Helping Without Caring: Role Definition and the Gender-Stratified Effects of Emotional Labor in Debt Settlement Firms

• In Event: 479 - Section on Sociology of Emotions Paper Session. Emotions and Social Worlds

Abstract

: Research on emotional labor has shown that workers who are required to feign emotions are more likely to suffer ill effects than those who are able to “deep act” their emotions. We argue that men have an advantage in deep acting their emotions on account of the social roles that are culturally available to them. We draw on observations and interviews with workers in the debt settlement industry to show that male agents were able to claim a role of educator in their work. This made it possible for them to avoid feeling that they were taking advantage of customers who might have been better off without the service they sold them. Female agents, by contrast, were not able to style themselves educators; instead, clients and employers expected them to adopt a therapeutic role with their clients. However, this role conflicted sharply with the expectation that agents be effective salespeople, and forced female agents to feign feelings of confidence and optimism. Clients, co-workers, and managers, we show, shaped workers’ freedom to define their emotional labor in satisfying ways

Authors

• Francesca Polletta, University of California-Irvine

• Zaibu Nissa Tufail, University of California-Irvine