Although many studies have been conducted on emotional labour, the empirical evidence regarding the effect of deep acting on employees' emotional exhaustion remains mixed. Scholars adopting the personfocused approach have supposed that deep acting is beneficial for employees' well-being because it reduces the discrepancy between felt and expressed emotions-emotional dissonance. However, the mixed results of previous empirical studies indicate that a more balanced approach including an alternative mechanism that offsets the effect of emotional dissonance seems to be required. Drawing upon the job-focused perspective, which stresses the psychological costs of emotional labour, we posited difficulty maintaining display rules as an alternative mechanism representing the ego-depleting process of emotional labour. We tested the mediating effects of emotional dissonance and difficulty maintaining display rules on the relationship between emotional labour and emotional exhaustion. Our research model was tested using data collected from 211 salespeople over a 4-week period. Using multilevel path analysis, we find that emotional dissonance and difficulty maintaining display rules mediate the effects of surface acting on emotional exhaustion. Difficulty maintaining display rules mediates the relationship between deep acting and emotional exhaustion. Our findings suggest that emotional labour strategies impact employees' emotional exhaustion via different mechanisms.
After the 1997 financial crisis, South Korea abruptly transformed into a neoliberal state. This sudden neoliberal turn necessitated an invention of new subjectivities, making it one of the nation’s most urgent projects. Various efforts were made by the state and market, and among them the notion of ‘creativity management’ stood out. First employed by Samsung Group, creativity management in a wide variety of forms was soon emulated by numerous organizations in South Korea, private or public. This article, drawing upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality, examines how self-governing, neoliberal subjectivities were constructed by the practices and discourses of creativity management. For this, we performed a multilevel analysis of governmentality at the macro (societal), meso (organizational), and micro (individual) levels by using data collected from various media sources and in-depth interviews conducted at two large Korean firms. The analysis reveals that the macro-meso-micro frame is a useful way of understanding the processes by which creativity discourse at a societal level is materialized in organizational programs and how both the discourse and programs influence subjectivities. The finding of this study also suggests an almost universal applicability of the governmentality notion in explaining the advent of neoliberal subjects even in a previously authoritarian state like South Korea. The article concludes by elaborating on these and other contributions in the discussion section.
With the neoliberal turn, young people constitute a large part of the insecure class of workers, or the precariat. Given the transient nature of their employment, members of the young precariat face structural barriers that hinder their efforts to organize themselves into trade unions. In this article, the three key barriers to their organizing efforts are identified as underdeveloped common identities, scarce material resources, and inability to utilize conventional trade union resistance methods. Drawing upon social movement theory, this study explores the extent to which the Youth Community Union in South Korea has successfully handled these barriers to represent young, temporary workers.
This study tried to explore platform workers’ challenges in achieving work-life balance. While past studies have focused on typical employees, little attention has been paid to how irregular workers including platform workers experience work-life balance. This paper analyzed interview data created by 9 webtoonists using grounded theory. This study found that the distinctive characteristics of platform labor such as readers’ evaluation system and job insecurity cause work-life conflict. The readers’ evaluation system embedded in the webtoon websites leads webtoonists to extend their working hours and strengthen labor intensity. In addition, webtoonists tend to perform heavy tasks to relieve employment anxiety. This study also investigated how platform workers devise strategies to restore work-life balance using boundary theory. Webtoonists are not passive actors who accept the imbalance between work and life. Instead, they attempt to restore the balance between the two areas by establishing the boundaries of work and life. Recent studies have pointed out that people can distinguish between work and life domains or integrate the two areas. This study found that most webtonnists preferred the segregation of work and life domains. They performed job crafting, and spatial and temporal boundary management to segregate the work-life domains. Finally, this study proposes the policies that support platform workers’ successful boundary work.
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