The Emotional and Semantic Nature of Working Class Labor in a Service Economy: An Overview of the Problematic in Foreign Sociological Discourse

The article aims to review and analyze the studies of service labor specifics in foreign sociology. Attention is focused on the emotional and semantic nature of work of the lower level of interactive service workers. Along with industrial workers, this group constitutes the new working class of postindustrial society. The definition of “emotional labor” by A.R. Hochschild and its further conceptualization in foreign sociology have been explicated. It is argued that a special type of “emotional work” required from ordinary employees transforms the value-semantic content of labor, the result and product of which is the success of service interaction. Special attention is paid to the gender dimension of emotional labor in the service sphere. Service researchers highlight the enormous role of gender in structuring public perceptions, demographics, and even ways of resisting those in the sector. Clients and managers share common stereotypes about employee representation of physicality and material attributes of role performance, which support the reproduction of racial and gender segregation. Interactive service work is characterized by specific attributes that are considered typically feminine in everyday consciousness, for example, submissiveness, helpfulness, and courtesy. These new behavioral standards challenge the model of hegemonic masculinity and become a factor that hinders the self-realization of young people in the new socioeconomic conditions. Based on the findings of empirical studies, it is shown that the subjective meaning of service work is directly related to the emotional repertoire of the roles played. Consequently, the value-semantic content is different for different types of service labor and may depend on a specific workplace. Resistance to dehumanization, instrumentalization and de-identification of their personality within the framework of the work process becomes a key aspect of the subjective life experience of service workers. This resistance is most often not expressed in an organized form, but manifests itself through alienation from the process and result of labor, as well as from their own emotions. The search for the meanings of such work is associated, as a rule, with the value of a permanent job, the development of vitality and firmness of character, for young people also with the process of growing up and gaining autonomy.

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