Being ‘fun’ at work: emotional labour, class, gender and childcare

Abstract

This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project investigating the experiences of UK‐based students training on level‐2 and level‐3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by class and gender. We consider the ways in which students are encouraged to manage their own and the children's emotions and we identify a number of ‘feeling rules’ that demarcate the vocational habitus of care work with young children. We conclude by emphasising the importance of specific contexts of employment in order to understand workers’ emotional labour and argue for more recognition of the intense demands of emotional labour in early childhood education and care work.

Schools as workplaces: Intersectional regimes of inequality

“…Young, working-class, early childhood teachers in England report that becoming a good teacher requires performances of wholesomeness. When interacting with parents they pretend that they do not have lives outside of the school where they smoke, drink, or have sex, but instead emphasize caring for other people's children as the totality of their being (Vincent & Braun, 2012). Likewise, many male teachers describe feeling caught between needing or wanting to care for students and the fear that their caring behavior will be viewed as sexually predatory or out-of-step with masculine requirements to be strong and detached.…”

Learning providers’ work with NEET young people

“…As Vincent and Braun (2013) have already suggested, however, there is a middle ground between complete alienation and complete engagement on the part of providers, which may parallel and reflect the 'ordinary' middle of youths considered by Roberts (2012). Different emotional labouring techniques are utilised, though their usefulness depends on individual contexts, to the extent that they may depend on whether a NEET young person is able to laugh about themselves on a particular day.…”

“…The 'calm and kind' approach, also termed 'mothering' in the following sections, is exemplified by Hochschild's description of air stewardesses whereas 'meanness and strictness' or 'keeping it real' are embodied by debt collectors. What Colley (2006, 25) (Hochschild, 1983) and can alter the true self (Vincent and Braun, 2013). The potential for burnout was a common theme in the interviews with providers.…”

“…A quarter raised questions about whether they become too involved and may act in what they consider to be inappropriate ways, common questions in the emotional work undertaken in caring professions (Vincent and Braun 2013). In two instances such scenarios involved providers lending money to NEET young people.…”

Food, feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials

“…A high proportion of feminist studies of caring continue to focus, rather paradoxically, on the 'public' space of non-parental child-care (e.g. Boyer, Reimer, & Irvine, 2013;Vincent & Braun, 2013); although of course the nature of privatised commoditised childcare questions the public/private dichotomy, as it is neither a public nor a private space, but a semi-public institutionalised space which only specific individuals -infants and young children, nursery staff and possibly parents or people with parental responsibility, can access.…”