Emotional Labour: Valuing Skills in Service Sector Employment

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-158
Author(s):  
Anne Junor
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Emotional Labour

Articulation Work Skills and the Recognition of Call Centre Competences in Australia

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Hampson ◽  
Anne Junor ◽  
Alison Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Customer Service ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Call Centre ◽  
Work Skills ◽  
Articulation Work ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Service Jobs ◽  
Interaction Management ◽  
Different Levels

Debates over whether customer service work is deskilled or part of the knowledge economy tend to focus on single issues such as control, emotional labour or information management. Call centre work, however, falls within a spectrum of service jobs requiring simultaneous and multifaceted work with people, information and technology, This activity, which we call `articulation work', is often performed within tight timeframes and requires workers, first, to integrate their own tasks into an ongoing `line' of work, and second, to collaborate in maintaining the overall work-flow. The requisite skills, of awareness, interaction management and coordination, tend to be poorly specified in competency standards that subdivide work into discrete tasks. We compare examples of call centre competency standards with case study accounts of the use of articulation work skills, arguing the need for a taxonomy allowing the recognition of different levels of these skills across the service sector.

Learning emotion rules in service organizations

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Seymour ◽  
Peter Sandiford
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Formal Training ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
A Chain

This article discusses the way in which emotion rules are learned by service workers through an ethnographic study of employees in a chain of public houses. It reviews the findings of recent research based on studies of large firms in the service sector in order to discuss similarities and differences in the ways in which emotion rules are learned, internalized, controlled, and monitored in large firms and small units. It concludes that in contrast to large firms, small units are characterized by little formal training and few explicit rules for emotion management and display. Implicit rules for performing emotional labour are learned through informal socialization with colleagues, managers, and customers. The importance of competing informal social control mechanisms is highlighted, showing how service workers are expected to be skilled emotion managers negotiating the expectations of different stakeholders.

A Woman's Voice on the Phone Matters

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-127
Author(s):  
Burcu Şentürk ◽  
Yunus Kaymaz ◽  
Serhan Karadeniz
Keyword(s):  
Human Resources ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Working Life ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Work Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Labour Economics ◽  
Female Employees

Various academic disciplines start to be interested in logistics sector as it gained importance in production activity. Researchers in labour economics, human resources, and many other social science disciplines conduct studies on employment structure, work life, organizational culture in logistics sector. As the number of female employees and managers increase in the sector, research about this subject appeared recently along with the other research. This study examines the relation between perception femininity and the emotional labour among the white collar employees of logistic companies in Turkey. Due to the limited researches that examine the logistics sector in the context of the gender and emotional labour, this study tries to understand the presence and dynamics of emotional labour through gendered nature of working life in service sector.

Counteracting shame, recognizing desire: Managing the emotional reverberations of criminalizing HIV nondisclosure in Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (6) ◽  
pp. 1265-1281
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Kilty ◽  
Michael Orsini
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
People Living With Hiv ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Feminist Attitudes ◽  
Heterosexual Sex ◽  
Living With Hiv ◽  
Criminalization Of Hiv

This article considers how emotions shape law through specific consideration of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in Canada. As the majority of these cases involve heterosexual sex, we argue that Canada’s aggressive prosecution is partially driven by carceral feminist attitudes toward protecting women’s sexual purity. We contend that emotions structure punitive mentalities in ways that contribute to the expansion of carceral culture into new sites of surveillance, in this case the field of public health and the HIV/AIDS frontline service sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with frontline workers in AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) across Canada, we explore the emotionally laden nature of disclosure for people living with HIV and those who counsel them. Emotions shape the narrative arc of disclosure and counselling practices, commanding significant emotional labour.

scholarly journals The Workplace Experiences of Waitresses: Exploring the Nature of Emotional Labour

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Burton ◽  
Gemma Piercy
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Positive Interactions ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Developed Economies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Workplace Experiences ◽  
Interactive Service

In western developed economies, it is service work that is increasing most swiftly; thus as westerners, we are now more likely to experience this sector as either workers or clients (McDowell, 2009). This paper explores the working experiences of three young female waitresses in order to better understand the nature of the service sector in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand society. This exploration incorporates a literature review covering the nature of interactive service sector work, as well as findings from in-depth interviews. The interviews focussed on the management-worker-customer triadic relationship that characterises interactive service work. The interviews were also used to explore how exploitation and alienation can be experienced in service sector workplaces. Each of the three women described times when they felt the power of others (employer, co-workers and/or customers) imposed upon them through poor management practices, workplace bullying and conflicts, and negative customer interactions. The findings demonstrate that their relationships with co-workers and managers were far more important than those with various customers, with the former being reported as the source of higher levels of workplace strain and distress. This challenges the literature’s emphasis on both the customer and the employer negatively affecting workers when they are engaged in emotional labour. The interviews also indicated some support for Bolton and Boyd’s critique of Hochschild’s arguments on emotional labour, in relation to the young women’s expression of agency. This is because the women expressed that there were times during their work in which they were able to make decisions independently. This is demonstrated by the moments of autonomy the women indicated they experienced when they were at work, as well as their descriptions of how they were able to exercise agency in relation to the flexible nature of their jobs. Most significantly, however, it was the young women’s description of how they managed their emotional labour by holding their service sector identity as a temporary part of their life that indicated their internal agency and ability to resist the more negative aspects of their jobs. The women also indicated that the‘enjoyable aspects of work’, including the benefits of gaining industry based skills and qualifications, and finding personal enjoyment in positive interactions with customers, also helped mitigate the more negative aspects of their work life.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document