Documenting a labor of love: emotional labor as academic labor

ABSTRACT

Neoliberal practices embedded in academia have transformed the university into a service industry. Through this lens, this review documents the current exploration of emotional labor in academia, specifically in communication studies. While a paucity of literature on this topic exists, I explore how a neoliberal agenda creates an expectation for communication faculty to perform emotional labor (and how this expectation is greater compared with other fields), the ways in which emotional labor is differentially experienced for women, and how communication studies as a gendered field exacerbates expectations to perform such labor. Moreover, I highlight the shifting perception of the field and the related moves to expand emotional labor. Finally, I discuss ways to move forward in a neoliberal academia.

KEYWORDS:

• emotional labor
• embodiment
• academic labor
• neoliberalism

Notes

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11 Ashforth and Humphrey, “Emotional Labor in Service Roles.”

12 Pamela K. Adelmann, “Emotional Labor as a Potential Source of Job Stress,” in Organizational Risk Factors for Job Stress, ed. Steven L. Sauter and R. Lawrence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1995), 371–81.

13 Thorsten Hennig-Thurau et al., “Are All Smiles Created Equal? How Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Affect Service Relationships,” Journal of Marketing 70, no. 3 (2006): 58–73.

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20 Sachi Sekimoto, “A Multimodal Approach to Identity: Theorizing the Self Through Embodiment, Spatiality, and Temporality,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5, no. 3 (2012): 226–43.

21 Ibid., 233.

22 Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

23 John T. Warren, “The Body Politic: Performance, Pedagogy, and the Power of Enfleshment,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1999): 257–66; Elyse Lamm Pineau, “Performance Studies Across the Curriculum: Problems, Possibilities, and Projections,” in The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. Sheron J. Dailey (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 1998), 128–35; Peter McLaren, “Schooling the Postmodern Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment,” The Journal of Education 170, no. 3 (1988): 53–83.

24 Sekimoto, “A Multimodal Approach to Identity,” 233.

25 Susan Leigh Foster, “Performing Authenticity and the Gendered Labor of Dance,” (presentation, Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing, Performance Studies International #21, 2015).

26 Susan M. Kruml and Deanna Geddes, “Exploring the Dimensions of Emotional Labor the Heart of Hochschild’s Work,” Management Communication Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2000): 8–49; James S. Sass, “Emotional Labor as Cultural Performance: The Communication of Caregiving in a Nonprofit Nursing Home,” Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 3 (2000): 330–58; Sherianne Shuler and Beverly Davenport Sypher, “Seeking Emotional Labor: When Managing the Heart Enhances the Work Experience,” Management Communication Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2000): 50–89; Sarah J. Tracy, “Becoming a Character for Commerce: Emotion Labor, Self-Subordination, and Discursive Construction of Identity in a Total Institution,” Management Communication Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2000): 90–128; “Locking Up Emotion: Moving Beyond Dissonance for Understanding Emotion Labor Discomfort,” Communication Monographs 72, no. 3 (2005): 261–83.

27 Zhang and Zhu, “Exploring Emotion in Teaching”; Paul A. Schutz and Mikyoung Lee, “Teacher Emotion, Emotional Labor and Teacher Identity,” Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication 27, no. 1 (2014): 169–86; Brian K. Richardson, Alicia Alexander, and Tamara Castleberry, “Examining Teacher Turnover in Low-Performing, Multi-Cultural Schools: Relationships Among Emotional Labor, Communication Symmetry, and Intent to Leave,” Communication Research Reports 25, no. 1 (2008): 10–22.

28 Jason J. Teven, “Teacher Temperament: Correlates With Teacher Caring, Burnout, and Organizational Outcomes,” Communication Education 56, no. 3 (2007): 382–400.

29 See Rebecca J. Erickson and Christian Ritter, “Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Inauthenticity: Does Gender Matter?” Social Psychology Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2001): 146–63; Mary Ellen Guy and Meredith A. Newman, “Women’s Jobs, Men’s Jobs: Sex Segregation and Emotional Labor,” Public Administration Review 64, no. 3 (2004): 289–98; Kenneth J. Meier, Sharon H. Mastracci, and Kristin Wilson, “Gender and Emotional Labor in Public Organizations: An Empirical Examination of the Link to Performance,” Public Administration Review 66, no. 6 (2006): 899–909.

30 Holly Ann Larson, “Emotional Labor: The Pink-Collar Duties of Teaching,” Currents in Teaching and Learning 1, no. 1 (2008): 45–56.

31 Marcia L. Bellas, “Emotional Labor in Academia: The Case of Professors,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561 (1999): 99.

32 Sharon M. Varallo, “Motherwork in Academe: Intensive Caring for the Millennial Student,” Women’s Studies in Communication 31, no. 2 (2008): 153.

33 Ibid.

34 Bellas, “Emotional Labor in Academia.”

35 Guy and Newman, “Women’s Jobs, Men’s Jobs.”

36 Mary Ann Cooper, “Salary Inequity in Higher Ed: Pay Gap Persists for Women,” Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine, August 5, 2015, https://ricardo-castillo-hk06.squarespace.com/mary-ann-cooper/?offset=1438809376468.

37 Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill, “Who’s Teaching Our Children?” Educational Leadership 67, no. 8 (2010): 14–20.

38 National Science Foundation, “Doctorate Recipients, by Sex and Broad Field of Study: Selected Years, 1984–2014,” December 2015, https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/data/tab14.pdf.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Quoctrung Bui, “What’s Your Major? 4 Decades of College Degrees, in 1 Graph,” National Public Radio, May 9, 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph.

42 National Communication Association “The 2012–2013 Humanities Departmental Survey: Communication in Comparative Perspective,” 2014, https://ams.natcom.org/uploadedFiles/More_Scholarly_Resources/Humanities%20Indicators%20Report%202014%20Final.pdf.

43 Rania Sanford and Amy Fowler Kinch, “A New Take on Program Planning: A Faculty Competencies Framework,” The Journal of Faculty Development 30, no. 2 (2016): 79–96.

44 National Communication Association, “Why Study Communication?” C-Brief 6, no. 2 (2016): https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_C-Brief_2016_April_II.pdf.

45 Bellas, “Emotional Labor in Academia,” 98.

46 Adelmann, “Emotional Labor as a Potential Source of Job Stress,” 379.

47 Giroux, “The Corporate War Against Higher Education.”

48 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 2014).

49 Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012).

50 Lawless and Chen, “Multicultural Neoliberalism and Academic Labor.”

51 Mauricio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism, the Financial Crisis and the End of the Liberal State,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 7–8 (2015): 67–83.

52 Gildersleeve, “The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic.”

53 Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1242.