Soundings a journal of politics and culture |
The idea to have a special Soundings issue on emotions came from conversations about care. The importance of care as a concept, and the changes it has undergone during the restructuring of the welfare state, have been highlighted in previous issues of the journal, notably The Public Good (No 4) and Active Welfare (No 8). During the Thatcher years, the shift from publicly funded to private care, and the replacement of state provision by the market, resulted in a cultural revolution that has changed the meaning of care. One indicator of this has been the change in language and the reprofiling of emotions in the public domain. On the face of it, ‘care’ has increasingly entered the arena of our everyday lives. Contract cleaners, identified on the backs of their uniforms as the care team, ‘wear’ it; security firms - Securicor cares – ‘do’ it; and familiars and strangers alike entreat us to take care, so implying that we ‘do’ it for ourselves.
When the idea for a special theme on emotions was first mooted, over four years ago, I began to keep a file. Into this file I piled newspaper clippings, articles and photographs which made emotional statements about care. I selected the articles to log a story about emotions. The file has since become an informal logbook, which tracks public displays of emotion in the late twentieth century. I have made a selection from my logbook for this issue of Soundings. Together with my commentary, they sketch out some of the changes that have taken place in our cultures of care over the last few years. The source is broadly limited to broadsheets such as the Guardian, Observer and New York Times.
The link between care and emotions is not new. Hilary Graham powerfully articulated it in the early Thatcher years when she wrote: ‘everyday conversations about caring are … conversations about feelings. When we talk about caring for someone we are talking about our emotion’.1 Graham is one of a number of feminist writers who have made a key contribution to the understanding of care, exposing its gendered nature and making it visible as labour in both the informal and formal sector. Women are the traditional carers at home and in the work place. With the decline of heavy industry though, the numbers of men engaged in the service sector is also rising. The implication is that, in the post-industrial era of late twentieth century Europe and North America, both men and women are more likely to be involved in relating to people rather than products. The growth in the numbers of unemployed among the traditional male ‘breadwinner’ also means that men will spend greater periods of time in the home than in the past while more women will enter the workforce.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is an important writer in this field and Stephen Lloyd Smith reviews her work in this issue, starting with The Managed Heart: the Commercialisation of Human Feeling (1983). He assesses the contribution Hochschild has made to our understanding of emotions and care in the Euro-American context. Hochschild is an American sociologist who first devised the term ‘emotional labour’ to describe the way in which two contrasting occupational groups in the USA service sector - flight attendants and debt collectors -managed their emotions to influence the feelings of others. In one case passengers were made to feel safe and cared for in a convivial safe place, while in the other, debtors were made to feel alarmed at the potential consequences of non-payment of bills. Hence flight attendants were portrayed as smiling, friendly, kind and courteous while debt collectors raised their voices and kept their distance.
In later work, Hochschild examined caring and emotions in the home and the interface with paid work. In The Second Shift (1989) fifty two-job couples who also cared for children under six were the subjects of study. Hochschild was particularly interested to find out how men and women managed their emotions and whether there were differences. Her enquiries led her to conclude that, despite the rhetoric of gender equality, there had been a stalled revolution when it came to child and home care. Equality was cosmetic, with the majority of women still lacking sufficient help from partners or kin. Despite family friendly policies offered by some employers, investigated in the Time Bind (1997), parents were opting to get away from home and the second shift to the more convivial and attractive option of paid work.
In a second essay in this issue, Stephen Lloyd Smith suggests that a theology of emotions can be inferred from Hochschild’s work. He shows how emotional labour can be used as an external marker of a caring society, but also to manipulate, manage, exploit and steal the soul. His speculations lead him to ask whether emotions should be considered as ‘special’ and therefore not for sale, or whether they should be welcomed in the workplace and in the home. If the latter position is adopted then it follows that emotions should be fought for in the same way as one would bargain for mental and manual labour. Furthermore, there is a need to recognise their value and to secure the conditions that sustain emotional labour through adequate remuneration, social and health benefits and the provision of caring spaces and places.
These arguments are not new. Ann Oakley’s research in the 1970s revealed housework to be a set of complex skills, which supported the feminist argument that it should be waged. 2 Given women’s prominence as carers and house keepers, there has been a certain reluctance on the part of some feminists to emphasise the value of care for fear of making women even more vulnerable to exploitation.
What is new about Hochschild’s work is that it offers a language for describing invisible work, paid or unpaid, that is taken for granted both in and outside the home. I discovered The Managed Heart while studying British student nurses in a health service just beginning to feel the impact of the Thatcher reforms.3 I then began to use the concept of emotional labour as a device for understanding the processes involved in learning to care, and found that emotionally supportive relationships were vital to the well-being of both students and patients. There were the equivalents of the debt collectors in hospitals too - ward sisters who were hierarchical and critical and instilled fear in students. In short, the conditions for sustaining emotional labour were very clearly visible.
Nursing and health care is one big minefield in the emotional labour stakes. In my log, I make the link between nursing and acting in an exploration of the similarities between these two forms of public performance and emotion management. I have identified occupations other than nursing and acting which require their workers to undertake emotional labour, such as air traffic controllers, doctors, ambulance workers, politicians. Steve Smith mentions others: teachers, the police, social workers, the Samaritans.
It is interesting to speculate as to whether the increased privatisation of the health service will lead to a commercialisation of the emotional labour of nurses and other public sector workers. For example, the images used to recruit nurses, raise money for research and advertise private health packages, always portray the nurse as the key carer, often smiling, always concerned and helpful to patients, their family and friends. Now more than ever, nurses’ emotional labour is at a premium, as the numbers of people opting for nursing as a career plummet to an all time low.
The images captured by Dympna Casey in her ‘Intensive Care’ photo-series go beyond care and concern to reveal anguish and grief, as all efforts to revive a patient fail. We see that as well as being highly technical, intensive care is also intensely emotional. In her picture ‘Behind the scenes’ we see two nurses sharing a moment of spontaneous emotion, unaware of the camera’s gaze. Through their laughter, they hold each other in a caring gesture. Rosy Martin’s photo-essay suggests that all carers need these moments so that overwhelming emotions can be contained and held, in order to nurture the ‘fragile part of the self’ to avoid burn-out.
Sue Williams describes more structured and systematic ways of building support systems into the teaching repertoire of student nurses. She shows how these systems encourage students to make connections between their ‘lay’ self and their ‘professional’ self, enabling them to communicate more sensitively. Such support systems are essential if nurses are going to stay in nursing.
I have also included the poem Miracle on St David’s Day, by Gillian Clarke, because it demonstrates that there are ways other than professional encounters to communicate with patients, even or especially ‘the insane’. It shows the power of poetry to make emotional connections in ways that cannot be easily expressed through normal language.
Over the last two decades, major political and social change in Europe and North America has reduced the state provision of care and increased the burden on personal carers, particularly women. In their essays, Marjorie Mayo, Prue Chamberlayne and Minoo Moallem go beyond the home to situate an analysis of care and emotions within the contemporary socio-political context. Marjorie Mayo makes connections between politics and emotions, unpacking the cosy notions that conceal the sometimes controlling and punitive dimensions of the ‘Third Way’ associated with New Labour. She describes how, contrary to expectation, Thatcher’s children are not hardened individualists accepting the rhetoric of the market unquestioningly. But they do want autonomy and respect. On the advice of his spin doctors, Tony Blair as the voice of New Labour offers a more caring, sharing society. Perhaps this is why when I asked a group of students what they understood by the term ‘emotional labour’ shortly after Blair had been elected opposition leader, one of them immediately replied Tony Blair!
The bigger picture across Europe has seen the collapse of communism, the rolling back of state provision, liberalisation of the marketplace, the fragmentation and casualisation of the workforce, and the development of the contract culture. A variety of third ways have emerged out of these changes, involving the reconfiguring of: public/private; state/voluntary; informal/formal. Prue Chamberlayne and Minoo Moallem give vivid examples of how these reconfigurations impact on the daily lives of carers who navigate and negotiate their own experiences of the Third Way and the realignment of personal and state power.
Prue Chamberlayne presents three case studies from East and West Germany and Britain, which illustrate the changing political cultures of the informal sphere. Each case study provides examples of how different social and political contexts, and the changing role of the state, create different cultures of care which enhance or limit carers’ lives and their capacity to care, as well as the lives of those cared for. The different cultures of care are accompanied by the need for different forms of emotion work to manage the care deficit within the domestic arena created by the shortfalls in the public provision of care.
In these accounts the gender dimension is prominent, but, as Prue Chamberlayne observed in discussion, the racial and class dimension of the argument is less apparent. This is because ethnic minority carers are effectively excluded by the system both bureaucratically and personally, which culminates in institutional forms of racism.
Still in Germany, Minoo Moallem, in her essay drawing on the experiences of Iranian immigrant entrepreneurs, puts the racial dimension on the agenda. She shows the blurring of boundaries between public and private, market and home, state and civil society which is caused by the gendered and racialised nature of the relations of care.. Minoo Moallem is also keen to challenge Euro-American interpretations of the immigrant experience, which fail to take account of power relations based on gender, class, race and geopolitical location.
This issue of Soundings addresses the theme of emotions and their manifestation and management in everyday life. As the articles and images illustrate, emotions are ever present, in politics, the media, at work and in the home. Hochschild provides a language to recognise their varied presentations as emotional labour and the conditions required to sustain it in both the public and private domain.
1. H. Graham, ‘Caring: a labour of love’, in J. Finch and D. Groves (eds), A Labour of Love: Women, Work and Caring, 1983.
2. A. Oakley, The Sociology of Housework, Martin Robinson London 1974.
3. P. Smith, The Emotional Labour of Nursing: How nurses learn to care, Macmillan, Basingstoke1992.
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