Shame is a Knife which Stabs Twice; Emotional Management in the Work of Arlie Russell Hochschild and Richard Sennett by Jess Dunne
MRes in Social Sciences
Introduction
While sociology has for much of its history flirted with emotion as a meaningful driver of international and social decision-making, as Scheff (2000) notes, the frontrunners of the sociological canon failed to reach theoretical or empirical consensus. Heaney (2019) further argues that contemporaneously there is still much ground to cover in addressing the intersecting forces of power and emotion, which this article seeks to consider within its analysis of shame in relation to class dynamics. This article will critically examine the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild and Richard Sennett in relation to emotional management, focusing on shame as a socially mediated process which influences us to pursue ‘appropriate’ emotional responses and to meet societal expectations. As Heaney (2019, p. 224) notes, emotions play a central role in “the formation, maintenance, transformation and destruction of a wide array of social bonds.” This article considers shame an emotion whose function is to maintain social continuity or as Hochschild phrases it to psychologically reproduce the class structure (Hochschild, 1979).
Hochschild’s work addresses shame more explicitly than Sennett’s, although his work consistently turns up phrases such as embarrassment, inadequacy and failure, he does not create a structured analytic model which could develop into a typology as Addison (2017, p. 10) notes have been the trajectory of The Managed Heart. This article will focus its discussion on Sennett’s The Hidden Injuries of Class because of its parallels with Hochschild’s The Managed Heart with both exploring specific class demographics and their interior emotional lives. Scheff (2000) defines shame as an umbrella of emotional responses including embarrassment, shyness, self-consciousness among others which arise from threats to social bonds. This definition is quite focused on the interpersonal level, and this article aims to demonstrate that shame encompasses both lapses in meeting social expectations, and a corrective reaction to emotional responses that go against the grain of the status quo. For example, a working-class mother might experience shame in response to running out of time to buy groceries and having to instead feed her children fast food; there is no external actor required to arouse the shame-response necessarily, or at least not in real-time, as the resultant shame originates from socialisation which has already taken place.
Socialisation refers to social and environmental processes by which individuals are conditioned to adopt and maintain socially desirable values. (Hurrelmann and Bauer, 2018). Similarly, shame can be taken as a correction to an emotional response that is internally perceived as inappropriate, as Hochschild (2012, p. 57) suggests the “pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel”, defined in her work as feeling rules, such as happiness at a wedding, sadness at a funeral, which is closer to Scheff’s definitional focus. While both Hochschild and Sennett explore the dynamics of class and emotions, neither theorist makes the explicit connection between emotion and power which a sharper examination of shame as a means of emotional management may have wrought.
Considering Arlie Russell Hochschild and her Model of Emotions
Arlie Russell Hochschild has focused much of her life’s work on the impact that societal demands bear on the emotional wellbeing of people working under capitalism, particularly the strain put on middle-class white women. Her ideas are compelling and shed light on social processes overlooked or misconstrued by other theorists, arguably specifically because she focuses on women, a historically neglected demographic. Her work builds upon that of Erving Goffman and Sigmund Freud, finding – as she describes it – the conceptual arena “between” the Goffmanian focus on consciously designed appearances on the one hand and the Freudian focus on unconscious intrapsychic events on the other (Hochschild, 1979, p. 555). Hochschild’s model of emotions as set out in The Managed Heart explores the management of feeling which she sorts into ‘emotion work’ and ‘emotional labour’, both are which are dictated by ‘feeling rules’. Emotion work may take place in our interpersonal dealings with friends, family and acquaintances and is the process by which we present our feelings in more acceptable ways, for example hiding anger or embarrassment to preserve relationships.
Emotional labour can be understood as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (Hochschild, 2012, p. 7). As Heaney (2019, p. 230) argues, the value of this capital, and its exchange rate’ viewed as an embodied capacity can be linked with ‘power to’ for Hochschild’s demographic or viewed as a resource may be linked to ‘power over’ or shame as a constraint on Sennett’s interviewees. Feeling rules are cultural norms or normative ways of behaving in social situations; these rules are continuously and rigorously enforced via what Hochschild refers to as rule reminders and sanctions. Rule reminders are sketchily described as taking several forms, such as questions such as “Why aren’t you happy even though?” or claims such as “You should be ashamed of yourself” and statements such as “You’re just as pleased as punch, I know you are”. Then, sanctions are essentially social consequences for failing to comply with feeling rules. (Hochschild, 2012). Surface acting is about knowing how to act in a given situation, knowing the implicit rules required within different contexts and the degree to which social actors convince others with their emotional displays (Addison, 2017). Deep acting is a process by which social actors convince themselves internally to reconcile and absorb their surface level emotional displays, an attempt at a real feeling self-induced (Hochschild, 2012). As Addison (2017) points out, Hochschild fails to meaningfully address why deep acting takes place or why social actors would need to actively change their inner feelings for social reasons when her focus is on interpersonal dynamics.
Addison however suggests that the reason for deep acting is to reconcile feeling out of place, this arguably arises from her own focus on emotions in the workplace and does not fully probe the depths of Hochschild’s theory. The missing link is socialisation, a compelling driver for social actors to wish to internalise and replace their own feelings can be explained by shame which operates akin to an internal warning system letting social actors know that they are failing to meet “cultural requirements” (Cottingham, 2016, p. 454 cited by Heaney 2019). Hochschild breaks ground in making visible the processes of deep acting as dictated by rule reminders and sanctions. However, The Managed Heart misses the depth of psychic damage caused by being in a social position whereby it would never be possible to meet those cultural requirements. Her work focuses on the middle classes and so these processes become more visible within the workplace because that is where they were most fraught for this demographic, especially at the time in which The Managed Heart was written. In her later work, she delves into the increasing collapse in separation between home and work for the squeezed middle classes as capitalism progresses, we see this explored in The Time Bind and The Outsourced Self in greater depth.
Considering Richard Sennett and the Respect Gap
Much of Richard Sennett’s work, but especially The Hidden Injuries of Class, has focused on the experiences of working-class men from diverse backgrounds including multi-generational immigrants. While he does not explicitly explore the dynamics of emotional management on a social level, his work does have a persistent throughline mapping out the psychic damage caused by what I suggest we call the respect gap. The respect gap should then refer to the site wherein the psychic damage caused by social position constraining individuals’ ability to meet societal expectations takes place, it is the “conflict between character and experience” which Sennett attributes to new capitalism (1999, p. 31). As is the case with many emotions, shame is conceptually elusive, in no small part because it is a sensitive and vulnerable emotion, we work hard to distance ourselves from.
Scheff (2000) is critical of Richard Sennett’s work in collaboration with Jonathan Cobb in The Hidden Injuries of Class because they do not explicitly address shame. Instead, he notes, they use the same codewords or as Sennett calls it the “cover language” used by the interview subjects for their own experiences, to continue to hide the already hidden injuries. This is an unreasonably rigid focus for Scheff to level at their work: they never set out to examine the role of the shame, their project was to explore what issues engaged “American manual labourers and their families that bear on this classic division between culture and the masses” (Sennett and Cobb, 1977, p. 9). Sennett’s later work engages with shame more directly, for example both Respect and The Corrosion of Character continued to explore the impact of emotional constraint on working class populations. Sennett’s sustained focus on class and the damage it can bear was the reasoning behind this essay excluding the work of Jonathan Cobb’s work outside of his contribution to The Hidden Injuries of Class, the writing of which is attributed predominantly to Sennett (as noted in the foreword).
Scheff summarises The Hidden Injuries of Class uncovered as two-fold; a lack of respect the interview subjects feel is warranted, and a feeling of being responsible for their own class and occupational positions. This is arguably a misreading of the work. The men interviewed experience a dual consciousness of the respect gap, knowing it is wrong but nonetheless feeling shame (variously referred to throughout the interviews as shame, guilt, embarrassment) due to their socialisation; “the janitor’s resentment was complicated by his fear that because of his lack of education and his menial status, we had a sneaking right to do so” (Sennett, p. 17, 1999). As Anthony Giddens (1977) acknowledges in his preface to The Hidden Injuries of Class, there appears to be a lack of class consciousness amongst American workers, and this is in part what Sennett explores. Class consciousness is loosely defined but broadly speaking encompasses an awareness of the structural constraints and advantages posed by both one’s own class and that of other social actors. (Fantasia, 1995). It’s therefore not surprising that there would be a less systematic theory arising from this work in comparison with say The Managed Heart which focuses on a more ‘in-tune’ demographic, if, as Skeggs and others believe, the emotional style or culture of the middle classes has been ‘universalized’ and legitimised towards the close of the twentieth century (cited by Heaney, p. 230, 2019). The internal emotional struggle of wants/needs agitating against feeling rules, experienced both by Hochschild’s flight attendants and bill collectors, and Sennett (with Cobb)’s working class boys and men is perhaps the role of free will and agency in the face of complex, implicit social power dynamics.
Sennett (2004, p. 49) refers to sociology’s synonyms for respect as “status”, “prestige”, “recognition”, “honor” and “dignity”, while each of these concepts is abstract, they are arguably consistent with what may be at stake when we experience shame. He suggests that society shapes character in three ways so that people earn, or fail to arouse, respect. First, via self-development, such as developing skills and abilities, secondly via self-care, or looking after oneself with as little external support as possible, and lastly and for Sennett most importantly by giving back to others (Sennett, 2004, p. 63-4). This is arguably a return to engagement with the concept of shame, by exploring the dynamics behind its antithesis. Returning to Hochschild, she makes fleeting references to class dynamics, for example she suggests that “middle-class families prepare their children for emotion management more and working-class families prepare them less. In this way each class prepares its children to psychologically reproduce the class structure” (Hochschild, 1979, p. 551). This is quite a sweeping claim to make, and we are never presented with compelling evidence; it is noteworthy that later in the article Hochschild attributes this point to Caroline Persell.
The implication may be that the lack of class consideration was pointed out as a limitation (Hochschild, p. 571, 1979). Sennett outlines the internalisation of class conflict, by which a man can play out both sides of the power situation in his own life, become alternately judge and judged, alternately individual and member of the mass. (1999, p. 98). Hochschild is concerned with a similar process, albeit on a more individualized level, her differentiation between the real-self and false-self sets at stake damage which can be done to the inner jewel which she proposes as a purer, internal, socially unaffected self. For her, “the actual content of feelings – or wishes, or fantasies, or actions – is not what distinguishes the false self from the true self; the difference lies in whether we claim them as “our own”” (2012, p. 194-5). There is a lack of internal consistency here within Hochschild’s ideas which gets sharpened in her later work, what wishes, fantasies, actions and indeed for this essay’s concerns, shame-wounds we take in and try to force to reconcile with our inner beings and senses of self is surely of great relevance within sociological study. Sennett repeatedly encounters working-class boys and men who “feel responsible for […] event beyond his control; he literally takes it into himself, as his own burden” (1999, p. 29).
Sennett’s examination of internalisation of class conflict is more coherent than Hochschild’s attempts to delineate between a real self and a false self which fights it out for an inner gem, which she presents as or our truest identity untouched by social processes. It is contradictory that the inner gem be considered pure at the same time as Hochschild remains aware that social actors who are increasingly influenced to undertake emotional labour and transmutate their emotional responses eventually begin to struggle to keep clear how they truly feel. Thus, rendering the ability to objectively retain the agency to choose what is and isn’t claimed as “our own” unlikely.
Conversely, Sennett (1977, p. 206-7) tracks similar ground in his differentiation between the “real person and the performing individual” who suffers as a result of “contradictions of the social order”. There is a clarity here that is missing from Hochschild’s split selves which I suggest is due to her lack of consideration of power and the impact on emotion which Sennett seems to consult throughout his work albeit largely implicitly. This is ironic considering Sennett is widely accused of lacking “empirical foundation and methodological rigour” as noted by Tweedie (2013, p. 94). As with Hochschild, there are limitations to Sennett’s work, not least his normative rant comparing his split selves to schizophrenia (1977, p. 206).
For both Hochschild and Sennett, the emotional toll the social processes they examine has on individuals is explored, and they often find commonalities. For example, Sennett discusses with a second-generation immigrant father the pain of feeling “like I don’t know who my kids are”, arising from a gap in experience and education, Hochschild comes across similar alienation but arising from a different context; “We’ll all eat a relaxed meal together when we finally get our schedules coordinated”, a future she notes rarely arrives for the working parents caught in the time bind (1997, p. 217). In The Time Bind Hochschild continually encounters this gap between the real self and the imagined self if only the interviewees had more time, for example the father who buys himself the tools to build his daughter a treehouse that will never come to fruition not because he is uncaring but because he is constrained. This is perhaps what she is getting at when discussing the real and false selves and claiming that it isn’t the content of our aspirations that matters but more so the act of claiming them as our own. However, it would strengthen her argument to explore also what keeps us from our aspirations and again this missing dimension is perhaps power.
Concluding Thoughts; Shame as a Knife
Shame depends on a gap between lived experience/achievements measuring up to societal expectation. As it is becoming increasingly challenging across class boundaries under late-stage capitalism to keep pace with societal demands, it makes sense that these processes would become more transparent within contemporary sociological output than was the case in the 1970s through 2000s which this article largely focuses on. Wouters (1989) criticises Hochschild for her work’s over-focus on capitalism within a very American context, which could be extended to Sennett’s work. However, their insights have applicability to other contexts so long as we remain conscious of the implications of gender and class. Wouters critique of Hochschild verges on acerbic, it is not unreasonable for The Managed Heart’s picture of capitalism to remain firmly within the borderlines of the USA as the study is specifically situated in that context. Putting the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild in critical conversation with the work of Richard Sennett brings us closer to reconciling the oft-neglected conceptual twins of power and emotion proposed by Heaney (2019).
This article has demonstrated that emotion can be at once an enabling and constraining force used to empower or disempower, concluding that shame is mobilised via socialisation as a means of emotional management. Giddens argues that the class consciousness of workers must be understood as a struggle against absorption, to maintain a sense of freedom and dignity in contexts where these threaten to be engulfed, Hochschild’s work identifies similar risks but perhaps to less of an extreme in her earlier work although this does progress over time (1977, preface.) It is this absorption which Skeggs and others frame as the universalization of middle-class experiences used to maintain status in middle-class children and to breed insecurity in working-class children; both are shamed at the table but at least one knows where to find the salad fork. Hochschild acknowledges that the experiences of working-class children differ but attributes this to less emotional management being carried out by their families which is reductive and problematic, implicitly levelling blame at working-class families (Hochschild, 1979, p. 551).
That said, being overly critical of a female theorist maintaining a theoretical focus on one intersection of identity over another perhaps verges on unfair, the so-called forefathers of sociology have largely ignored women for hundreds of years without similar critique, arguably creating the necessity of Hochschild’s theoretical focus in the first place. This essay concludes that shame is a knife which stabs twice, or to put it plainly; middle-class children are socialized to experience shame in the hopes of encouraging them to stick to paths which will afford them greater privilege, working-class children are socialised to experience shame in ways which will keep them in check. Class boundaries for both groups are maintained via the same emotional management strategy but deployed differently, accounting for the fact that two theorists working with opposing social demographics would find so much commonality within their respective studies.
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