrote a whole book about these uncommon couples. She tells New York Magazine’s Science of Us the findings in her The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages.

Streib’s interviews revealed benefits and challenges to class difference in marriage. Partners may recognize in each other qualities they felt lacking in their own class background. Thus, working-class individuals may value the confidence and sense of stability of middle-class individuals, while middle-class partners may gravitate toward the intimacy and expressiveness they perceive in working-class families. Middle-class individuals often communicate in a “managerial” style, which, according to Streib, means “They manage their emotions, so before you want to express something, you think about it first, you figure out what you really feel, you think about how to express it in a way that will make the other person most comfortable, and then you kind of quietly and very calmly state how you feel and make sure there’s a good rationale behind it.” Working-class individuals, on the other hand, have a more laissez-faire way of expressing emotions. They are more likely to state their honest feelings directly, even if they’re not particularly nice or polite.

While differences in communication styles provide opportunities for understanding, they also pose challenges. Trying to change the other person, Streib says, is not going to make a partnership work.

The couples who it went really well for were the ones who appreciated each other’s differences. So they would say things like, “You know, it’s not how I do it, but I can understand why that other way makes total sense,” or could actually use their partner’s differences to help them solve a problem at times. So keeping in perspective that difference isn’t necessarily bad, and that they love their partner despite or because of all these differences, could help a lot.

As in any relationship, cooperation and communication are keys to success. Cross-class marriages may not be incredibly common, but at least one sociologist is convinced Tom and Sybil could have made a life of it—save a few plot twists.

It’s a common problem in post-recession America: you hate your job, but you also can’t just up and get a new one. We usually have social options for dealing with this, ranging from commiserating with co-workers in the breakroom to organizing for better working conditions. But if you work in the service industry, where the customer isn’t too keen on knowing you hate your job, bosses can try to bust up the social bandwagon.

A piece for MSNBC’s The Ed Show makes great use of Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labor.” The piece gives a handful of examples in which employees, from Starbucks baristas to Wal-Mart greeters, are increasingly burdened with managers’ attempts to regulate how much they demonstrate enjoying their work. The author even quotes one account of employees who could be fired for not touching each other frequently enough!

This raises some fascinating questions for work in the 21st century. We know all social interactions are governed by rules and institutions, but when work is a scarce necessity, do we have the luxury of “doing what we love,” or must we “fake it ‘til we make it”… to a better job?

TSP’s Media Awards may have taken the summer off, but journalists and social scientists assuredly did not! We are excited to announce the winner of the May 2012 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science:

“Paying for the Labors of Love,” Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

In her engaging and thorough review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self (the author was the subject of her own Citing in May 2012 with a New York Times Op-Ed), Shulevitz wrote:

I guess you’d call it popular sociology, but I think of it more as an act of mourning. …Hochschild’s look at how we meet some of our most personal needs with the aid of paid strangers doesn’t try to be exhaustive; goes light on figures and statistics; and, when itemizing the most outrageous advances in the market for love and care, never lapses into that magazine journalist’s tone of wry amusement. …Hochschild isn’t really interested in the extremes of the outsourced life. She wants to know what it feels like to be caught in the middle of it. An ethnographic sociologist rather than a quantifier of social trends, Hochschild elicits thoughtful reflections from ordinary people. Then she uses those reflections to chart the confusing intersections between commerce and private life…

By going on to engage Hochschild’s book and other, relevant sources (including novels that illustrate “the gulf between employers, who imagine that relations between themselves and their emotional delegates are mutually beneficial, and the employed, who grasp the cash they take is meant to make them invisible”), Shulevitz shows the deep literary knowledge and willingness to delve into even daring topics that earned her editorial roles at New York Magazine, Slate, and Lingua Franca, as well as bylines in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and more.

As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we do work hard to winnow our favorite nominees. In this case, we’ve actually chosen a piece that has not yet been featured on our site, though it is well-deserving of many a read. And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers cheer and encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important (if not always rewarding) work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.