Emoting up, emoting down: status, authenticity and the emotional labour of STEM graduate students

Abstract

Various studies have examined emotional labour’s positive and negative aspects, but the structural conditions under which people experience emotional labour as fulfilling vs. taxing are underexplored. In this study, I use interviews with graduate students – a group whose relative social status changes routinely – to illuminate the types of emotion work that occasion positive and negative feelings. I find that graduate students often felt positive when performing emotional labour down the academic hierarchy to undergraduate students but felt negative about their emotional labour when performing it up the academic hierarchy to professors. I also find that women, people of colour and international students find their emotional labour particularly distressing when they perceive it to be an expectation of their marginalised social identity. Using identity theory, I show how status dynamics underlie people's emotional reactions when their identities are at risk of being disconfirmed. This research study contributes to the field of the sociology of emotions by specifying that status matters for whether emotional labour is a positive or negative experience for workers.