Do Production Employees Engage in Emotional Labour?

Abstract

In 1983, Airlie Hochschild published a `classic', The Managed Heart . Since this publication, scores of articles have been produced to explore the various manifestations of emotional labour across a range of service industries. However, there is little research on emotional labour when the face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with customers are not obviously apparent. This article presents data collected from a food processing plant that has seen a strong managerial attempt to develop a unitarist culture. Employees face a significant level of emotional labour in their interactions within this culture. As has been found in the service industry literature, employees react differently to the emotional labour that they face, and indeed, not all emotional labour is negative for employees.