Emotional Labour

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

https://www.routledge.com/Emotion-Affective-Practices-and-the-Past-in-the-Present/Smith-Wetherell-Campbell/p/book/9781138579293

Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present is a response to debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of emotion. This timely and unique book explores the ways emotion is embroiled and used in contemporary engagements with the past, particularly in contexts such as heritage sites, museums, commemorations, political rhetoric and ideology, debates over issues of social memory, and touristic uses of heritage sites.

Including contributions from academics and practitioners in a range of countries, the book reviews significant and conflicting academic debates on the nature and expression of affect and emotion. As a whole, the book makes an argument for a pragmatic understanding of affect and, in doing so, outlines Wetherell’s concept of affective practice, a concept utilised in most of the chapters in this book. Since debates about affect and emotion can often be confusing and abstract, the book aims to clarify these debates and, through the use of case studies, draw out their implications for theory and practice within heritage and museum studies.

Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present should be essential reading for students, academics, and professionals in the fields of heritage and museum studies. The book will also be of interest to those in other disciplines, such as social psychology, education, archaeology, tourism studies, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and history.

Stress studies are becoming more and more attention nowadays, the financial crisis and recession of 2008 around the world further contributed in increasing higher levels of stress among employees, particularly in the corporate context. The organizations, to make themselves efficient in utilization of resources, have gone through entire restructuring, layoffs, downsizing, and mergers. This has resulted in unstable employee-employer relationship which has caused a great deal of stress among employees. There is no such thing as a stress-free job in the world. Everyone in his/her work is exposed to tension, frustration and anxiety as he/she gets through the duties assigned to him/her. In order to make our work experience and environment as pleasant as possible, it is better that we learn the technique of moderating and modulating our personal stress levels. Hence the research has shown that high level of stress seriously affect the performance of employees as well as their health condition. This article reviews and summarizes three decades of empirical literature concerned with stress in general and occupational stress in particular with major coping strategies.

A second-order factor structure of teachers' emotional intelligence is supported. Emotional intelligence impacts deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotion. Emotional intelligence has a positive impact on teaching satisfaction. Expression of naturally felt emotion is the most adaptive emotional labor strategy. The nature of emotional labor strategy mediates the role of emotional intelligence.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

Two studies including 108 nurses and 101 police officers tested the proposition that emotionally demanding interactions with recipients may result in emotional dissonance, which, in turn, may lead to job burnout and impaired performance. More specifically, on the basis of the literature on burnout and emotional dissonance, the authors hypothesized that emotional job demands would explain variance in burnout (i.e., exhaustion and cynicism/disengagement) through their influence on emotional dissonance. In addition, the authors predicted that emotional dissonance would be (negatively) related to in-role performance through its relationship with burnout. The findings of a series of structural equation modeling analyses supported both hypotheses. The implications for research and practice are discussed, as well as avenues for additional research.

Early career academics face their own particular set of issues when it comes to struggling with the neoliberal university. In this note, we consider how our responses to the neoliberalization of academia – whether in teaching, research or other activities – promote justice or not. Rather than theorize justice in the abstract, our goal is to tease apart the injustices, vulnerabilities and complicities of our workplaces. We draw upon our individual experiences, which span six institutions across six countries, to explore how mundane choices and everyday actions might enable us to resist the neoliberal pressures on our work and our labour. We do this by acknowledging that there is a real possibility that we come to embody neoliberalism in our choices, decisions and habits. That is, we are disciplined and become self-disciplining in turn, in order to survive. We explore this tension through a series of experiential vignettes that help to frame our everyday resistance as 'tim-adical' action, both radical and timid at the same time.

In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as 'immaterial labour', 'affective labour' and 'precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and Laura Grindstaff, the latter drawing on Hochschild's concept of emotional labour), which we believe may be more useful than autonomist concepts in developing empirically informed critique. The main body of the article then consists of an ethnographic account of working on one particular television programme, an account that aims to build on these theoretical debates. We analyse how the power to provide exposure or not to individuals in the talent show genre in contemporary television (a feature that derives from the symbolic power of producers to make texts that are then circulated to massive numbers of people) and disputes between commissioners and independent producers about how best to go about doing so (an organizational issue) are registered in the form of stress, anxiety and sometimes poor working relations among project teams of young television researchers (a matter of working conditions and experiences). We especially focus on how additional pressures are borne by these workers because of the requirements to undertake emotional labour, involving the handling of strong emotions on the part of talent show contributors, and to maintain good working relations in short-term project work, requirements generated by the need to ensure future employment. Ultimately, then, we support the view that creative work is 'precarious' -but we go beyond the generalizations involved in concepts such as immaterial labour and affective labour to show the specific ways in which precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in one industry.

Josh considers how academic work in the neoliberal university demands increasing 'existential labour' (Bailey et al., 2017), where academics are required to act in alliance with normative organisational purposes even if their experienced meaningfulness is contradictory.

This essay, or rather collection of essays, draws together three distinct streams of thought, time and space into a single river of understanding concerning labor, leisure, human-nature relations, city and town planning and human evolution at both the individual and collective levels. From Daoist tales of effortless leisure under 'useless trees' to Pieper's eulogy of leisure in the Modernist world(view) of total work and onto the planning theory and practice of Sir. Patrick Geddes, this ambling and nomadic stream seeks to problematize hegemonic contemporary conceptions of evolution, order, labor, leisure, nature and human-nature relations and to plant the seeds of a new principle, a new mythos, to which human evolution and being can be oriented in ashes of the charred edifice of Modernity. Can we transcend the materially rationalist, labor centric conceptions of humanity that reign in contemporary hegemonic culture for a more holistic perspective in which the infinite and finite aspects of human being can co-exist without either one interfering with the other? Can human-nature relations, especially as cultivated through city and town planning, transcend the present order of hierarchical domination, objectification and callous consumption of nature for an order of relations in which nature acts upon us as a teacher and we consume nature in harmony with its own natural order rather than through creation of an artificial order?

The term emotion, stemming from the Latin emovere (to move out or agitate), broadly refers to those affective upheavals in experience that are directed at events or objects in the world and that often prompt us to act in specific ways vis-à-vis these events or objects. Since antiquity, these episodes have been branded by labels like shame, anger, fear, joy, embarrassment, or disgust, and classed into categories. Historically, Darwin's (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the most influential scholarly works to inform prominent understandings of emotion in many academic disciplines. Across disciplines, there is broad consensus that emotions are discrete in kind; that is, they are characterized by specific configurations of phenomenal experience, bodily changes, expressions, and action tendencies. Emotions are also widely thought to be adaptive, insofar as they are purposeful and meaningful for an individual, and reflect an evaluative engagement with the environment that helps one prepare for specific actions. Related to this capacity, emotions are generally presumed to fulfill communicative purposes, for instance through facial or vocal expressions, which is why they are deemed essential to social interaction.

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.

The rise of digital technologies and social media platforms has been linked to changing forms of work, as well as the mainstreaming of pornography and a 'porn chic' aesthetic. This article examines some of the ways in which these themes coalesce, and interrogates the conceptual boundaries of sexualized labour, extending beyond traditional organizational settings and into Web 2.0. The study explores performances of sexualized labour on social media by analysing visual and textual content from 172 female influencers on Instagram. This article contributes to the literature on sexualized labour in three ways. First, by demonstrating how sexualized labour is enacted across various forms of influencer labour, and how this relates to the attention economy and monetization. Second, by developing the extant conceptualization of sexualized labour and introducing connective labour as a required element to mobilize sexualized labour. Third, by opening up a critical analysis of what is meant by 'sexualized' labour within a cultural context of pornographication.

In this study, the effects of service employees' job performance and intentions to quit on their displays of emotional labor are examined. Also, the mediating role of interpersonal deviance on these effects are also observed. For this purpose, data are obtained and analyzed from 403 private service employees' working in Ankara. The relations and effects between variables are presented by correlation and regression analyses. The validity of scales are measured with structural equation model. According to the findings, it is seen that employees' emotional labors have significant effects on their job performance and intention to quit the job. Particularly, it is found that while job performances of employees who act surfacely are low, but their intentions to quit are high. It is observed that interpersonal deviance has negative contribution to the employees' job performance, but positive contribution to the intention to quit. And also, coming through that interpersonal deviance has partial mediating role between emotional labor and job performance and intention to quit. Due to the findings of this study, recommendations are given for the managers of service sector to recruit and maintain productive and effective service emplooyees. Özet: Bu çalışmada, hizmet sektörü çalışanlarının duygusal emek gösterimlerinin, onların İş Performansı (İP) ile İşten Ayrılma Niyetleri (İAN) üzerine etkileri araştırılmıştır. Ayrıca bu etkilerde, kişiler arası çarpıklığın aracılık rolüne bakılmıştır. Bu maksatla, Ankara'da özel hizmet sektöründe çalışan 403 katılımcıdan anket yoluyla elde edilen veriler analiz edilmiştir. Çalışmada değişkenler arası ilişkiler ve etkileri korelâsyon ve regresyon analizleri ile ortaya konurken, değişkenlere ait ölçeklerin doğrulanması esnasında yapısal eşitlik modelinden istifade edilmiştir. Bulgulara göre, hizmet sektörü çalışanlarının duygusal emeklerinin, İP'leri ve İAN'leri üzerinde önemli etkilere sahip olduğu görülmüştür. Özellikle, yüzeysel rol yapan çalışanların İP'leri düşük iken, İAN'lerinin ise yüksek olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Kişiler arası çarpıklığın da çalışanların İP'lerine olumsuz etkileri ve İAN'lerine ise olumlu katkılarının olduğu gözlemlenmiştir. Ayrıca, çalışanların duygusal emeklerinin iş performanslarına ve işten ayrılma niyetlerine, örgüt içinde yaşamış oldukları kişiler arası çarpıklığın kısmi aracılık ettiği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Çalışmanın bulgularıyla ilintili olarak, etkin ve verimli hizmet sektörü çalışanlarının temini ve idamesi için hizmet sektörü yöneticilerine de konu ile ilgili önerilerde bulunulmuştur. Anahtar Sözcükler: Duygusal emek, iş performansı, işten ayrılma niyeti, kişiler arası çarpıklık. JEL Sınıflandırması: M10, M12, D23

What drives employees to engage in each of the three forms of emotional labour: surface acting, deep acting and genuine expression? The motivational bases of these behaviours have seldom been examined. We therefore explore them through the continuum of controlled to autonomous drivers of behaviour which are central to Self-Determination Theory. The concepts of extrinsic motivation (external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation and integrated regulation) and intrinsic motivation are integrated with forms of emotional labour to explain how and why employees regulate their emotional expression.

Title. Emotional labour underlying caring: an evolutionary concept analysisAim.  This paper is a report of a concept analysis of emotional labour.Background.  Caring is considered as the essence of nursing. Underpinning caring, the internal regulation of emotions or the emotional labour of nurses is invisible. The concept of emotional labour is relatively underdeveloped in nursing.Data sources.  A literature search using keywords ‘emotional labour’, ‘emotional work’ and ‘emotions’ was performed in CINAHL, PsycINFO and REPERE from 1990 to January 2008. We analysed 72 papers whose main focus of inquiry was on emotional labour.Review methods.  We followed Rodgers’ evolutionary method of concept analysis.Results.  Emotional labour is a process whereby nurses adopt a ‘work persona’ to express their autonomous, surface or deep emotions during patient encounters. Antecedents to this adoption of a work persona are events occurring during patient–nurse encounters, and which consist of three elements: organization (i.e. social norms, social support), nurse (i.e. role identification, professional commitment, work experience and interpersonal skills) and job (i.e. autonomy, task routine, degree of emotional demand, interaction frequency and work complexity). The attributes of emotional labour have two dimensions: nurses’ autonomous response and their work persona strategies (i.e. surface or deep acts). The consequences of emotional labour include organizational (i.e. productivity, ‘cheerful environment’) and nurse aspects (i.e. negative or positive).Conclusion.  The concept of emotional labour should be introduced into preregistration programmes. Nurses also need to have time and a supportive environment to reflect, understand and discuss their emotional labour in caring for ‘difficult’ patients to deflate the dominant discourse about ‘problem’ patients.

Empathy, a complex and multidimensional concept, has been defined in many ways within the context of nursing. Although there is general support that nurses' empathic attitude is important for patient's adherence to treatment and care satisfaction, there are still some inconsistencies in the link between empathy and nurses' well-being. The general aim of this study is to verify the role played by empathy in promoting well-being in nursing work. Therefore, 222 nurses from different hospitals in a north region of Italy, completed a self-administered questionnaire. A cross-sectional survey was conducted. Our result show that empathy is composed by two factors: a cognitive dimension (perspective taking) and an affective one (compassion). Perspective taking enhances job satisfaction, work engagement and reduces turnover intention. Compassion does not. These findings confirm that perspective taking and compassion have different impact on nurses' well-being. Further studies is required to inform education or for application in clinical settings.

An online survey was conducted on a national sample of United States professors to examine emotional labor and its relationship to work outcomes. Participants were queried on genuine, faking, and suppressing emotional expression facets of emotional labor, as well as emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and affective commitment. The sample of 598 included 71 instructors, 177 assistant professors, 168 associate professors, and 182 professors. A path analysis was conducted testing two models of emotional labor. Results supported a model indicating significant direct relationships between emotional labor, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Additionally, the relationship between emotional labor and affective commitment was mediated by emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Genuine positive expression was the only emotional labor variable to have significant direct relationships with all outcomes. For U.S. faculty, the experience of emotional labor was related to several work attitudes.

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w grupie 168 nauczycieli. Analizie poddano związek dwóch form pracy emocjonalnej (płytkiej i głębokiej) z objawami wypalenia zawodowego. Dodatkowo poszukiwano odpowiedzi na pytanie o rolę inteligencji emocjonalnej (IE) w tym związku. Wyniki wskazały, że zależności pomiędzy pracą emocjonalną a symptomami wypalenia są zbliżone bez względu na jej formę, przy czym inteligencja emocjonalna istotnie modyfikuje te związki – pozytywna korelacja pomiędzy płytką pracą emocjonalną a emocjonalnym wyczerpaniem i depersonalizacją oraz negatywna korelacja pomiędzy płytką pracą emocjonalną a poczuciem dokonań osobistych zanika w grupie osób o wysokiej IE. Analogiczny wzorzec wyników odnotowano w przypadku związku pracy głębokiej i depersonalizacji.

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Theorizing a sociology of emotion that links micro-level resources to macro-level forces, this article extends previous work on emotional capital in relation to emotional experiences and management. Emerging from Bourdieu's theory of social practice, emotional capital is a form of cultural capital that includes the emotion-specific, trans-situational resources that individuals activate and embody in distinct fields. Contrary to prior conceptualizations, I argue that emotional capital is neither wholly gender-neutral nor exclusively feminine. Men may lay claim to emotional capital as a valued resource within particular fields. The concept of emotional capital should be seen as distinct from emotion management and felt emotional experience and distinctions between primary and secondary sources of capital clarify the simultaneously durable and evolving nature of capital and the habitus. To illustrate these conceptual refinements, I use interview and diary data from male nurses. Men bring primary emotional capital, developed during primary socialization, to the nursing profession while also developing secondary capital through occupational socialization centered on empathy and compassion. The construct of emotional capital is refined as a structured yet dynamic resource developed through primary and secondary socialization and activated and embodied in everyday emotion practice.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

The metaphor of “care drain” has been created as a womanly parallel to the “brain drain” idea. Just as “brain drain” suggests that the skilled migrants are an economic loss for the sending country, “care drain” describes the migrant women hired as care workers as a loss of care for their children left behind. This paper criticizes the construction of migrant women as “care drain” for three reasons: 1) it is built on sexist stereotypes, 2) it misrepresents and devalues care work, and 3) it misses the opportunity for a theoretical change about how skills in migration contexts can be understood.

This article reports the results of the measurement of emotional intelligence of Pakistani university librarians. Previous studies established that emotional intelligence will be required if effective performance is dependent on stable communication and interactions between workers and patrons. Hence, for a profession like university librarianship where high level of interactions with patrons is involved, emotional intelligence is mandatory. As a result, the present study descriptively measured the current emotional intelligence of librarians performing in universities of Pakistan. The results are significant to understand that how librarians professionally handle their emotions and that of others in the modern age of technological and organizational innovations. Using survey research method, data was collected through semi-structured questionnaire from randomly selected sample of librarians. Findings showed a moderate level of emotional intelligence among these librarians. The results are significant towards training needs assessment and may contribute in the future employability of librarians, curriculum development, and professional development programs.

The paper draws together literature on emotional intelligence (EI) and emotional labour (EL) and examines its influence on work effectiveness (WQ) in different business settings; professional service, service shop and mass service. In professional service, it is proposed that EI is important in assisting employees to achieve highly in five facets of WQ; job role, career role, innovator role, team role and organisation role. In service shop, the influence of EI is moderate but the role of EL is increasingly important. In mass service, EI does not significantly contribute to high WQ instead EL plays its effective role in promising WQ. Therefore, the role of emotional intelligence and emotional labour in influencing service quality is dependent on the type of service organisations.

The present study tried to analyze the relationship between images of the brand with that of loyalty. Numerous factors may affect loyalty of a brand in soft drinks. Furthermore, it is also perceived that consumers vary in their brand loyalty for carbonated and non-carbonated drinks. In the present study it was tried to find out whether image of a particular brand play any role in achieving repeat purchases and the opinion and types of carbonated and non-carbonated was not found to be related to loyalty.

The  activist use  of  Facebook  p ages  in the  2011  movements  of  the  Egyptian  revolution  and  the  Spanish  Indignados  saw phases  of  exponential  growth  in user  engagement  in  proximity to key protest events,  signaled  by  spikes  in  likes  and  comments.  This  article  analyzes  these  episodes  as  momen ts  of  digital  enthusiasm facilitated  by  emotional  communication on  political  Facebook  pages.  Drawing  on  quantitative  and  qualitative  analysis  of  Facebook  data,  I  argue  that  two  elements  concurred  to  build  moments  of  digital  enthusiasm:  (a)  the  hopeful  narr ative  produced  by  activist  admins  managing  political  Facebook  pages,  and  (b)  the  receptivity  and  cooperation  of  ordinary  Internet  users who overwhelmingly reinforced the message  put forward by activist admins. This  emotional  dialogue  between  admins  and  use rs  generated  a  process  of emotional  contagion  that  helped  establish  propitious  psychological  conditions  for  mass  protest  participation. Moments of digital enthusiasm demonstrate the power of social media and  emotional communication in mass protest mobiliza tion. However, they also highlight the  risk of evanescence  of collective action in a digital age.

This article examines articulations of the role of passion in accounts of the life and work of the songwriter. It draws upon a range of interviews with successful artists captured in the Sodajerker On Songwriting podcast. It is suggested that these interviews capture the ‘voicing’ of the conventions of creativity in popular music, exploring a context in which passionate motivation, expression and understanding of the (potentially) affective responses to songs are paramount to the labour of the songwriter. The article explores how the core of this labour deals in emotion, attempting to articulate feelings in recognizable, tradable form. This is a process that is both instrumentally rationalized but often felt to be a deeply authentic process, understood (and believed) to spring from the individual’s emotional experience, so conferring identity in a generic field. In light of current debates about the nature of creative work and emotional labour, the accounts drawn upon here can be seen to epitomise many of the qualities of what constitutes ‘good work’ through a mode of self-actualisation.

Gunnarsson, Lena (2014) ‘Loving him for he is: the microsociology of power’, in A.G. Jónasdóttir and A. Ferguson (eds) Love – a question for feminism in the twenty first century. London: Routledge, pp. 97-110.

The chapter theorizes the tension inherent in contemporary western heterosexual love between, on one hand, norms of gender equality and freedom to choose and, on the other, persisting gender inequality. Focusing on the empirically documented asymmetry in love ‘exchanges’ as such between women and men, I ask how this tendency comes about despite the fact that mutual love is the raison d’être of the relationship, that the ideological context prescribes gender equality and that there are no salient external factors that stop women from breaking up in case they are not satisfied.

Neoliberal practices embedded in academia have transformed the university into a service industry. Through this lens, this review documents the current exploration of emotional labor in academia, specifically in communication studies. While a paucity of literature on this topic exists, I explore how a neoliberal agenda creates an expectation for communication faculty to perform emotional labor (and how this expectation is greater compared with other fields), the ways in which emotional labor is differentially experienced for women, and how communication studies as a gendered field exacerbates expectations to perform such labor. Moreover, I highlight the shifting perception of the field and the related moves to expand emotional labor. Finally, I discuss ways to move forward in a neoliberal academia.

This paper addresses itself to literature on aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour in order to extend understanding of the determinate and determinant relationships that occur between the processes of the production of economic value and the processes of  the formation of subjectivities. I argue for a theoretical re-evaluation of the  importance of labour in analysis of the ‘modes of life’ of contemporary society by examining these forms of labour in the context of the Autonomist Marxist thesis of the ‘General Intellect’. Labour under capitalism is the site of the production of subjectivity and the activity of the production of economic value and these forms of labour are preponderant over other labours in the knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. My analysis presents the specific importance of work in the processes of the production of contemporary life.

Although the concepts of these forms of labour present qualitative difference, they also exhibit confluence. I seek to extend the usefulness of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour as analytical categories by operationalising them in a new stage of the division of labour with reference to previous ethnographic studies and to the Marxist extension of Smith’s concept. Analysis of these labours show that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour, as in Marx’s formal subsumption of labour under capital. New regimes of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in Fordist modes of labour, toward a commodification of workers’ subjectivities. Worker subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the direction of the worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity.
I identify the determinate relationships between worker- and social-subjectivities and the significance of reproduction of labour by these social subjectivities to the production of modes of life and the formation of social values. Subjectivity is alienated from the subject and commodified in the activity of these forms of labour and is then consumed by social-subjects whose subjectivities are in turn transformed in the act of consumption. My analysis of the operation of these forms of labour in post-modern economy  explores how processes in capitalist social organisation act  in such a way that economic-value producing labour-activity produces human subjectivity and how subjectivity determines modes of life. The production of economic value is a determinate factor in the production of social values.

In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of wage-labour in the post-modern economy effects a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic subjectivities. Capital annexes the outside’ of capital, the sphere of non-work, and the production of subjectivity reveals a tendency for the production of a capitalistic mode of life. Thus what appears to be a new form of life in which workers are free to act autonomously in capitalism is actually a new form of alienation. However, many thinkers in the field of post-modern political economy underplay the real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West, the Fordist nature of the power-relations that occur in aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour, in which the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion.