Browsing by Subject "Emotional Labor"
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Item Experiencing emotional labor: an analysis of the discursive construction of emotional labor(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Haman, Mary KathrynThis study analyzes how employees at a university recreation center discursively construct their experiences of emotional labor, how they conceptualize such behavior in terms of displaying unfelt emotions and faking in good and bad faith, and what these discursive constructions reveal about their perceptions of authenticity. The findings demonstrate that workers construct emotional labor as a natural ability and as performing a role. People who construct emotional labor as a natural ability depict themselves as the controller of their workplace emotion. They display unfelt emotions in good faith when they do so to uphold another??????s face, and they believe that they possess a true self. Employees who construct emotional labor as performing a role view their supervisors as controller of their workplace emotion. They fake emotions in good faith when doing so uphold their own face, and they fake in bad faith when it upholds the face of a co-worker who they feel needs to be disciplined. These people do not possess a sense of authentic self. They view themselves as multi-faceted and they say that they use social comparison to determine how to behave in particular situations. These findings reveal previously unexplored complexities in scholars?????? conceptions of emotional labor and authenticity.Item Facing Racism at 30,000 Feet: African American Pilots, Flight Attendants, and Emotional Labor(2012-07-16) Evans, LouwandaIn this qualitative study, I examine the experiences of African American pilots and flight attendants with emotional labor. Integral to existing theories of emotional labor is the incorporation of voices of color and their contemporary movement into professional industries. Essentially, most all theories of emotional labor were built through the examination of low-wage service workers in gendered or racially segregated occupations, with only recent incorporations of gendered occupations within professional settings. Using the theoretical concept of emotional labor, or the labor required to reduce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others, I argue that emotional labor is much more than labor produced within the confines of a job, but is also based on identity characteristics that directly influence interactions in the workplace. Therefore, I qualitatively examine, through in-depth interviews with more than thirty African American flight crew members, how emotional labor is influenced and performed when people of color are introduced to professional settings. The results of this study show that there are multiple dimensions of emotional labor that should be added to existing theory. Primarily, existing standards of emotional labor in the airline industry are a direct result of institutional structures and cultures created during a period of systematic exclusion that do not account for contemporary racism and sexism. Thus, performing emotional labor in this industry is unequally placed on those white women and people of color that had no input into its creation. The results of this study suggest that emotional labor should be inclusive of systemic racism perspectives as a method of understanding how salient identity characteristics, such as gender, race, and class, are directly connected to preconceived ideologies that influence interactions that call for emotional labor. Moreover, because African American men and women in this industry are underrepresented, emotional labor becomes a necessity in their interactions with coworkers, consumers, and management. In addition, African Americans experience highly regulated emotional labor that influence how they perform their jobs, interact with others, and formulate appropriate counter-narratives.Item The Emotional and Spiritual Dimensions of Being a Pastor: Authenticity and Identity(2011-10-21) Otey, Penny AddisonEmotional labor and its influence on authenticity and identity amongst human service workers has been the focus of numerous studies. Often these studies viewed identity as a stable sense of self. This study set out to examine emotional labor amongst clergy and how it may differ from the emotional labor experienced in other occupations, with the premise that individuals have multiple identities that shift and change depending on the situational context. A thematic analysis of interviews conducted with twenty-seven clergy and a textual analysis of denominational/church texts was conducted to examine the following ideas: 1) how clergy negotiated tensions of authenticity and identity in their work; 2) how clergy described the spiritual and emotional dimensions of their work; 3) how denominational texts address issues of spiritual and emotional labor; and, 4) if clergy felt enabled and/or constrained by denominational standards and beliefs. The results of this study indicated that emotional and spiritual labor amongst clergy is unique for several reasons. One, the emotional labor clergy engaged in served a positive function because they see it as means of helping others. Second, clergy were aware that emotional labor was intrinsic to the job and they engaged in activities to preempt or manage the tension they felt when the job required them to mask their true feelings and display organizationally preferred feelings. Finally, clergy enjoyed the spiritual dimension of their jobs; thus they were engaged in spiritual work (authentic spirituality), not spiritual labor (inauthentic spirituality). Results also indicated that denominational texts did convey a preferred identity or ideal for how pastors should behave. Pastors indicated that the denominational expectations and guidelines for pastors both enabled and constrained them. The majority of the pastors felt the freedom to disagree civilly and the denomination/church provided venues in which pastors could communicate their dissenting views. However, in some cases, pastors felt the denominational guidelines for the "ideal pastor" were in conflict with how they saw their own role as pastor and they left the denomination. Results also revealed how pastors? identities shifted and changed as the context in which they were ministering changed.