Page 114 - The Disneyization of Society

PERFORMATIVE LABOUR

write about ‘strategic intent’ which conveys a sense of direction, much like
Peters’s strong cultures. Strategic intent provides ‘the emotional and intellectual
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energy’ for getting to a certain point in the future and ‘aims to create employee
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excitement’. While there is scepticism about the degree to which organizational
cultures can be changed and manipulated in the way implied by such writers, 8
there is little doubt that many consultants and organizations have sought to cre-
ate high-commitment cultures that draw on employees’ emotional resources. This
aspect of emotionality in organizations will be addressed briefly at least in part
because it is one of the ways in which emotional labour is cultivated.

Why Promote Emotional Labour?

Emotional labour is closely associated with the delivery of services, most notably
perhaps those in which the service entails a commercial transaction. The link is
so close that the quality of the service delivery, of which the display of positive
emotions is an important component, is increasingly being associated with the
quality of the service itself or of the goods that are supplied in the course of a service
transaction. This means that diners in a fast-food restaurant are more likely to
respond positively to a meal that is supplied in a pleasing way rather than in a
surly or morose manner. This is especially likely to be the case as services assume
greater prominence in the economy and as customer expectations of service qual-
ity and delivery are ratcheted upwards. 9
Probably nothing epitomizes or exemplifies emotional labour more than the
smile. The smile, along with other elements of a positive emotional display such as
eye contact, transfers to the service transaction a generally upbeat set of impres-
sions that are meant to improve the aura surrounding the service. When
Hochschild conducted research on flight attendants, she noted that during a train-
ing session at which she was present one of the trainees had written ‘Important to
smile. Don’t forget smile’. The directive had come from a pilot who had said: ‘Now
girls, I want you to out there and really smile. Your smile is your biggest asset.
I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on’. Moreover,
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the fact that one of the airlines she researched emphasized in one of its jingles that
its ‘smiles are not just painted on’, suggested that the smile was supposed to come
from within and therefore should not be mere surface acting.
The reason for inculcating emotional labour on the part of service staff is that
there has been a growing recognition that the style and quality of the delivery of
a service are crucial to how it is perceived. 11 In many instances, and the work of
flight attendants is an example of this, the display of positive emotions becomes
a component of the service. In other words, emotional labour is a source of
differentiation. It is a means of differentiating services that are otherwise more or