Emotional labor, defined as the management of inner feelings at work (Hochschild, 1983), highlights the complexities of gender, social hierarchies, and work in service- and hospitality-related industries globally. Business historians have not fully engaged with the concept. Yet the use of emotional labor as an analytical framework helps revisit the logic of “rationality” in business management and illuminates the dynamics of social relations. This panel seeks to understand how emotional labor became institutionalized as part of work and organizational culture in businesses across various geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We ask how businesses commodified feelings; and how different national contexts shaped the nature of commodification and management of feelings. Ultimately, how have capitalism accessed and intervened in a space to determine a universal prescription for femininity and body image at the workplace?
Ai Hisano examines the “restaurant girls” of Japanese department stores from the 1900s to the 1930s, packaged as part of the food services provided on their premises. She argues that this new form of labor marked the incorporation of personality performance into business management. If serving food was considered the extension of domestic work, serving guests at the hotel also presupposed women’s responsibility as caretakers. Focusing on the role of hotel social directors, Megan Elias unveils the complexities of gendered roles in consumers and workers in the early- to mid-twentieth-century United States. Yen Nie Yong brings the dimension of postcoloniality into her analysis. She examines how the state’s paternalistic rule played a key role in immortalizing the Singapore Girl—the representation of Singapore Airlines’ female cabin crew from the 1970s. Together, this panel attempts to unpack the fluid and contingent historical processes involved in negotiating egalitarianism at work and women’s autonomy over their feelings and bodies, amidst varying contexts of modernization of businesses and economies.