SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN PRACTICE

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION.

EXPLANATION OF EMOTIONS BEING SOCIAL. 

ROLE OF ‘EMOTIONAL LABOR CONCEPT’ IN COMMUNITY PRACTICE. 

CONCLUSION.

References. 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

TheSOCIOLOGICAL THEORY provided by Arlie Russell Hochschild is selected for this essay. She was born on January 15, 1940, in Boston, works at the University of California as a professor of sociology. Hochschild’s work is a combination of interpretative theory, keen observation, and analysis of human emotions. She believed that our society and culture has a great impact on our emotions and thus enlightened the ways how we control and manage our personal and work life emotions. This concept arose in her as, being the child of diplomats, she realized that people draw boundaries between their inner and outer feelings depending on their culture and the society they move in. She extended this concept to emotional labour where people have to fake emotions according to their job requirements .

EXPLANATION OF EMOTIONS BEING SOCIAL

According to Hochschild (2003a), the socialist scholar began her work with the thought that human feelings and emotions are largely controlled by the culture and society hence, emotions like happiness, sorrow, jealousy, annoyance etc. can be regarded as being social. SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY She further argued that each culture patronizes the feelings of its people. For example in some cultures being sick corresponds to some sort of disease while in other cultures it may be taken as being depressed or emotionally unstable. She further elaborated her concept by visualizing the fact that how we react to a particular situation or incident is guided by our culture and this is what has been infused in our minds from the beginning of childhood.

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY For example from childhood, we observed that birthdays and weddings are the events of joy and people enjoy and reflect gesture of happiness on these occasions and that’s the reason we portrayed the feeling of happiness on such occasions no matter what we feel inside. A similar example is of funerals that they are considered to be an occasion of mourning and feeling sad though the fact is if you are not emotionally attached to the deceased you may not have the feeling of sorrow inside but as the culture has implanted this approach a person automatically starts displaying the feeling of grief. Hence it can be seen that culture plays an important role in suggesting the possibilities of how we should feel (Hochschild, 2013b).

Apart from this, there are ideas about what should be the feeling if a person undergoes or perform a certain activity. For example, we have the thinking that we should be overwhelmed if we have achieved something or we should be angry if someone has deceived us. In short, we have set some rules regarding our feelings and these rules reflect our culture and society SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY.

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY: In the view of Hochschild (2004), Hochschild proceeded with this concept and visualized that this idea can perform a great role in better community development and therefore, nurtured the concept of emotional labour. She emphasized that managing your external emotions according to the job requirements and not letting inner feelings or emotions affect your work life can result in better performance and work environment. She also proposed that training the labour on controlling and faking their emotions would result in community peace and development. This concept is further elaborated in the next section…