The Alienated Heart:

Hochschild’s ‘emotional
labour’ thesis and the
anticapitalist politics of
alienation
Paul Brook
Abstract

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s influential emotional labour thesis in The

Managed Heart (1983) exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the com-
modification of human feelings as customer service, and complements con-
temporary anticapitalist writing with an enduring influence and political
relevance that is underpinned by Hochschild's application of Marx’s alien-
ation theory. Critics have sought to blunt the politics of her thesis by reject-
ing as absolutist her condemnation of workers’ alienation. But her applica-
tion of alienation theory is not thorough, since her explicit usage of it is lim-
ited to only two of Marx’s four dimensions, and thus it stops short of theo-
rising alienation as generic to society. This undermines Hochschild’s argu-
ment on emotional labourers’ resistance, since she inadequately captures the
way workers are shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capi-
talism. The continuing political potency of her thesis requires that it should
be defended and strengthened.

Introduction: A very political theory

I
t is difficult to overestimate the enduring influence of the
emotional labour thesis found in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s
seminal work, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling (2003 [1983]). Debates on emotional labour continue to turn
on this pioneering contribution (Bolton, 2005), and yet it is an
unlikely candidate to have won such a high profile. Published in the
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Capital & Class 98

harsh, neoconservative climate of Reagan’s USA, the book

resolutely exposes and opposes the harm wrought by the expanding
demand for the commodification of emotions in the form of
customer service. Thus, The Managed Heart’s core arguments and
political conclusions are highly relevant to today’s anticapitalist
movement with its slogan of ‘our world is not for sale’,
underpinned by its damning analyses of neoliberalism, corporate
power and consumerism.
Since The Managed Heart, Hochschild’s emotional labour thesis
has spawned an immense range of studies that reach far into the
world of work beyond her original study of flight attendants and
debt collectors. These, which Bolton (2005: 53) has referred to
pejoratively as an ‘emotional labour bandwagon’, include studies of
nurses, Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers,
schoolteachers, psychotherapists, holiday representatives, call-
centre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others (see Steinberg &
Figart, 1999; Bolton, 2005). While these studies vary in the degree to
which they follow Hochschild in her explicit condemnation of
emotional labour, they tend to contain an implicit acceptance of its
exploitative and subordinating nature. Some have extended
Hochschild’s thesis to include additional dimensions, as in Witz et
al.’s (2003) addition of aesthetic labour, which stresses the increasing
commodification of service workers’ appearance and sexuality as
‘display’. Most notable has been the development of a feminist
dimension to emotional labour debates, which centres on the
socially reproduced, gendered commodification of emotion in
organisations, and on the related feminisation of most service work
(see Fineman, 2005; Colley, 2006; Lewis & Simpson, 2007). Thus
James (1989, 1992), in her pioneering studies of cancer nurses’
emotional labour, developed a feminist orientation in her analysis
of the source, maintenance and commodification of compassion in
the ‘caring workplace’.1
What underpins Hochschild’s politicised critique in The
Managed Heart 2 is the pivotal role played in it by her application of
Marx’s alienation theory. This is borne out by the central argument
of some of Hochschild’s critics, who seek to blunt her critique by
rejecting as absolutist her condemnation of the alienation workers
suffer through the commodification of their emotions. They argue
instead that customer service interactions are double-edged in that
they possess the potential to be subjectively satisfying as well as
distressing for the worker (Wouters, 1989; Tolich, 1993; Korczynski,
2002). In essence, they reject the notion that the experience of
having one’s emotions commodified is intrinsically alienating.
Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing movement
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 The Alienated Heart

towards the rejection of ‘emotional labour’ as a meaningful

category of wage labour (see Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Bolton, 2005;
Lewis & Simpson, 2007), on the basis that not all emotions are
commodified in the labour process, and that Hochschild’s
application of alienation in this context implies that workers are
rendered powerless. Consequently, Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’
theory is now challenged by a growing usage of Bolton’s (2005)
alternative, largely depoliticised thesis on ‘emotion management’ in
organisations. This argues that emotion workers exercise a
significant degree of emotional free choice because of the very
limited extent to which their emotions can be commodified.
Therefore, they enjoy a largely unalienated experience of the
labour process. To date it has been Hochschild’s opponents, rather
than those who wish to build on her thesis, who have recognised her
understanding and use of alienation as pivotal, and who have
thereby subjected it to sustained criticism (e.g. Wouters, 1989;
Tolich, 1993; Bolton, 2005).
Although it has been condemned as absolutist, Hochschild’s
application of alienation theory is nevertheless not thorough.3 She
restricts her explicit theorisation to the two of Marx’s (1975 [1844])
four dimensions that are specific to the workplace: product
alienation and labour process alienation. The first deals with
workers’ loss of control over and ownership of their labour
product, and the second with the removal of their control over the
labour process. However, while alienation has its source at the point
of production, Marx’s remaining two dimensions relate to the
wider corrosive effects of alienation in society, and should not be
separated from the first two (Yuill, 2005). These dimensions –
human nature alienation and fellow beings alienation (including
commodity fetishism) – deal with the way the suffusion of the
commodity form and market relations through society severely
distort our self-knowledge, social relations and understanding of
the world. While these dimensions are occasionally implicit in
Hochschild’s analysis, she does not explore them as wider social
dimensions of alienation contributing to and compounding the
direct commodification of workplace emotions. In not doing so,
she stops short of theorising alienation as generic to capitalist
society (Meszaros, 2005 [1970]; Billig, 1999). This effectively
localises the existence of alienation to workplace social relations.
Furthermore, The Managed Heart is devoid of an explicit class
analysis. This undermines Hochschild’s argument in explaining
individual and collective responses, including resistance by
emotional labourers. She compounds this weakness with an
insufficiently dialectical analysis (Rees, 1998) whereby she is unable
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Capital & Class 98

to capture the complexity and potential of contradictory

dimensions in the emotional labour process (Sturdy, 1998; Taylor,
1998). Thus Hochschild inadequately theorises the way workers are
shaped by alienation but not blinded to the reality of capitalism
(Lukács, 1974; Heller, 1978).
The combination of under-theorisation and theoretical gaps
generates weaknesses in her overall thesis that leave it open to more
valid criticisms than partisan claims of absolutism. In particular,
Hochschild is criticised for her tendency to dichotomise the
distinction between the private self and the commodified public self
(Wouters, 1989; Barbalet, 2001; Bolton, 2005); and for overestimating
the degree of managerial ownership and control of workers’
emotions (Ashworth & Humphreys, 1993; Barbalet, 2001; Bolton, 2005;
Theodosius, 2006), as a consequence of which she presents frontline
workers as ‘crippled actors’ (Bolton & Boyd, 2003).
Whatever the weaknesses in Hochschild’s thesis, it is neverthless
‘one that clearly politicises our understanding of emotion at work’
(Fineman, 2005: 6). What follows is a critical defence of Hochschild’s
emotional labour thesis at a time when there are growing efforts to
reject its Marxian core of alienation theory, and to diminish its
political content. Accordingly, this article aims to defend the thesis as
a valuable contribution and a significant building block for a still thin
Marxist debate on emotional labour.4 It begins with an exposition of
Hochschild’s thesis, followed by an analysis of the ‘emotional labour’
concept against each of Marx’s four dimensions of alienation.
Central to this assessment is the question of the adequacy of her
theorisation of worker’s resistance arising from the alienation of
emotional labour, and how it can be strengthened and developed
within the classical Marxist tradition (see Rees, 1998).

Emotional labour in play

The Managed Heart’s opening lines set the analytic and political tone
for what is to come. Hochschild begins by citing the case of the
young boy in a wallpaper factory discussed by Marx in Capital. She
notes Marx’s point that the boy is no more than an instrument of
labour, and expresses a fundamental concern at the human cost.
Hochschild then makes a direct comparison between the boy in the
nineteenth-century wallpaper factory and a flight attendant over a
century later:

The work done by the boy in the wallpaper factory called for
a co-ordination of mind and arm, mind and finger, and mind
and shoulder. We refer to it simply as physical labor. The
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 The Alienated Heart

flight attendant does physical labor when she pushes heavy

meal carts through the aisles, and she does mental work when
she prepares for and actually organizes emergency landings
and evacuations. But in the course of doing this physical and
mental labor she is doing something more, something I define
as ‘emotional labor’. This labor requires one to induce or sup-
press feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance
that produces the proper state of mind in others. (p. 7)

Here Hochschild is laying the foundations for her argument that

the human cost of performing emotional labour is as harmful as
that of the physical and mental labour discussed by Marx. This is
because ‘beneath the difference between physical and emotional
labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work:
the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of
self – either the body or the margins of the soul – that is “used” to
do the work’ (p. 7).
The early introduction of alienation theory is joined by another
equally fundamental use of Marx’s critique of wage labour;
namely, the distinction between exchange value and use value in the
commodification of emotions. This is integral to Hochschild’s
primary definition of emotional labour as ‘the management of
feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display;
emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has “exchange
value”. I use the synonymous terms “emotion work” or “emotion
management” to refer to those same acts done in a private context
where they have “use value” (p. 7).5
Hochschild’s analysis rests on this distinction between emotion
work and emotional labour. Emotion work is the process of
managing and presenting emotions in the private sphere of our
lives, such as amongst family and friends and even as a customer.
Emotional labour, in contrast, involves the commercialisation of
workers’ feelings through a transmutation 6 of ‘private sphere’
feelings into a package of emotions that is consumed by the
customer as a commodified service interaction. The process has the
effect of alienating frontline workers from their emotional product
through management’s wresting of formal ownership and control
from workers of the form, timing, giving and withdrawal of
feelings, moods and their display.
Two other aspects compound this loss of control. First, there is
an unequal relationship with the customer: ‘the customer is always
right’. This is in contrast to our private lives, where we tend to
experience a much greater level of assumed and/or near equality
in our emotional interactions:
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Capital & Class 98

In private life, we are free to question the going rate of

exchange and free to negotiate a new one. If we are not satis-
fied, we can leave; many friendships and marriages die of
inequality. But in the public world of work, it is often part of
an individual’s job to accept uneven exchanges, to be treated
with disrespect or anger by a client, all the while closeting into
fantasy the anger one would like to respond with. Where the
customer is king, unequal exchanges are normal. (pp. 85–6)

Second, management imposes codified feeling rules on emotional

labourers in order to ensure the delivery of the requisite quality of
customer service. These rules dictate the form, content and
appropriateness of emotional displays, thereby separating workers
from the design and control of the labour process. Workers,
therefore, are estranged from their emotional product and the
process of emotion production.
Hochschild argues that employers’ feeling rules increasingly go
further than demanding behavioural compliance, which she calls
surface acting. This is because management frequently strives for
emotional workers to internalise the feelings they are required to
display, not only in order to enhance the ‘quality’ of the emotional
display, but also to diminish the likelihood of emotive dissonance
(Jansz & Timmers, 2002) caused by the strain of continuously
bridging what is really felt with what has to be feigned over long
periods. Hochschild argues that the response of many emotional
labourers is to ‘try to pull the two closer together either by
changing what we feel or by changing what we feign’ (p. 90), which
she calls deep acting.
Deep acting is the result of a worker’s seeking a more
comfortable space for her self, free from the dangers of emotive
dissonance (Jansz & Timmers, 2002) through the fusion of her real
and acted emotional labour. However, despite fusion’s apparent
benefits, there is ‘a cost to be paid’ (p.119), since it is a condition that
requires a systemic suppression of the real self, thereby deepening
the individual’s subordination to her commodification. However, as
a contradictory and unstable condition, it can transform into a
nascent form of resistance:

Often the test comes when a company speed-up makes per-

sonal service impossible to deliver because the individual’s
personal self is too thinly parcelled out to meet the demands
made on it. At this point, it becomes harder and harder to
keep the public and private selves fused... The worker won-
ders whether her smile and the emotional labor that keeps it
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 The Alienated Heart

sincere are really hers. Do they really express a part of her?

Or are they deliberately worked up and delivered on behalf
of the company? (p.133)

Alienated from what?

Underlying Hochschild’s conceptualisation of emotional labour is

her ‘social theory of emotions’. Such a theory, she argues, has to
possess both social and psychological dimensions in that it needs to
be able to ask how the construction of social interaction for profit
influences an individual’s personality. Hence, while employers’
feeling ‘rules run deep … so does the self that struggles with and
against them’ (p. 229).
Hochschild states that to manage feeling is to consciously strive
to alter a pre-existing emotional state that is indicative of a given
self. Yet this notion of a psychological given self does little to
articulate its relationship with the socially constructed dimension
of emotion. For this, Hochschild turns to Freud’s notion of the
signal function of emotion, whereby messages such as anxiety,
delight, hope and despair signal to the individual that there is the
presence of danger, pleasure and so forth from within or external
to the individual. Signal function achieves the integration of the
social and the psychological dimensions by being a manifestation of
the innate self that is profoundly contingent upon socially
constructed prior expectations:

The idea of prior expectation implies the existence of a prior

self that does the expecting … Most of us maintain a prior
expectation of a continuous self, but the character of the self
we expect to maintain is subject to profoundly social influ-
ence. Insofar as the self and all we expect is social … the way
emotion signals messages to us is also influenced by social
factors. (pp. 231–2)

Hochschild’s theory of emotion, therefore, binds together the

psychological and the social into an interdependent and dynamic
unity that is akin to Marx’s ontology of the dialectical unity of the
mind and body (Marx, 1975 [1844]; Meszaros, 2005 [1970]). It does
this by integrating the notions of emotion as a signal function – a
biological sensory function – with socially constructed prior
expectations as indicative of the given self. Without such a
conceptualisation, it would be incoherent to theorise alienated
emotional labour, for without a theory of human nature, how is it
possible to identify an alien condition that violates the individual?
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Capital & Class 98

Hochschild’s given self, like Marx’s theory of ‘human nature’,

appears to oppose the common-sense idea that each individual
possesses a common, discrete and fixed human nature independent
of society (Ollman, 1976 [1971]). While Hochschild does not provide
an explicit anthropology of the given self, her implied
conceptualisation is not incompatible with Marx’s materialist
conception, which argues that the only nature-imposed condition
of all human existence is the requirement to labour on the
environment in order to satisfy human needs. As sentient beings,
humans are different from other animals – we are reflective and
imaginative in the abstract before concretely acting on our natural
environment (Marx, 1976 [1867]). Marx calls our capacity for
conscious labour species being. This is not just a theory of individual
human nature: species being is inherently social because in order to
survive, individuals have to enter into collaborative,
interdependent relationships.
For Marx, the source of alienation in capitalist society is the
necessity for the overwhelming majority of people to labour for a
wage in order to ensure physical survival and a semblance of
emotional dignity, where a minority, the ruling class, owns and
controls the means of production. A worker, therefore, hands over
ownership and effective control of her labour – in other words, her
species being. For Marx, this essential relationship between worker
and capital generates alienation in capitalist society:

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not
belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not con-
firm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable
and not happy, does not develop free physical and mental
energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the
worker only feels himself when he is not working … (Marx,
1975: 326)

Here, Marx explicitly refers to the ruination of body and mind.

This understanding of mind and body as an interrelated dialectical
unity (Yuill, 2005) is crucial to the task of interpreting the efficacy
of Hochschild’s argument that emotional labour is alienating in the
same way as the production of physical commodities.

Hochschild’s half-made theory of alienation

Marx (1975), as indicated above, identified four dimensions of

alienation, with the first two – product alienation and labour
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 The Alienated Heart

process alienation – dealing with the immediate conditions of

workplace relations. The second two, fellow beings alienation and
human nature alienation, encompass capitalist society as a whole.
These dimensions are not separate processes with discrete sets of
symptoms, but are rather aspects of a generic process that is
endemic to capitalism. This is because the whole of humankind is
alienated, in that it suffers a loss of control because the power of
capital is embodied as an alien force that confronts individuals and
society as a hostile and potentially destructive power (Meszaros,
2005 [1970]). How thorough and adequate, then, is Hochschild’s
application of alienation theory, and what are its consequences for
her theorisation of emotional labour?

Product alienation
The worker is alienated from the product of her labour by the
simple fact that it is not she who owns or controls its disposal, but
rather the capitalist. The consequence is that the product of her
labour is objectified and appears as external to herself rather than
as an affirmation of herself, her species being. Thus while the
worker invests her energies and life in the production of the
commodity, it is a one-way relationship – a ‘one-sided enrichment
of the object’ (Ollman, 1976: 144) – for which she receives only
money. The creative power, energy, thought and consideration that
is required in order ‘to make something vanishes into the object of
alienated production, which in turn is not replaced by other
revitalising creative power’ (Yuill, 2005: 135). Hochschild concurs
with the idea of a ‘one-sided enrichment’ when she states that
when the product ‘is a smile, a mood, a feeling, or a relationship, it
comes to belong more to the organization and less to the self ’ (p.
198). This is because for the cabin crew in Hochschild’s study, their
smiles ‘were seen as an extension of the make-up, the uniform, the
recorded music, the soothing pastel colours of the airplane decor,
and the daytime drinks, which taken together orchestrate the mood
of the passengers’ (p. 8). Hochschild, like Marx, sees this
estrangement from the product of labour as having a human cost
for emotional labourers. While Marx makes the general point that
alienated labour ‘mortifies the flesh and ruins the mind’,
Hochschild is more specific and identifies emotive dissonance
amongst many cabin crew where they experience ‘burnout’, feeling
‘phoney’ and ‘emotional deadness’ (see Jansz & Timmers, 2002).
Emotive dissonance is the result of the worker’s investing
emotionally in her performance over a prolonged period. The
cumulative effect is that she suffers an emotional malnourishment
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Capital & Class 98

caused by an insufficient revitalising return on her investment.

Hochschild argues that there comes a breaking point between the
real and acted self, and that as a matter of self-protection she is
forced to ‘divide’: ‘some workers conclude that only one self
(usually the non-work self) is the real self. Others, and they are the
majority, will decide that each self is meaningful and real in its own
different way and time’ (p. 132).
Hochschild appears to argue that emotional labour elicits a
more profound form of alienation than even Marx imagined. This
is because the majority of workers can only cope with their
estrangement by ‘fusing’ their commercialised selves with their
real, ‘private sphere’ selves. Hochschild’s argument, therefore,
implies that Marx underestimated the potency of alienation when
he stated that ‘the worker only feels himself when he is not
working’ (1975: 326).

Labour process alienation

Closely allied to product alienation is labour process alienation,
wherein workers lack control over the process of production – that
is, the conditions under which we work, how our work is organised,
what we produce and the effect it has on our health (Cox, 1998). For
Marx, by wresting control of the labour process, capital denudes us
of our intrinsic capacity to work creatively and transforms it into
its opposite. Thus a worker experiences ‘power as impotence …
[and his] own physical and mental energy, his personal life … as an
activity directed against himself, which is independent of him and
does not belong to him’ (1975: 327).
Another dimension to labour process alienation is the fact that
work is under the control of forces hostile to us. This is because
owing to the competitive nature of capitalism, managers are under
constant pressure to extract more value from the worker, thereby
cheapening the worth of the individual to capitalism. As
capitalism develops and corporations grow larger, there is a
general tendency for work to be designed to achieve ever-greater
economies of scale, unit efficiencies and labour productivity,
thereby enhancing the importance of the productive process, its
logistics and technologies over the skills and value of the
individual. The result is that ‘the special skill of each individual,
insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity
before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and mass of labour
that are embodied in the factory mechanism ’ (Marx, 1976: 548),
and the ‘idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere
sources of error’ (Lukács, 1974: 89).
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 The Alienated Heart

Hochschild echoes Marx and Lukács when she argues that

contemporary service jobs ‘are now socially engineered and
thoroughly organised from the top’ (p. 8). Yet management’s control
of workers’ display and performance is contradictory and unstable.
She details how, during cabin-crew training, airlines seek to
suppress workers’ negative emotions, which are largely borne of
their experience of the service labour process where they are
‘treated with disrespect or anger by a client, [yet] all the while
closeting into fantasy the anger one would like to respond with’ (pp.
85-86). For her, companies’ efforts to control the service labour
process is an estranging experience in which ‘the more seriously
social engineering affects our behaviour and our feelings, the more
intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing
them (is this me or the company talking?)’ (p. 34). Moreover,
Hochschild is at pains to highlight the alienation that derives from
the progressive devaluing of a worker’s creative contribution
through the increasing rationalisation of the labour process.
Hochschild shows how the worker is no more than an appendage to
the externally imposed smile factory system, and her personal,
defensive responses are treated by employers as ‘mere sources of
error’, such as offering ‘a thin crust of display’ (p. 21) in order to
cope with management’s ever increasing customer service targets.
For Hochschild, new forms of deskilling compound the
alienation generated by the corporate control of the labour
process, and the ever-greater competitive pressures to rationalise
the service production system. Following Braverman (1974), she
argues that there is a tendency for the ‘mind’ of the work process
to ‘move up the hierarchy leaving jobs de-skilled and workers de-
valued’ (p. 119). For example, cabin crew training on how to deal
with angry passengers is a form of deskilling. This is because the
‘mind of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what
mental moves are needed to settle down an “irate” has moved
upstairs in the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to
implementing standard procedures’ (p. 120).
In summary, Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour explicitly
argues that workers are systematically alienated from their service
product and the labour process that determines the form and
timing of its manufacture. However, while her explicit theorisation
peters out beyond the immediacy of workplace relations, she does
provide a partial analysis of the impact of emotional labour on
wider capitalist social relations. As a result, it is possible to argue
that her thesis, rather than rejecting the remaining two dimensions
of Marx’s theory of alienation, instead possesses the potential for
their acceptance and integration.
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Capital & Class 98
Human nature alienation
Human nature alienation is that aspect of alienation which
addresses the damaging and distorting effects of capitalist society
on our species being. For while capitalism has immeasurably
enhanced our collective capacity to transform the world through
medicine, travel, communication, modern agriculture, etc. in the
interests of all, this capacity is thwarted. This is because capitalism
suppresses our potential to realise our collective species being,
based as it is on an anarchic drive for profits, competition, class
division and exploitation. Hochschild appears to hint at an
understanding of the way capitalism’s capacity to meet the needs
and desires of humanity is thwarted by its need to put profit before
all else:

Massive people-processing – and the advanced engineering of

emotional labor that makes it possible – is a remarkable
achievement. It is also an important one, for a good part of
modern life involves exchange between total strangers, who in
the absence of countermeasures and in the pursuit of short-
term interest, might much of the time act out suspicion and
anger rather than trust and good will … But like most great
achievements, the advanced engineering of emotional labour
leaves new dilemmas in its wake, new human costs. (p. 187)

Hochschild is ambiguous, however, as to whether she believes

the costs of emotional labour to be removable without replacing
the whole process of commodification of emotions or, more
simply, reorganising the process. At several points, she seems to
suggest that workers can avert alienation by successfully managing
their ‘true self ’: ‘When feelings are successfully commercialized,
the worker does not feel phoney or alien; she feels somehow
satisfied in how personal her service actually was. Deep acting is a
help in doing this, not a source of estrangement’ (p. 136).
This is a shift away from Marx’s theorisation of alienation as a
systemic dimension of capitalist relations of production, and
towards one that posits it as primarily an individualised,
pathological condition that can be ‘treated’ within capitalist social
relations. Indeed, subsequent writers have drawn on this
inconsistency to argue that it is possible to remove the alienating
psychological costs of emotional labour by redesigning the work to
ensure greater autonomy and control for the individual (Wharton,
1996; Ashworth & Humphrey, 1993). In short, Hochschild’s
ambiguous theorisation and her inconsistencies on the nature of
alienation and its existence beyond the immediate realm of
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 The Alienated Heart

workplace relations serve to blunt her overall critique of the

generic commodification of human feelings.
Conversely, Hochschild also suggests that capitalism’s
deepening and spreading market relations have a cumulative spill-
over effect into wider society. In her 2003 afterword to The Managed
Heart, she refers to the increasing take-up of ‘personal services’ and
the way private life is progressively invaded and shaped by
commodified emotional labour, suggesting a ‘vital link between
larger social contradictions and private efforts to manage feeling’
(p. 202). These contradictions, she states, which generate emotional
strain between the real and false selves, now exist not only at work
but also at home, and increasingly ‘in between’ work and home.
Thus she tentatively hints at the possibility of an analysis that
would highlight emotional labour’s alienating, corrosive effects
beyond the workplace.

Fellow beings alienation and commodity fetishism

‘
Fellow beings alienation’ refers to social relations between individuals
that increasingly take the form of relationships between
commodities. In a society based on the production and consumption
of commodities, the pervasiveness of commodities can seem an
inevitable, even a natural state of affairs (Lukács, 1974; May, 2006).
Marx states that under capitalism, the wealth of society appears as an
‘immense collection of commodities’, with the commodity becoming
a ‘universal category of society as a whole’ (Marx, 1976: 125).
For Marx, this generates a multi-dimensional phenomenon
throughout capitalist society, which he calls ‘commodity fetishism’
(1976). Consequently, we experience relationships with each other
not as individuals, but as if we were extensions of capitalism
(Ollman, 1976). As capitalism develops, commodification
encroaches and invades our lives to the point at which a life outside
market relations and independent of commodities is unimaginable.
Even the most intimate aspects of our lives are touched and shaped
(Hochschild, 2004), for from cars, washing machines, art, dating,
dog walking and customer service to the ever-present commercial
images of beauty, success and happiness, our lives and self-
concepts are inscribed by commodification. Whatever the personal
or social usefulness of these commodities, their exchange value
takes precedence. Consequently, ‘things’ dominate our existence.
Even as consumers, we are alienated thanks to our enmeshed
dependence on the market, where ‘the very character of man is at
the mercy of his products, of what they make him want and
become in order to get what he wants’ (Ollman, 1976: 146).
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Capital & Class 98

Individuals also relate to each other in society as objectified

bearers of the commodities that they produce, possess and
consume. The consequence is that commodities acquire social and
human characteristics, as with ‘cool’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘sexy’
brands, owing to our entering into social relationships based on the
amount (especially money) and quality of commodities we possess
(Lodziak, 2002). Our social interactions are also determined by our
place and function in the market as managers, staff members, sales
assistants, customers, clients, professionals, unemployed workers
and so on. Thus we encounter each other in competitive market
relationships in which we are either in an inferior or a superior
position (Cox, 1998). In other words, we are reified individuals and
enter into reified relationships as the bearers of economic
relations. As such, we are the personification of the commodities
we possess (Lukács, 1974).
Reification necessarily generates an obscuring of the actual
social relations that lie behind the production of any commodity.
We connect with our fellow humans through the lens of
commodities, where all knowledge of and understanding of how
and why our fellow humans produced the thing is submerged
beneath a fetishised embrace of a commodity’s assumed and
claimed properties (Ollman, 1976). One example of a fetishised
embrace is that of customer service. As customers, we expect sales
staff to respect and value us irrespective of whether that respect
and value is sincere. Thus commodity fetishism7 is the process
whereby human relationships are reified as exchange values,
human qualities are invested in material commodities, and real
social relations of production are obscured to the point at which
the world of markets and commodities appears to be almost
independent of human design.
Hochschild does not acknowledge fellow beings alienation and
commodity fetishism as being a dimension to Marx’s theory, nor to
her own. However, as in the case of human nature alienation, her
theorisation does not close off its existence. Indeed, The Managed
Heart is replete with references to and examples of commodity
fetishism. She shows how cabin crews’ existence as commodified
labour power generates a fetishised discourse on their worth as
things. Managers continually remind them of their disposability
due to competition for cabin crew jobs. Even more starkly,
managers refer to them as ‘bodies for the flight’ and ‘breakage’
when they are too ill to work (p. 136). Hochschild recognises this as
reification when she explains that ‘surface and deep acting in a
commercial setting … make one’s face and feelings take on the
properties of a resource … to be used to make money’ (p. 55). She
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 The Alienated Heart

further explains that this is underpinned by a broader process

centred on a corporate logic in the airline industry, which makes ‘a
series of links between competition, market expansion, advertising,
heightened passenger expectations about rights to display, and
company demands for acting’ (p. 90). This can reasonably be
interpreted as the construction of a reified, ‘taken for granted’
perspective by workers on the naturalness of their being treated as
things.
While Hochschild’s arguments are largely consistent with the
concept of commodity fetishism at the level of workplace
relations, she is ambiguous as to the extent to which it exists in
other spheres of commodified social relations. Her theoretical
ambiguity, however, does not preclude the occasional tantalising
commentary on the damaging impact of emotional labour in wider
society:

Estrangement from display, from feeling, and from what feel-

ings can tell us is not simply the occupational hazard of a few.
It has firmly established itself in the culture as imaginable. All
of us know the commercialization of human feeling at one
remove – as witness, consumer, or critic – and have become
adept at recognizing and discounting commercialised feeling.
‘Oh, they have to be friendly, that’s their job’. (pp. 189–90)

The significance of Hochschild’s ambiguity is that she leaves

open the theoretical door to the argument that away from the
immediacy of workplace relations, capitalist society possesses
spaces free from alienation, whereas Marx’s commodity fetishism
theory makes plain that in a society based on commodity
production, there is no escape from alienation. As Meszaros
explains, ‘selling is the practice of alienation [as] alienation is
characterized by the universal extension of “saleability” [and] by
the conversion of human beings into “things” so that they could
appear as commodities on the market’ (2005 [1970]: 35).

Commodity fetishism, class consciousness and resistance

Commodity fetishism is central to Marx’s theory of class

consciousness and class struggle. This is because commodity
fetishism produces the appearance ‘that class exploitation is not a
social product but the inevitable and unalterable result of the
functioning of the market’ (Rees, 1998: 95). Class distinctions are
also submerged by the common experience of being a customer.
This is particularly acute in contemporary ‘consumer capitalism’
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Capital & Class 98

thanks to the ideological elevation in status of consumers over

producers through the ‘myth of consumerism’ (Lodziak, 2002),
wherein workers and billionaires appear to possess, in equal
measure, ‘customer sovereignty’. Commodity fetishism, therefore,
is the harbinger of a distorted ideology peculiar to capitalism in
which ‘all men and their circumstance appear upside-down as in a
camera obscura’ (Marx & Engels, 1970 [1845]: 47). As such, under
capitalism ‘widespread social beliefs become so distorted that they
are insufficient for understanding the social conditions which have
produced such beliefs’ (Billig, 1999: 314).
Commodity fetishism may dominate the everyday consciousness
of workers, but it is not an ‘iron cage’ of ideological distortion. This
is because the wage-labour relationship comprises a central
contradiction that acts as a countertendency to commodity fetishism.
Thus, although capitalists treat workers’ labour power as if it were
another purchased tool to be exploited intensely, it is unlike any
other commodity, for it is not possible to separate the worker from
the labour power itself. When an item is bought from a shop, full
ownership and control of the commodity passes to the consumer.
However, the price, content and duration of labour power are
subject to continual haggling. Moreover, the ‘worker brazenly
accompanies his labor power right into the workplace and stands
protectively by it’ while arguing ‘about the terms of its sale’ (Rees,
1998: 221). For Lukács (1974), this central contradiction corrodes and
prises open the grip of commodity fetishism. This is because the
reified ‘laws’ of the market accept as reasonable this daily struggle –
antinomy – but cannot resolve the contradiction (Rees, 1998).
Workers, therefore, are compelled to address the social reality
of their commodification and its exchange as a struggle for justice
and dignity against exploitation and abuse by the capitalist.
Through this experience, nascent working-class consciousness
emerges and begins to oppose the distortions of commodity
fetishism, with the potential for workers to collectively ‘use this
insight to unravel all the other mystifications of human relations
that have taken on the appearance of relations between things’
(Rees, 1998: 222). Thus a contradictory consciousness exists within
classes and individuals, comprising a dialectical relationship
between commodity fetishism as bourgeois ideology, and class
consciousness. Alienation, therefore, is never a complete process
but is instead a contradictory one that generates the potential for
conscious resistance by workers to commodity fetishism and its
underpinning, dehumanising social relations.
The Managed Heart offers argument and evidence that supports
this analysis of the relationship between commodity fetishism and
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 The Alienated Heart

class consciousness, without itself utilising either concept.

Hochschild’s ‘transmutation of feelings’ is an unstable state,
vulnerable to the contradictions of capitalist accumulation
processes, as she explains: ‘When an industry speed-up drastically
shortens the time available between flight attendants and
passengers, it can become virtually impossible to deliver emotional
labour. In that event, the transmutation of emotion work, feeling
rules, and social exchange will fail’ (p. 121). The instability of
transmutation arises, for the most part, from the central
contradiction intrinsic to the wage-labour relationship: the daily
struggle over the terms of sale of workers’ emotional labour,
particularly in an increasingly competitive environment:

The companies worry that competitors may produce more

personal service than they do, so they continue to press for
‘genuinely friendly’ service. But they feel compelled to keep
the conveyor belt moving faster and faster. For workers, the
job of ‘enjoying the job’ becomes harder and harder. Rewards
seem less intrinsic to the work, more compensation for the
arduousness of it. (p. 125)

Hochschild explains that when management is seeking to

intensify emotional labourers’ work, there is a corresponding
reaction by many workers that undermines any such efforts, and
protects the workers’ perceived value of their labour power:

The company exhorts them to smile more, and ‘more sin-

cerely’, at an increasing number of passengers. The workers
respond to the speed-up with a slowdown: they smile less
broadly, with a quick release and no sparkle in the eyes, thus
dimming the company’s message to the people. It is a war of
smiles. (p.127)

Hochschild’s ‘war of smiles’ can be seen as a breach in the wall

of commodity fetishism that allows class consciousness to emerge.
As management’s speed-up bites, trade unionism gives expression
to workers’ ‘accumulated resentment and discontent’ (p. 126). This
burgeoning class consciousness is also evident in reactions to those
workers who respond positively to management’s work
intensification: they ‘become the “rate-busters” who are resented by
other workers’ (p. 130). Thus Hochschild acknowledges that there
are contradictions in the commodification of emotional labour that
generate resistance to management’s control of the labour process
– ‘As one veteran put it: “The more the company sees the battle, the
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Capital & Class 98

tougher they get with the regulations. They define them more
precisely. They come up with more categories and more
definitions. And more emotionalizing. And then, in time, we reject
them even more”’ (p. 130).
Hochschild’s analysis, therefore, interprets resistance to
exploitation and subordination – and its accompanying
undermining of commodity fetishism – as being generated by the
contradictory nature of wage (emotional) labour.

‘Crippled actors’ or resistive agents?

Hochschild’s account of resistance demonstrates that she

understands that workers are reflexive and possess the agency to
begin to challenge their alienation. This contradicts a commonly
made criticism of her thesis, namely that she presents emotional
labourers as ‘crippled actors’ in that their ‘transmutation of feelings’
implies they cannot exert an active and controlling force in
relationships with management and customers (Bolton & Boyd,
2003; Bolton, 2005). This is because Hochschild is said to imbue
management’s feeling rules with such dominance that the
performance of customer service becomes an atomised experience
for the worker, where emotional reassessment is anaesthetised by
alienation. This is evidently not the case, for Hochschild clearly
theorises workers’ transmutation of feelings as being inherently
unstable owing to the daily playing-out of the struggle at the
frontier of control of emotional labour power. Equally, she is able
to explain how the breakdown of ‘transmutation of feelings’
frequently transforms itself into conscious, organised resistance.
Nevertheless, such is the frequency of the ‘crippled actors’ charge
and its milder form of Hochschild’s theory being too ‘one-
dimensional’ (Callaghan & Thompson, 2002: 248), that her account
of resistance requires more detailed critical assessment.
Since The Managed Heart, competition, restructuring and work
intensification have fuelled unionisation and militancy in the
airline industry globally (Blyton, 2001), and the resistive ‘emotional
labour’ of cabin crew has proved a rich source of empirical study
(e.g. Linstead, 1995; Tyler & Taylor, 2001; Bolton & Boyd, 2003).
Indeed, Linstead’s (1995) account of the 1993 strike by Cathay
Pacific cabin crew against staff cuts and the consequent speeding-
up of work appears to take up the ‘story’ where Hochschild leaves
off. In it, Linstead captures the contradictory struggle between
management’s normative (and gendered) emotional demands, and
the class-conscious nature of resistance to them: ‘In the
advertisements, the Cathay girls fix sultry smile then avert their
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 The Alienated Heart

faces with Asian humility … this servile image has been smashed
by the perfumed picket line which has shown itself to be tough,
resilient and well orchestrated’ (p. 200).
While the airline industry represents the best example of
militant trade unionism by emotional labourers, there is also
evidence that in their day-to-day activities, cabin-crew ‘remain very
aware … that they are offering an empty performance … without ever
buying-in to the norms set by the company’ (Bolton & Boyd, 2003:
301). Moreover, there exists a plethora of evidence from other
service industries of day-to-day, informal individual and collective
resistance, irrespective of a union presence (e.g. Ogbonna & Harris,
2004; Sandiford, 2007). Thus in call centres, Mulholland found that
‘sales sabotage, working to rule, work avoidance, absenteeism and
high turnover are expressions of a workplace antagonism rooted in
and against the social relations of production’ (2004: 720). Moreover,
workers invariably direct their resistance against customers as well
as against managers. In betting shops, Filby (1992) found that while
women are employed for their ‘figures’, their ‘personality’ and their
‘bums’, they exploited their sexualised emotional labour to assert
informal control by developing a culture of sexual humour to
ridicule and humiliate male managers and unpleasant ‘punters’.
Likewise, Taylor and Bain’s (2003b) call-centre research found that
workplace activists used a culture of humour to subvert anti-union
managerial authority in their campaign for trade union recognition.
Thus, Taylor (1998: 99) is correct to argue that workers experience
an ‘incomplete transmutation’, and that as a resource for the
creation of surplus value, the emotional labour of service
employees is a ‘double-edged sword’ (Filby, 1992).
Studies on resistance amongst emotional labourers in a range of
service settings tend to highlight the triadic nature – which includes
the customer – of the labour process (Korczynski, 2002; Sandiford,
2007). Likewise, many point to the existence of shifting boundaries at
the ‘frontier of control’ (e.g. Tyler & Taylor, 2001; Taylor & Bain,
2003a), where ‘management control of emotional labour can be partial,
incoherent and often contradictory’ (Taylor, 1998: 100). This is due to
the ‘exacerbated’ labour indeterminacy of emotional production
(Bolton, 2005: 62), as management struggles to control the thoughts,
feelings and behaviours of workers during customer interaction.
Accordingly, service regimes are commonly marked by a process of
informal, ‘continual negotiation and re-negotiation [with
management/customers] over the transformation of emotional labour
power into a serviceable product’ (Callaghan & Thompson, 2002: 251).
It is not surprising, therefore, that Hochschild’s notion of a
‘successful transmutation of feelings’ should risk appearing to
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Capital & Class 98

consign workers to a disabling, fetishised state. This is a consequence

of her partial application of Marx’s theory of alienation, which
disallows an explicit conceptualisation explaining the contradictory
experience of emotional labour dialectically. Thus she is unable to
produce a conceptualisation of workers’ consciousness as
contradictory and their agency as constrained, comprising an
antagonistic interrelationship between the twin potentialities of
emotional assimilation of feeling rules and class-conscious
resistance. Such a theorisation would enable an explicit explanation
of how workers retain and exercise sufficient control over their
emotional labour so as to alleviate their day-to-day working lives –
or even to exert a counter controlling force in relationships with
management and customers (Callaghan & Thompson, 2002).
While Hochschild does not, in her theory, close off the potential
for the type of daily getting by and getting back activities outlined
above, she largely omits an explicit analysis of them. Moreover, her
lack of a theorisation of class means that she does not possess the
conceptual armoury to account for them as preconditions and
precursors to more class-conscious acts of resistance, in contrast to
more recent, Marxist oriented labour process analysis (LPA)
studies of emotional labourers (e.g. Taylor, 1998; Taylor & Bain,
2003a, 2003b; Mulholland, 2004). These studies have sought to
overcome this weakness by arguing for the integration of the
emotional labour concept with LPA’s theorisation of relations of
production as antagonistic and contradictory, thereby producing ‘a
complex interplay of compliance, consent and resistance’ (Taylor,
1998: 100). Nevertheless, to date there has not been a detailed and
systematic assessment of Hochschild’s theoretical adequacy from
within the LPA tradition.
Finally, it should be noted that Hochschild explores the
experience of emotional labour principally through the
individualised, conceptual lens of her distinction between
individuals’ surface and deep acting, and ‘transmutation of feelings’
(Bolton, 2005). By focusing on the immediacy of the individualised
commodification process, in contrast with the LPA approach, she
insufficiently locates her analysis in the wider context of workplace
class relations. Thus, she underemphasises the basis, form and
significance of collectively forged organisational space for worker
agency and activity outside and within the commodification
process. Yet a lack of emphasis is not the same thing as a theoretical
closure, as Bolton and Boyd (2003) and Bolton (2005) have argued.
Rather, Hochschild’s portrayal of the emotional labour workplace is
one in which consent, indifference and conscious resistance by
workers are ever present, but are unduly overshadowed by her
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 The Alienated Heart

conceptual foregrounding of the deleterious impact on individuals

from the commodification of their emotions.

Conclusion: Reasserting the human cost of emotional labour

The Managed Heart may suffer from theoretical ambiguities,

inconsistencies and gaps, but its core arguments remain tenable
within the context of a classical Marxist analysis (Rees, 1998).
Hochschild convincingly argues that the commodification of
emotions is an acutely alienating variant of wage labour that
systemically pits emotional labourers into a daily struggle to secure
a dignified sense of self. It is fought out in the context of
management’s continual search for enhanced performance, driven
by intensifying capital accumulation strategies. Emotional labourers
experience this pressure collectively and, as Hochschild
demonstrates, frequently resist it through trade unionism. Her
thesis, therefore, offers a trenchant critique of the harm caused by
the production of customer service – and the commodification of
emotions more generally – as a core feature of so-called ‘consumer
capitalism’. In doing so, The Managed Heart can be said to be an early
example of contemporary anticapitalist-style critiques of
consumerism and the profound alienation suffered by its producers.
The Managed Heart’s legacy remains a powerful one, if
theoretically enigmatic. As with all eclectic endeavours, there
exists the risk that divorcing a concept from its wider theoretical
foundations might diminish its potency and explanatory power.
While this is so with Hochschild, it is also the case that her
theorisation leaves sufficient space for a more rigorous and
politically potent analysis to emerge that restores the full range of
explanatory power to Marx’s theory of alienation in its application
to emotional labour. In this era of growing global resistance to
rampant commodification, a resilient and damning critique of
emotional labour is of vital necessity.

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Notes
1 Hochschild makes a largely theoretically unintegrated foray into the
gendered nature of emotional labour in The Managed Heart (pp. 162-
184).
2 Intriguingly, The Managed Heart is the only time Hochschild has
employed alienation in relation to emotional labour or in her
subsequent work on the commodification of everyday life (2004,
2005).
3 Hochschild’s partial application may be a consequence of her narrow
understanding of Marx’s concept. After reading an earlier draft of
this article, she commented, ‘It really made me think about alienation
in a larger way’ (2007). She is not alone in offering a partial rendering
of alienation, e.g. Barbalet (2001) and Lodziak (2002).
4 Heller (1978) provides a rare example of a Marxian attempt to
theorise emotion in relation to alienation. She argues that as
capitalism develops, it generates dominant ideological notions of
emotional appropriateness that are dependent on the needs of capital
and bourgeois society more generally. Thus it is possible to interpret
the increasing reification of customer norms throughout society, and
their attendant emotional requirements, as a product of contemporary
‘consumer capitalism’.
5 Hochschild is vague on whether all forms of wage labour comprising
emotional displays constitute alienating emotional labour. She
suggests that the all-important distinction is whether or not there is
‘exploitation of the bottom by the top’. Therefore, ‘It is not emotional
labour itself but the underlying system of recompense that raises the

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 The Alienated Heart

question of what the cost of it is’ (p. 12). Yet Hochschild does not
attempt to theorise what might constitute an exploitation of
emotional labour.
6 Hochschild deliberately chooses a ‘grand word’ here (p. 19). Her usage
is designed to express the grievous nature of the process, not to imply
permanent ‘mutation’.
7 This concept has been greatly developed by Lukács (1974) as reification.

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