Communication 3nine2 Chapter 39 Navigating The Limits of a Smile

Navigating the Limits of a Smile    Sarah J. Tracy

Cassie, a 24-year-old from Oklahoma, is a new junior assistant cruise director on the 1600- passenger Radiant Spirit cruise ship. She is thrilled to have the job, yet in her first few weeks she is overwhelmed with the formal training mandates and inflated passenger expectations for customer service. After agreeing to participate in a provocative passenger activity and then being faced with sexual innuendo from a passenger, Cassie must grapple with the questions, "Who is to blame?" and "What can I do about the situation?" This case raises questions about emotion labor, unobtrusive control, and sexual harassment in a customer service organizational environment.

The objective of this case is to illustrate the difficulty of navigating the limits of emotion labor and the complexity of managing sexual harassment in a customer service organizational environment.

Emotion labor—the organizationally-mandated commodification and control of employee emotional display; paid work that is done to create a publicly-observable facial and bodily display of emotion that serves as a central "product" of the organization.

Defining quid pro quo harassment is much easier than identifying hostile work environment harassment. The case presented does not illustrate quid pro quo harassment. However, it may exemplify hostile working environment harassment if a reasonable person would believe that the harassment is objectively severe enough to make it abusive. Furthermore, for it to "count" as harassment under Title VII’s purview, Cassie must subjectively agree that the environment is indeed hostile.

Quid pro quo harassment—involves making conditions of employment (hiring, promotion, retention, etc.) contingent on the victim’s providing sexual favors. E.g., "Sleep with me or you’ll get fired."

Sexual harassment—any unwanted or offensive sexual advances or derogatory remarks made from a person in a hierarchically superior position to an unwilling subordinate.

1. In what ways is emotion labor communicated in the workplace? What other types of work require emotion labor (consider positions that require both pleasant and unpleasant emotional displays).

2. Are "emotion labor" jobs usually low or high status? Who, demographically, holds these different jobs? How are they compensated for their work?

3. What do you think are the psychosocial effects of being paid to enact a prescribed emotional demeanor?

4. Are cruise ship employees ever really "backstage?" In what other types of jobs do employees face difficulty in ever separating from the organization?

5. How much responsibility do employees have in researching organizational positions in advance and being aware of the downsides of the job? How much responsibility should the organization have in communicating the negative sides to the job?

6. Do you think using customer comment cards is an effective way to evaluate employees? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so? How much emphasis should be put on customer comments? In what other ways should employees be evaluated?

This case study serves to illustrate the complexities and potential abuses of emotion labor and unobtrusive/concertive control in organizations. Emotion labor is considered to be the organizationally mandated commodification and control of employee emotional display (Hochschild, 1983). The cruise staff job, consisted almost primarily of emotion labor; as Blake said, "Our job is our personality." According to Hochschild (1983), nothing is inherently wrong with emotion management, or the effort people expend on making sure that their private feelings are expressed in a way that is consistent with social norms or expectations. Anyone who has ever put effort into appearing somber at a funeral or joyous at a wedding has engaged in emotion management.

When this emotion system leaves the doors of private life and enters the gates of public institutions, however, it is "transmuted" and a "profit motive slips in" (Hochschild, 1983, p. 119). In other words, when employees are paid to churn out a smile, extend a stoic voice tone or portray a polite demeanor, they are no longer engaging in simple emotion management, but rather are entering the realm of emotion labor, something that can become problematic as emotion becomes "processed, standardized and subject to hierarchical control" (Hochschild, 1983, p. 153). The worker must give up control over her emotions and maintain an organizationally prescribed mask— whether that be a mask of fun-loving pleasantry, as in the case of Disney employees (Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989) or one of concerned irritation, as in the case of bill collectors (Hochschild, 1983). As Fineman (1993) explains, maintaining such a mask "can be fun; an exquisite drama…it can also be stressful and alienating" (p. 3).

Maintaining the mask can also be difficult because, in many emotion labor-laden jobs, the control of employees is multi-faceted and unobtrusive, and therefore difficult to resist. In traditionaljobs, work conflicts are generally couched in terms of employee versus supervisor interests and control measures are largely in the form of, visible rules and regulations and obvious sanctions from managers. In contrast, some organizational atmospheres are marked by unobtrusive or concertive control, in which organizational values are so inculcated into employees that they make decisions in line with organizational priorities. As Barker (1993) found in his research with workplace teams, concertive control creates a situation in which employees believe that they are acting in their own interest, yet they still act in ways that help management more than themselves. In other words, employees come to willfully subjugate themselves to organizational norms.

Admittedly, Spirit’s service program served as an obtrusive and visible part of the ship’s control system. However, control did not end there. In the case of the cruise staff, passengers (and their comment cards) essentially served as a stand-in for management. As such, employees engaged in certain behaviors, such as cutting their hair and doing cartwheels at their activities that seemed to be of their own choice. No manager or supervisor, for instance, told Cassie that she had to participate in the balloon game or dance with Fred. Because Cassie was evaluated by passengers it made sense to engage in these activities in order to receive more comment cards, and therefore potentially guarantee herself a favorable probationary review. Nevertheless, because this control was indirect, it largely seemed as though Cassie was making these choices of her own accord. The control was hidden, and therefore almost impossible to resist. Indeed, just as the perfection of surveillance may be the panopticon—a prison watchtower in which inmates can never know whether they are being looked at any one moment, but sure that they may always be so—the watchful eyes of passengers and peers unobtrusively created for the cruise staff a state of permanent visibility and a virtually incontestable system of control.

Barker, J. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 408–437. Dougherty, Debbie S. (1999, February 3). Dialogue through standpoint: Understanding women’s and men’s standpoints of sexual harassment. Management Communication Quarterly, 12, 436– 468.

Fineman, S. (Ed). (1993). Emotion in organizations. London: Sage.

——. (Ed.) (2000). Emotion in organizations (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Ford, W. S. Z. (1999). Communication and customer service. Communication Yearbook, 22, 341–375.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feelings. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Jansma, L. L. (2000). Sexual harassment research: Integration, reformulation, and implications for mitigation efforts. Communication Yearbook, 23, 163–225.

Keyton, J., & Rhodes, S. C. (1999). Organizational sexual harassment: Translating research into application. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 27, 158–173.

Keyton, J., Ferguson, P., & Rhodes, S. C. (2001). Cultural indicators of sexual harassment.Southern Communication Journal, 67, 33–50.

Townsely, N. C., and Geist, P. (2000). The discursive enactment of hegemony: Sexual harassment and academic organizing. Western Journal of Communication, 64, 190–217.

Van Maanen, J. & Kunda, G. (1989). Real feelings: Emotional expression and organizational culture. In L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, 11 (pp. 43–104). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Sexual Harassment Web Resources: <http://www.vix.com/pub/men/harass/myth.html>

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: <http://library.uncg.edu/depts/docs/us/harass.html>

<http://www.carnival.com/>

<http://www.princesscruises.com/>

<http://www.royalcaribbean.com/>

A version of this case study was transformed into a script and ethnodrama by playwright and director, Dr. Linda Park Fuller at Arizona State University. It was performed in February 2003 at The Hugh Downs School of Communication’s "Empty Space Theater, and featured a cast of 12 made up of ASU students and the author, Sarah J. Tracy, as narrator. Ethnodrama brings scholarly investigations of society and culture to a broad general audience. As such, the performance was designed to trigger audience awareness and discussion about sexual harassment and concertive control in organizations.

1. In your opinion, what should Cassie do in this situation? If you were Cassie, what would you do in this situation? Is there a difference in how you answered these questions? If so, why?

2. Whom or what do you believe to be most "at fault" for Cassie’s dilemma?

3. In what ways did Cassie and the other cruise staff play a role in encouraging this situation?

4. What organizational structures and practices encouraged this situation?

5. What customer expectations helped to allow this situation to occur?

6. How did "backstage" serve as a respite for cruise employees? On the flip side, how did it serve to reinforce or strengthen the front-stage customer service expectations?

7. Should customers be categorized as committing sexual harassment and other abuses traditionally reserved for organizational superiors? Why or why not?

8. Should organizational leaders be legally and ethically responsible for helping employees to recognize and negotiate the boundaries between selling a smile and accommodating customer abuse or harassment? How might they do so? What organizational structures could help protect employees from customer harassment while still providing a focus on customer service?

9. Considering the web pages of different cruise lines (provided below), how do cruise companies advertise employee personality and customer service as part of the cruise package? What type of expectations for customer service do these websites encourage?

10. Considering the web pages and articles discussing sexual harassment (provided under bibliography of resources below), how is the term defined? What is the difference between "quidpro quo" and "hostile environment" sexual harassment? Is one more difficult to classify than the other? Do you believe any of the actions described in the case fall into the legal understanding ofeither of these types of sexual harasment