The Role of Workers’ Emotion in The Working Process

Marx’s view of work was that work was broken down into ownership and the means of production, where capitalists were owners and workers were the means of production. Workers were not able to realize their full potential in this capitalist economy, where they were moving away from a craft system towards a monopoly system. The decline of the craft system allows the worker to produce more, and as “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces… The devaluation of the world of men is in the direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.” This is important because it signifies that the systems of control were forcing workers to mass produce even though the workers were unable to reap the own benefits of their work or the wealth they were creating. Also, the more standardized work is, the more alienated workers become: from the products of their labor, from the process of their labor, from their fellow workers, and from their species-being.

Marx predicted a revolution would happen after workers developed class consciousness and were driven to obtain more power. Although this revolution never came to the forefront, his contributions though helped us to understand the negative effects of alienation caused by moving away from a craft system and towards a standardized, capitalist system. The two major contributions of Weber toward the understanding of work are the ideal type and rationalization. Weber viewed bureaucracy as very hierarchical, and that “Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties and the execution of the corresponding rights”. His concept of the ideal type was more conceptual than practical in practice, but was meant to identify the characteristics of a social form. He named the six characteristics of the “ideal type of bureaucracy” to be a hierarchy of authority, a division of labor, meritocracy, a written set of rules, impersonal relationships, and a goal of efficiency. The degree to which a bureaucratic structure had these characteristics determined its optimality. The characteristic of impersonal relationships in his ideal type of bureaucracy also mirrored his concept of rationalization, where science and calculations reign supreme over sentiment and beliefs. The concept of rationalization is important because elements of it can be seen today in the McDonaldization of society, where work has elements of efficiency, predictability, control, and calculability.

Braverman’s contribution to the understanding of work was of the importance of the division of labor. He believed the division of labor was not only specific to modern day capitalism, stating that “methods of analysis of the labor process and its division into constituent elements have always been and are to this day common in all trades and crafts”. Going beyond the division of labor, he also believed in the need of the detailed worker: that apart from a complicated work being divided into simpler parts, workers were also separated into doing one specific simple part. This is the deskilling of labor, or creating increasingly specialized jobs in order to mass produce. Although Braverman did not acknowledge that workers are autonomous beings and would likely challenge authority when being tasked to do this simple labor, because power struggles are ongoing, his notion of deskilled labor and detailed workers helped to understand the necessary components to mass production.

Hochschild’s contribution to the understanding of work was the concept of emotional work, the mental taxation that is endured in a field where personalized experiences are crucial. While feelings are thought of as personal, when a job forces a script onto its workers, the private ways that people feel end up being controlled by their work. Hochschild defines emotional labor as labor that “requires on to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” In other words, emotional workers have to compromise their own feelings for the experiences of the customers they are serving. Through this process, emotional work causes an alienation from the product of labor in the form of not having the experience you are producing, alienation from the process because you are forced to act a certain way, and alienation from coworkers as you are in constant competition with them.

Overall, emotions are a form of currency in certain types of work by which firms control their workers.