Smiling Behind the Mask: Emotional Labor during COVID and the Human Cost of Competing Logic

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 22: Emotional Labor

Abstract

This paper examines restaurant workers’ experiences of emotional labor in relation to the exceptional turnover rates during the reopening phase of COVID-19. Leveraging original interview data (N=16) and participant observation (12 months) of two restaurants I call Upscale Cuisine and Southern Chain, I find that front-of-house workers’ inhabitation and enforcement of organizational COVID mandates required their performance of emotional labor to navigate the conflicting logics of safety, accountability, and customer service held by workers and customers. From an inhabited institutionalist perspective, the loose coupling between guideline enforcement and the interactive nature of restaurants may have led to intensified experiences of emotional labor. I argue that, in customer service interactions, conflicting institutional logic intensifies emotional labor when workers must modify or abandon inhabited logic to appease customers. Broadly, the case of restaurant workers during COVID demonstrates that competing logics may lead to negative emotions and subsequent turnover intentions. This paper contributes to emotional labor theory and inhabited institutionalism literature by identifying logic specific to the service industry and COVID as well as how they socially construct workers’ emotions.

Author

• Victoria Isabelle Thompson, Indiana University-Bloomington