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The Managed Heart
Hochschild's 1983 book that named emotional labor and cracked open a dimension of working life economics had rendered invisible — the founding text of the sociology of emotion and the sharpest available lens on the AI emotional economy.
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling is the 1983 monograph in which Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the concept of emotional labor and demonstrated that the modern service economy extracts value from workers' feelings as systematically as the industrial economy extracted value from their bodies. The book combines Delta Air Lines fieldwork, interviews with bill collectors, theoretical engagement with Stanislavski and Goffman, and political analysis of how feminine emotional performance is naturalized as character rather than recognized as skill. Its concepts — emotional labor, feeling rules, surface and deep acting, emotive dissonance — have traveled across sociology, management studies, and now into the analysis of artificial intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from a decade of Hochschild's work on the sociology of emotion, beginning with her 1979 American Journal of Sociology paper on emotion work and feeling rules. The Managed Heart was the empirical extension of