A Revisionist History Approach to the Study of Emotional Labor: Have We Forgotten Display Rules and Service Contexts?

We take a revisionist approach to study emotional labor—commoditization of emotions for a wage—to delineate how organizational scholars must “revive and resubmit” two crucial elements of the emotional labor phenomenon that have been left behind as research within this space evolved. First, we argue that scholars have not paid enough recent attention to display rules that prescribe what emotions are acceptable within service interactions, instead assuming classic conceptualizations (i.e. show positive emotions and hide negative emotions) still prevail. Second, we highlight that the shift away from service occupations to more white-collar occupations may have minimized our understanding of the complexity of emotional labor in modern service arrangements, such as multiple job holders, and employees in the gig economy. We hope that future emotional labor scholarship will dig into several taken-for-granted assumptions about the phenomenon moving forward to help “go back to the basics” regarding display rules of those in service work.