Scientific Management

Introduction

According to Noon and Blyton (2007) in the last few decades, a shift in industrial structure was experienced in advanced economies, a growing proportion located in tertiary, service sector. Most of the service products generally involve direct interaction (such as voice-to-voice or face-to-face) with public to a much greater degree than the manufacturing industry. Thus, an increased proportion of the workforce are undertook what can be called the performance of ‘emotion work’ due to the growth of service sector. For instant in the UK, the service sector provides most employment which account for 80 per cent of all employment (Nixon 2009). As the raise of service sector in modern economies, an increasing number of researchers start focus on the importance of emotional work or emotional labour. The purpose of this essay is to explore what is emotional work and to what degree is it accurate representation of service sector and sales job.

Emotional work

What is emotional work? The concept of ‘emotional labour’ was first introduced by Hochschild (1983, p.7), she defined the emotional labour as ‘the management of feeling to create a public observable facial and bodily display’. In this theory, Hochschild stated that there are two ways in managing employee’s emotion which are surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting refers to the employee adjust the emotional expression, to make it in keeping with the requirement of the organization; and deep acting refers to adjust the real feeling to achieve the objective of the organizationally expected emotion (1983).

However, some authors were having different explanation in their conceptualization of emotional labour. Ashforth and Humphrey defined that emotional labour as ‘the act of displaying appropriate emotion (i.e confirming with display rule).’ (1993, p.90) they suggested that emotional labour should focus on the emotional behavior regulated by organization rather than individual’s emotional feeling....