Elena: This part of this article is very important because here we can see how the concept of emotional intelligence in modern society is aiming at the separation between public and private feelings and behavior and basically training people to act "well" even if they are about to commit suicide. The danger of this incoherence is much more relevant and obvious in cults but no less in society, fortunately the author concludes that that is no model for a more balanced life.
To return once again to Foucault’s earlier cited ‚not bad, but dangerous‛ statement,
the ‚bad‛ of emotional labour is that, for Hochschild, it further increases the span of
managerial control, facilitating an increasing pervasion into the ‚inner reaches‛ of
emotional subjectivity. On the face of it, EI extends this capacity further still. After
all, EI is understood to be a measure not simply of our performance at work, but of
who we are. The scope, then, for employees to develop protective self-distancing stra-
tegies, to maintain a clear distinction between their selves at work and their ‚true‛
selves beyond is severely curtailed.42 The rhetorical appeal of EI — that it is based
upon neuroscience, not an arbitrary managerial standard — might indeed com-
pound the tendency, under the rubric of EI, for dissent or a breakdown in emotional
performance to be pathologised as an individual failing, as indicative of a person
who lacks requisite levels of emotional competence, as something that is wrong with
me.43 Yet advocates of EI encourage the capacity to maintain a ‚healthy‛ distance
between the personal and professional ‚self.‛ Goleman, for example, states quite
explicitly, that ‚< itself
signifies poor emotional competence.‛44
In this respect, then, Hochschild and Goleman appear to share common concerns.
Each is advocating a separation between ‚private‛ and ‚public‛ life so as to protect
the ‚true‛ emotional self. For Hochschild, ‚navigation of the emotional waters‛45 in
our private lives serves the purposes of welfare and pleasure, whereas in the public
domain ‚a profit motive slips in.‛46 Our ‚private‛ uses of feeling are thus deemed
to require protection from the interests of capitalist enterprises. Similarly, Gole-
man’s emphasis is upon elucidating our true feelings. Indeed, he identifies the com-
petence of emotional self-awareness as central to EI. However, his intention, he
states, is definitely not: ‚
simply bare their feelings or souls to each other, in some nightmarish vision of the
office as a kind of emotional salon or ongoing sensitivity group<.‛47
But while both Goleman and Hochschild warn against the blurring of the boun-
daries between private and working lives, this very conception of an absolute split
between the ‚private‛ and ‚public,‛ ‚authentic‛ and ‚acted,‛ ‚real‛ and ‚false‛
42
J. Cullinane & M. Pye, ‚Winning and losing in the workplace — the use of emotions in the
valorisation and alienation of labour,‛ paper presented to Work Employment Society annual
conference, University of Nottingham, 11th–13th September, 2001.
43
P. Fleming & G. Sewell, ‚Looking for the good soldier, Svejk: alternative modalities of resis-
tance in the contemporary workplace,‛ Sociology, 36 (4) (2000); Hughes.
44
Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, 287.
45
Hochschild, 119.
46
Ibid., 153.
47
Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, 287.
Hughes: Emotional Intelligence
41
selves, is itself problematic, as is the more general conceptualisation of power and
selfhood that is common to Hochschild and other dominant sociological accounts of
emotions at work. It is in this connection in particular that, in different ways, the
work of both Elias and Foucault each offers considerable utility in rethinking the
expansion of emotional labour and, more particularly, the rise of EI as a managerial
discourse. Indeed, the notional stratified ‚self‛ which both Hochschild and Gole-
man consider axiomatic for their respective analyses, marks for both Elias and Fou-
cault at once a point of departure, and through a shared focus on the sociogenesis of
‚modern‛ selfhood, a concrete analytical focus.
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