Emotional labour and the living personality at work: Labour power, materialist subjectivity and the dialogical self

Abstract

This article builds on Hochschild's primary understanding of emotional labour, as an aspect of labour power and sold for a wage, to develop a materialist theory of labour subjectivity from within the Marxist tradition that deepens and extends labour process analysis. It argues that the physical, intellectual and emotional aspects of labour power comprise a dynamic, inter-dependent complex – Marx's living personality at work – and that emotional effort is not a discrete, exceptional register of the self. A theory of the subjective–collective experience of labour power is then developed that commences with Vygotsky's concept of the dynamic unity of thought-speech-action in order to theorise the inter-relationship between labour activity and consciousness. This is then integrated with Bakhtin's materialist conception of emotion as the volitional tone of all labour activity and Vološinov's dialogical concept of speech, as contradictory consciousness turned outwards. Thus, workplace relations comprise routine dialogical contests between individual-collective workers and management over the meaning and purpose of employees' ideas, feelings and behaviour. The subjective–collective experience of labour power, therefore, is characterised as the dialogical self, constituted by an active presence in the labour process' contradictory, antagonistic relations.

Keywords:

• collective worker
• dialogical self
• emotional labour
• labour power
• labour process analysis
• materialist subjectivity

Notes

There is a long-standing dispute over whether Vološinov and Bakhtin was the same person. I follow Dentith (1995) in assuming that they are two different writers, not least because Vološinov, unlike Bakhtin, is explicitly Marxist.

Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's work has long been popular in other branches of sociology and applied social studies (Daniels 2008; Dentith 1995), but has had minimal take-up and influence in the sociology of work. Vygotsky's ideas underpin the large body of ideas referred to as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (Barker 2007; Jones 2009).

LPT core theory, as principally articulated by Thompson and Smith (2001, 2009), is not without its critics from either ends of the Marxist/non-Marxist LPA spectrum. Jaros (2005, 2010) argues it is too close, conceptually, to Marx's labour theory of value and structured class antagonism. On the other hand, Martinez Lucio and Stewart (1997) and Carter (1995) argue that the core theory marginalises the role of the collective worker and wrongly severs its connection to class struggle.

The reference here to productive labour does not imply that capitalist social relations are not manifest in the relations of ‘unproductive’ labour where, instead of surplus-value, surplus labour is extracted, such as in public sector service work (Carchedi 1977; Carter and Stevenson 2012).

This interdependent unity of physical, intellectual and emotional faculties is readily apparent through our common knowledge that distressed emotional states affect physical changes, such as provoking headaches, digestive disorders, lethargy and even heart attacks.

This is not to ignore aesthetic labour, sexualised labour (Warhurst and Nickson 2009) and body labour (Cohen 2011). They are composites of physical, intellectual and emotional labour, which are the primary labour power capacities (Brook 2010).

Brook (2009a) offers a detailed critical assessment of Hochschild's application of Marx's theory of alienation in the Managed Heart, while Weyher (2012) usefully explores emotion in Marx's alienation theory.

See Korczynski (2002) for a critical discussion of services management literature, including the servicescape model.

Brook (2009b) offers a detailed counter-critique of Bolton's (and Boyd's) critique of Hochschild and alternative typology of workplace emotion management.

In stressing the foundational role played by a unified conception of human labour activity, I follow Marx's understanding of materialism that ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’ (1975, 421). Vincent (2011) makes the same mistake by arguing that ‘emotion at work’ is a subjective phenomenon rather than a sensuous, real dimension of human labour activity.

Medvedev was another influential pioneering dialogician who wrote on literature as an ideological form.

Capitalism also transforms our society-wide ‘emotional economy’. Illouz (2007) argues that the individualised market relations of consumer capitalism have created an intensely ‘emotional capitalism’ of ‘cold intimacies’ where commodified market relations have become deeply emotional via discourses of ‘self-realisation’ and ‘self-help’ that in turn are framed by ‘romantic fantasy’. While Fineman (2010, 27) argues that contemporary capitalism produces ‘emotionologies (that) colour’ loud public discourses on certain social groups and occupations, such as asylum seekers, bankers, nurses, firefighters and welfare claimants. Emotionologies are ‘politico-ideological constructs, largely shaped by the agendas of powerful political groups and media that legitimate vocabulary and feelings as appropriate expressions for certain social groups and activities’, such as ‘admiration, hate, love, pity, fear anger or indignation’ (Fineman 2010, 27).

It can be argued that competitive pressures on both private commercial and public service organisations have generated a specific neo-liberal form of ‘emotional grammar’ (Nussbaum 2001). This emanates from management seeking to inculcate worker servility and affective commitment to related organisational goals in the name of customer-orientation. In tandem with this has arisen the ideological pressure on employees to view themselves as individual market actors, working flexibly with portfolio careers, in which they should possess ‘emotional intelligence’ to enable them to be become more intelligent, adaptive and reflexive thereby demonstrating ‘moral character’ (Hughes 2005).

In Theodosius’ (2008) study of emotional labour in health care she adopts Archer's (2003) notion of the internal conversation as a means for offering a realist theorisation of the experience of emotional labour. However, her analysis does not employ an integrated theory of workplace structures and relations, such as LPA. Consequently, it tends to have a one-eyed focus on the experience of the individual worker, divorced from wider social relations and collective agency. Furthermore, while Archer's inner conversation attempts to marry agency with structure it produces a ‘stretched’ separation between the two and deliberately ‘bends the stick’ in favour of agency (Mutch 2004).

Bakhtin uses the term utterance and Vološinov words-in-use and utterance to describe speech acts, which may be full sentences or even just verbal exclamations, such as Ah! The meaning of these is contingent upon the participants and context. Speech acts in this sense are founded on the basis of many genres, not just formal language, which people use in everyday speech and communication (Dentith 1995, 37–40). I use the terms interchangeably.