Vying for Hearts and Minds: Emotional Labour as Management Control

Abstract

Research on the labour process under capitalism has generated many insights about managerial control strategies. Even though these studies have matured, shifting from a focus on managerial imperative for direct control to a concern with the complexity and multiplicity of approaches, they have largely overlooked recent developments on emotional labour as a control mechanism. To remedy this oversight, this article identifies how owners and managers use emotional labour to elicit workers' consent to the conditions of employment at Travel Corp, a United States based professional services firm. Findings suggest that emotional labour masks the nature of capitalist work relations by reframing the owner-employee relationship, obscuring managers ‘power with customer demands, and suppressing labour-management conflicts over work responsibilities and job security. The focus on emotional labour highlights the important processes through which management secures employees’ consent and emphasises the subjective experiences of workers as sites of struggle over the labour process.