Notes on:
Vincent, C. and Braun, A. (2013)
'Being "fun" at work: emotional labour, class,
gender and childcare'. British
Educational Research Journal 39 (4):
751-68.
Dave Harris
This studies the experiences of students on level
two and level three child care courses use in the
concept of emotional labour. Expectations
are shaped by class and gender. There are a
number of "feeling rules" in the 'vocational
habitus'.
[A quote from Hochschild notes that the emotional
labour required in particular occupations will
reflects occupational and class differences,
gender and ethnicity]. 42 students were
interviewed, to see how they were able to develop
a vocational habitus [the term used by Colley and
others to refer to understanding what is required
in a job, how people should feel look and act, and
what sort of values and attitudes are
appropriate]. They were drawn from FE
colleges in greater London and were taking NVQs.
Interviews also asked for parental occupation and
educational levels, and the girls were mostly from
working class backgrounds, but frequently with
routine working or unemployed mothers.
Emotional labour, in response to expectations, is
likely to be shaped by class and gender.
Childcare [ECEC work—early childhood education and
care] is dominated by white working class girls in
the UK, is poorly paid and has low requirements in
terms of qualifications.
There have been attempts to raise the status of
ECEC workers by stressing the skilled and
professional nature of the role. Emotional
skills are often stressed in the form of an ethic
of care, although it is not common to discuss
caring and emotion openly. Instead, various
rhetoric is have developed referring to '"nurture,
protection, containment" and also, of course, to
indicate warmth and positive emotions'
(754). Emotions are understood in terms of
emotional scripts and these are are linked to
other social relations referring to '"power and
intimacy, authority and self hood"'..
Clearly they are subsets of more general norms and
expectations about the appropriate emotional
response. Hochschild has described emotional
scripts as '"feeling rules"'.
Early work here includes Goffman on the
presentation of self, the dramaturgical metaphor,
and the relevance of scripts, costumes and
sets. The notion of impression management
was developed by Hochschild in the work on
emotional labour—how particular positive emotions
are displayed in order to affect customers.
Hochschild saw that there was a high human cost,
as well as commercial gains for the company.
She developed the notion of feeling rules as norms
that affects how emotions are felt in particular
social relations. These were established by
management specifically, although they also relate
to 'wider, broader societal rules'. Feigning
emotions, '("surface acting")' is
exhausting. '"Deep acting"' works 'through
fusing the real and acted emotional self' (755),
but this suppresses 'the real self' and workers
become commodified. Deep acting can be seen
in perpetually warm and calm workers, including
'"the teacher who likes every student
equally"'[quoting Hochschild].
This can lead to alienation and burn out, although
possibly 'a middle ground of individual
settlement' might also be possible. Not all
jobs demand the same emotional skills, for
example, and sometimes 'relatively perfunctory
levels of emotional behaviour' will do.
Public sector work might not have an obvious
profit motive. Professionals might have more
say in the way in which they had very complex
forms of emotional management: one study found
that nurses were able to juggle their public faces
and performances, so 'their emotional labour is
presented as agentic and skilful'.
Emotional labour requires resources and
opportunities, however and these are available in
different ways to different class fractions, says
Colley: the emotions look universal, but they
require different 'repertoires of feeling', and
these are distributed in the usual ways.
With working class girls on caring courses, there
are particular expectations: they must become
'responsible, respectable carers' (756).
This may offer pleasures, but it is also labour
that becomes a commodity and that might lead to
alienation: it is Bourdieu's symbolic violence.
Emotion work is not usually explicitly discussed
in training courses, and is normally relegated to
the private sphere, just as women normally are
[says Boler]. Writers like Reay have
referred to the conversion of emotional capital in
the emotional labour to support children
schooling: she argues that emotional capital is
not so closely linked to social class, but it is
connected to context and resources. Huppatz (2009)
has apparently identified forms of gender capital:
one form involves caring, and some resources
are'"aligned to the female body"'(757), while
others refer to 'feminine qualities' like
mothering experience. Students on the course
saw these as natural, and deploying them as a
matter of common sense, something instinctive in
females. While this is a resource that can
be capitalized in order to provide an income,
rewards are diminished, and natural skills cannot
be converted in other fields: also, men can
display qualities' and behaviours stereotypically
thought of as feminine, but this can provide
problems, as with the three male childcare
students who 'were all acutely alert to homophobic
renderings of male childcare workers as gay and
therefore deviant'.
This makes an emphasis on emotions 'risky',
especially if they are also seen as something
antiintellectual, subjective. Emotions in
care work can reinforce essentialist notions about
women as emotional, and care workers can 'look
suspiciously like 'the "good woman"'. This
kind of thing can assist the differentiation by
gender within professions, with consequent low
status roles for women.
ECEC students need to manage the emotions of the
charges and also their own. There is 'a
dominant discourse of child rearing... A
particular style of emotional regulation' (758).
Parents are also expected to regulate the emotions
of their children, showing them how to name
emotions and speak about them, in a calm and
rational way. This is characteristic of
middle class mothers, and it involves
intellectualizing emotions so as to remain in
control. Negative emotions are seen as
threatening and as leading to 'disturbed and
disruptive children'. This approach can be
seen in student and tutor interviews and texts,
often using the term role model.
Nevertheless, some students found this kind of
behaviour management difficult, because children
do not understand the concept, or can react in an
emotional way, while staff can not discipline them
but must remain calm. Apparently they
perceived rules saying that they could never say
no. They sometimes contrasted their own
upbringing, their own experience and intuition,
and saw the approved approach as inauthentic
(759). Skepticism and resistance was common,
especially if there was no chance to discuss their
own opinions. When it came to their own
emotions, there was a lot of work 'to present an
appropriately wholesome image'. Working
class women were often particularly instructed
explicitly about self presentation, for example
told to conceal any interest in smoking, drinking
or sex out of work. They saw this as being
expected to be perfect, to engage in self
sacrifice.
Feeling rules get codified as good practice.
In this case, they included 'being happy, "fun"
and "smiley" at work, not getting too involved
with individual children and treating all children
equally'. Some students also said they could
never shown negative emotions, like being
grumpy. The vocational habitus 'apparently
requires authentic emotional engagement' (760)
with their children. Some of the usual
subversive strategies to resist managerial
demands, such as the use of humour, were not
available. Colley has noticed that demands
can sometimes be contradictory—detachment with
nurturing, for example. What is actually
required seems to be 'a careful blend of warmth
and restraint', and students constantly talked
about the need to maintain the line between the
personal and the professional, being authentic
enough, but never full on. We know from
Goffman that the provision of a backstage area can
help teachers express negative emotions and vent
their frustrations. Without them, workers
can simply go through the motions, in Hochschild's
phrase, or encounter 'breaking points'. In
this case, sometimes students made relationships
with particular children which were then 'deemed
inappropriate by their managers'. One
student reported an event in a mixture of
emotional and managerial language.
Students varied in terms of their commitment to
child care as a career, but they tried to relate
to the views of placement staff and course tutors,
to avoid excessive friendliness, or show any
favouritism: sometimes this led to anxiety about
physical contact with the children. Many
students were seen by their tutors as vulnerable
themselves with low self esteem, and these were
the target of specific advice about not
encouraging excessive dependence. However,
getting the balance tried can be difficult even
for the experienced ones, and anxiety and guilt
might be a constant. If these stressful
emotions are ignored, emotional disengagement can
result. Staff support to process their
feelings might be required. Other
professions, like nursing, seem to display the
same tensions.
Although there were some rejection of the
prescribed approach, most students accepted what
they had been told. Some students only
modified their affectionate behaviour. Those
who resisted most tended to be labelled as not
'"the right person for the job"'. Others
struggle to reconcile the problem using homely
analogies like training a dog. Caring for
each child equally was a particular problem,
especially if they saw children as unique
individuals. We can describe attention as
between formal and informal care, with the former
being diffuse and affective, often ascribed to kin
[good old Parsonian pattern variables!]: formal
care is more blurred, however. Students were
already aware of the dangers of getting over
attached to children or vice versa, and some saw
this as a necessary 'pragmatic response' to
workload and expectations. Studies of nurse
training shows similar concerns, extending to how
the students should 'dress talk and behave': it
was seen as necessary to be explicit because the
students 'are understood as lacking the forms of
cultural capital that would automatically ensure
that they behaved"professionally"' (763 - 4).
There were sometimes problems in relating to other
adults on placement—fitting in. Some said
that they had really had to work hard on their
patience. The overall theme was the
necessity of staying in control of your self 'and
consequently the children'(764). The need
was to create 'a reasoning and reasonable child -
at some cost to themselves'. There are
different approaches, and one is based on early
childhood centres in Reggio Emilia, which
[surprisingly] seems to avoid or pass over
displays of intense and strong emotions, not being
prepared to be so open to difficult emotions.
In most training regimes, students lacked the
space to explicitly reflect upon emotional scripts
and feelings. But emotional labour is
important. ECEC occupations are seen as
morally worthy but low status, and
demanding. It is hard to classify labour as
either agentic or alienating - it is more
subtle. Most students found placement
satisfying and enjoyable, and found themselves
able to undertake emotional labour, sometimes
because of their own history of school failures
earlier. They did accept the need to balance
their approach to children. However, the
occupations are not well paid and often involve
long hours, so this could be seen as a pretty poor
return on emotional capital. Their gender
capital 'has both provided them with opportunities
and attract them within those
opportunities'(765). They need to have
stress reduced by being able to discuss the
effects of the emotional labour involved in
'always "being fun at work"'.
References include lots of work by Colley.
There is an interesting article by Fournier, V
(1999) 'The appeal to "professionalism" as a
disciplinary mechanism'. Sociological
Review, 47 (2): 280- 307, and
Huppatz, K (2009) 'Reworking Bourdieu's "capital":
feminine and female capitals in the field of paid
caring work'. Sociology 43 (1) 45-66.
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