Bounded Emotionality at the Body Shop

Impersonal criteria for making decisions and restraints on emotional expression at work have long been the hallmarks of organizational life (for example, Weber, 1946, 1981). Recent work has broken this emotional taboo (for example, Fineman, 1996), exploring how certain organizations require the expression of particular emotions at work in order to maximize organizational productivity, an aspect of job performance that has been labelled emotional labour (see for example Hochschild, 1983; Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989). Sutton (1991) and his colleagues (for example, Sutton and Rafaeli, 1998) have explored discrepancies between outward behaviour and inward feelings experienced by smiling flight attendants and nasty bill collectors. In contrast, feminist organizational …