analyzing social context

How Emotional Experiences are Influenced by One s Sense of Self
The interviewee was a mother, age 55, employee of a mortgage servicing company. Because of COVID 19, she has been stuck working from home, which is very challenging and frustrating for her as none of the conveniences of her office are at her disposal and it makes her work more difficult and time consuming. The primary emotion she feels is anger: she is physically pained by working 12 hour days sitting in a dining room chair that is hard on her back and hands, since she had spinal surgery a year ago; she misses her comfortable office chair. Her computer and wi-fi are slower than the system at work, where she has two computer screens that she can use at once to help speed up her work. With everyone working from home, the tasks are more slowly accomplished and she is often frustrated by her co-workers who, also overwhelmed, move more slowly than normal and who also call out for help, which adds to her work and frustration. By the end of her day, she is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted.
The ways in which the mother expressed her emotions were appropriate within the context of Hochschild’s notion of “feeling rules.” She said that she would call her boss to vent, which is a commonly accepted practice, and she noted that her boss is okay with it and is very personable and would usually talk her down from her high stress attack, but that at the end of the day she would still feel stressed and wiped out. This all could be an example of what Hochschild calls “deep acting” (35). This is where the person expresses spontaneously a real feeling that “has been self-induced” (Hochschild 35). It is possible the mother is self-inducing her own anger in an effort to get the attention of her boss so that he knows how much time and work and effort and energy she is putting into her work to help the company. Her sense of self, however, is negatively affected by this because she is convinced that she is overwhelmed by the work that she is doing and that the absence of the little conveniences really do add up to create a very difficult situation for her so that it comes across like her job is now 10x harder or even impossible to do now that she is working at home, does not have her comfortable office chair, has only one computer screen instead of two, has a slower Internet connection, and has to rely on colleagues who are also working from home and who, she suspects are not really working but are rather faking being online.
There does not appear to be any misfit in terms of how the feeling rules are in play, for it could easily be shown that the mother is believing so deeply in her own misfortunate circumstance that she really does feel overwhelmed and angry about her situation. She knows that she has a boss that she can vent to and make her frustrations heard and that this will ensure that her suffering is not going unnoticed and that in the future it might be something that she can fall back on, for instance, to show how much she personally sacrificed for the company.
But as Katz indicates expressing these emotions could also be a way to “resolve emotional tension” (19). Thus, the deep acting conjures up the emotions, so that the need to vent them becomes real, and like the angry LA driver who curses and shouts in his own car at others though they cannot hear him because it helps him to relieve stress quickly she will call her boss when the emotions become too high and she needs to have some release.
As Goffman explains, tie signs “contain evidence” about the nature of a relationship (195). The relationship between the mother and her boss, as expressed by the mother contains a tie sign. Early in the interview she described herself as an extremely dedicated worker and never slacks on her work. She is the type of worker who wants to make sure that her work is not going unappreciated by her superiors because then it would seem as though all her virtue were being wasted as though tossed into the void. Thus, at the end of the interview, when she describes how she can always call her boss to vent, it is a tie sign—almost like two lovers hand-holding in public: it is a declaration to a third party (the interviewer) of a special bond. In terms of the lovers holding hands it is a sign to the rest of the world that they are lovers. In terms of the mother and her boss and the casual manner in which she describes how he is always ready and willing to listen to her complaints it is a sign that she is loved and respected by her superior and that she truly is appreciated—otherwise her complaints would not be heard and she would be telling a much different story. At the end of the day, she knows that it is all worth it because her hard work is being duly noted by her boss and it is all going down in her file and someday she will likely receive an award—perhaps employee of the month. That is the suggestion inherent in the tie sign.
The mother’s sense of self influences and is influenced by these emotional experiences in different ways as well. First, there is Mead’s sense of “I” and “Me” which can be taken into consideration. For example, the “Me” is the socialized aspect of the self—the learned behaviors, the attitudes, the sense of expectations from others. The “I” is the individual’s identity that is formed in response to the “Me.” So with the mother, she has developed a pattern of learned behaviors and attitudes that conform with the expectations of others: she presents herself as a hard worker because it is naturally a learned attitude to have when one is in a job that is demanding. However, she does not ever describe the actual challenges of her job but rather only the inconveniences of having to work from home. What it is that makes her a hard worker is not defined. She talks the language of one who has learned how to talk the talk—but in terms of substance there is nothing to be found. There is only a “woe is me” emotional experience that makes up the individual’s identity—the “I.” She sees herself as a victim of COVID 19 because she is a hard worker as her “Me” has led her to believe. Because she feels so challenged by working from home, however, she has to lay the blame for her difficulties elsewhere (it cannot be her own fault because her “Me” meets expectations and her “I” is convinced of the dedication that “Me” has shown). So her “I” blames lazy co-workers for consistently dropping the ball and causing her to have slow down. To make sure her boss is convinced that she is still meeting expectations, she must call him to let him know what is going on so that her “Me” is not devalued or diminished, which would in turn negatively impact her “I” and cause her to feel a different emotional experience. Anger is thus the emotional experience that influences her sense of self and that is influenced in turn by her sense of self as well. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts because she is convinced that her challenges are of an external sort that she has no control over and that are ultimately unfair since she is such a good, hard worker and deserves a more comfortable chair and two computer screens and faster wi-fi.
Goffman’s “fronts” can also help to explain why the mother is presenting herself in this manner: the front stage of her behavior is an expression of internalized norms that she herself has come to accept and she has expectations of behavior that she is now expressing. The expectation is that working from home is difficult if not impossible because it is simply not how one works and if it were possible to work in this manner then they would have already had been doing it—but they were not so the conditions are abnormal and unfair and she must make sure her boss knows it.
In terms of Simmel’s concept of “social geometry” it makes sense that the mother should be expressing herself in these terms and demonstrating anger as well because she is no longer in a group setting in which she knows how much power she has and what her role identity is. Now she is as though cut adrift in the ocean and has no sense of how far from shore she is or how long she will be at sea—so she must continuously send out distress signals to her boss to let him know that she is still out there and will need to be picked up and rescued at some point. At any rate, she does not want to be forgotten and she feels insecure in this new working environment because there is no “there” there—she is not in a workplace that she can call her own and that has a working group with a working hierarchy: everyone is adrift and on their own and it is very much like being lost in a forest or at sea—one does not know whether the others are closer to the hierarchy or further away, whether the others are gaining in power over her or whether they are losing in power. She cannot see what relationship they are cultivating with their superiors during the lockdown and cannot see how that might be affecting her own status and position. There is a great deal of job insecurity that she is probably experiencing where her emotions are looked at from this perspective and that could help to explain why she feels the need to call her boss to vent—it is a way to let him know that she exists and that she is still with them.
In conclusion, there are numerous ways to examine the emotional experience of the mother interviewed here. She could be said to be deep acting, or it could be that her “Me” and “I” are at work in creating a sense of self that is self-reinforcing. It could be that she is merely attempting to signal her own value and status through a tie sign. Or it could be a front or effect of her sense of tension in this new social geometry.
Works Cited
Goffman, Erving. “Tie Signs.”
Hochschild, Arlie. Managed Heart. University of California Press, 2012.
Katz, Jack. How Emotions Work. University of Chicago Press, 1999.