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This chapter continues the discussion of how parents make decisions regarding their approaches to digital and mobile media in the lives of their children, foregrounding the role of emotion work in these processes. In particular, the chapter considers how families engage in emotion work as they experience the time crunch of balancing work and family life, and how parents feel the need to justify their approaches when among extended family and peers who may not share their class and/or cultural milieu. The chapter then proposes emotion work as a framework that offers an alternative to presuming that parents make media choices based on rational reasoning regarding risk.

The study of self work is one of the oldest and most developed areas of management and organizational research that focuses on social-symbolic work. This chapter reviews three literatures on self work in management and organization research. For each, it introduces the type of self work, reviews its development in management and organizational research, and explores the implications of studying it as a type of self work. First, the chapter explores how the concept of self work can help organize an extensive and well-developed literature through a discussion of emotion work. Second, it explores how the concept of self work can extend an existing research area by using the example of identity work. Third, it explores how a social-symbolic work perspective can motivate a new stream of literature by examining career work as a form of self work that remains largely unresearched.

This chapter examines the emotion work of deference and caring among Indian customer service agents. Deference and caring are central to call center work; emotion work involves the enactment of femininity for both male and female employees. Workers serve and care for Western customers by reproducing hierarchies present in many traditionally feminized service occupations such as nursing and domestic work. This chapter explores gender and racism in relation to the feminization of emotion work and how emotion work enables call center agents to learn to not take the rude behavior of customers personally, thus maintaining self-worth in the face of abusive customers. It shows how aggressive and abusive behavior is normalized in the context of encounters between Westerners and Indians, which provide a forum for a continual process of racialization.

This chapter reviews and summarises the theory proposed throughout this book. It considers this theory within the context of the case-study site used as an example throughout. While all child and family social work organisations will interpret the wider systemic pressures individually and have their own regional needs and local idiosyncrasies, the case example provides an illustration of how pride and shame can be used in political attempts to shape, direct and control public services. In addition, it also demonstrates the complexity of the decision-making process, where experiences, or the anticipation, of pride, shame and other self-conscious emotions drive practitioners to comply with, or resist, such pressures. These processes are not reserved specifically for child and family social work, however. Indeed, the whole welfare state and governmental apparatus has been going through a transformation as neoliberal ideas, agendas and values have become embedded into political, media and public discourse. These ideas, therefore, relate to other disciplines and practices. This chapter sketches out the conditions needed for authenticity and pride in social work practice before concluding with possible future directions in the theory and practice of pride and shame in professional practice

This chapter considers how shuttle traders, or small-scale entrepreneurs in the wholesale garment business, move merchandise from Turkey to locations across the former Soviet Union and are part of a broader transformation of intimate practices and affective states brought about by gendered mobility in the region. Featuring the accounts of three women entrepreneurs from Russia, the chapter reflects on how particular political-economic formations generate their own distinctive affective states. The chapter considers the emotion work required of women as men contend with shame about no longer being primary breadwinners, and as women widely reflect on their shame associated with becoming traders. Overall, the chapter analyzes how ideals around gender and labor are renegotiated as global capitalism encompasses former socialists.

This concluding chapter revisits the themes of mothering, the self, emotions, and time, tying them together theoretically in order to understand intensive mothering more broadly. The temporal-emotional conflict is part and parcel of the ideology of intensive mothering. What underlies the temporal and emotional tensions, at least in part, is a definition of childhood, and by extension intensive mothering, as time-sensitive. This temporal assumption is the most salient feature in homeschooling mothers' experiences and has the biggest impact on their identities. It drives the ways they interpret their past, present, and future and, through temporal emotion work, helps them construct identities as good mothers over time.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants work to be present for their aging parents, with particular emphasis on the interrelationships among ethnicity, culture, and gender that shape expectations, attitudes, and practices concerning care giving. It considers how immigrant children become more aware of changes and losses happening in their parents' lives, including retirement from work, selling businesses, marital difficulties, and death of close friends and family members. It shows that adult daughters, both near and far, are more acutely aware of and responsive to changes happening in their parents' lives, and that they maintain close ties with their immigrant parents even as they are cognizant of and empathetic to changes their parents experience as they age. This chapter also examines the negotiations that take place between spouses and among siblings in providing financial and other types of support to aging parents.

This chapter takes a look at the argument that is directly against a characterization of will as a “moment of choice”. This argument treats willing as a processual development. The chapter shows that willing can be viewed as a gradual change of orientation from one attentional target to another. In this chapter, thinking of will is a morally loaded process that is achieved through emotion work, thought, conversation, and a variety of other experiences. The chapter also briefly refers to recent anthropological considerations of emotion, agency, and intention.

This chapter shows how homeschoolers manipulate their subjective experiences of time to manage their feelings. Even when mothers found ways to juggle all their household responsibilities and solicit domestic contributions from their husbands, it left them with their heads barely above water. Homeschoolers feel they have no personal time or, as they called it, “me-time,” which result in problematic emotions that have to be managed. Mothers first tried to allocate their time differently to carve out space in their schedules for themselves, but these quantitative time-use strategies proved ineffective. As a consequence, mothers resorted to managing their feelings by manipulating their subjective experiences of time, a process henceforth referred to as “temporal emotion work.”

This chapter draws on material from life histories of development workers. It asks what personal resources are required to be able to cope with the ethical and emotional demands of the job. It explores concepts of resilience that highlight the internal (psychological) and external (social) resources that enable people to cope with stressful life events. It suggests that ‘being a survivor’ can itself become a crucial psychological resource. It argues that both professional and managerial support for development workers is often lacking, and this can compound the stresses of the job. It also explores some of the strategies that development workers deploy to cope with the demands of the job. It also problematises prevailing positivistic models of evidence, effectiveness and success, arguing for a ‘complex systems psychodynamic’ approach that recognizes the centrality of ‘emotion work’ and ‘relation work’ to the development task.

Chapter Five analyzes the way in which agents create intimate bonds with artists, performing emotional work with them, and constantly working at drawing the boundary between “being friendly” and “being friends” with their clients. This chapter sheds light both on the agents’ dependence on the artists that they represent and draw their professional legitimacy from, and on the forms of power that they hold over their clients, even when they handle the most successful stars. It examines the embedded professional hierarchies that tie agents and artists in “coupled careers” in Hollywood. It reveals the importance of agenting practices for the shaping of artistic profiles and careers. Together, chapters 4 and 5 show that, even if relationship work takes very personalized forms, it goes beyond building one-on-one ties: it involves larger mechanisms of mutual reliance which form groups and hierarchies in the entertainment industry.

This book explores the relationship between money and work, with particular emphasis on how the workplace shapes our attitudes toward money and other finance-related matters. It considers the different types of “cognitive work” (efforts to conceive of the meaning of money and work in particular ways) and the different types of “emotion work” (efforts to manage one's emotions about money) that emerge from the structured and patterned association between job and money. It shows how the cognitive and emotion work that is needed to perform certain jobs creates specific money cultures—beliefs and practices about money that are socially transmitted. It also examines how distinct money cultures develop out of the quotidian practices and socialization experiences that occur at work. The book argues that our work plays a very important role in shaping the way we come to think of money and even affects our lives outside of work—an approach that it refers to as a cognitive economic sociology of money and work.

This chapter examines how commission salespeople and sports and entertainment agents conceive of the connection between time and money. Focusing primarily on people selling food and beverage products, residential real estate, and clients' talents as entertainers, athletes, or writers, it considers the cognitive and emotion work that salespeople undertake around issues of time and money in relation to other dilemmas that arise between work space and private space, including product dilemmas. It shows that salespeople link time and money not only because they are paid on commission but also because their employers create a particular money culture that encourages them to think this way. It suggests that salespeople maintain a sense of self-worth that is not entirely dependent on sales commissions.

This chapter describes a way to think about money in both structural and cognitive terms. In particular, it examines how particular types of work lead to specific observable money cultures and whether money is simply a medium of exchange or an important ritual object in and of itself. It also considers the relationship between culture and the economy within the context of money and how conceptions of money are created and revealed through the daily practices, mental cognitions, emotional labor, and worldviews that are generated at work. It shows that cognitive work and emotion work are intertwined in the way we conceive of money. The interplay between culture and structure is evident in money-related stories and the narratives that people tell about their work and about their identity as working people.

This chapter examines how people become comfortable in the world of other people's money, including people with substantial amounts of money, by focusing on fund raisers and grant givers. In particular, it considers the money cultures that develop around fund raising and grant giving as well as the cognitive and emotional dilemmas that arise when your job is to ask for money or to dole it out. It discusses the types of cognitive and emotion work that fund raisers and grant givers must do to make sense of money and to understand inequality in financial circumstances. It also explores the structural differences between fund raising and grant giving and their effect on the particular money cultures that are created in both lines of work.

This chapter focuses centrally on cis women’s reported household, childcare, and emotional labor within their partnerships and families with trans men. While a considerable number of studies document the household and childcare division of labor and emotion work within heterosexual, gay, and lesbian households, doing so within trans partnerships and families is virtually unprecedented. This chapter details the ways in which cis women’s partnerships and families with trans men are both similar to and distinct from some of these other family forms. It also highlights transition-related carework and rituals (such as raising funds for transition-related surgeries and photographically documenting bodily transition) in order to document this understudied form of material and emotional labor.