Social Construction of Emotional Labour: An Exploratory Study of Nurses Working in Hospitals in Lucknow City

A feminist Arlie Hochschild defines emotional labour in her book “The Managed Heart” as regulating or managing emotional expressions with others as a part of one's professional work. Pam Smith in her book “The Emotional Labour of Nursing Revisited: Can Nurses Still Care” focuses on the significance of emotional labour with modern healthcare practice. She particularly emphasises on the challenges that nurses have to face emotionally with their profession precisely with death & dying on the ward. Catherine Theodosius in her book “Emotional Labour in Health Care: The Unmanaged Heart of Nursing” again reckons the sociological idea of Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labour & says that emotional labour is mainly found in places in the nursing profession that are not easily recognisable. She goes ahead giving a suggestion that the nursing profession has a vital and impeccable responsibility to include emotional labour as emotional labour is fundamentally related to personal and social identity. In this era where everything is so fast paced, automated & where health care is predominantly guided by biomedical & clinical models of health, this research paper delves into understanding of whether there is a room for emotional labour. Nurses are supposed to have greater awareness about emotional labour as the professional competence of nursing demands detachment so that patients can be treated in a more prolific way. Data was collected through Google forms with 32 nurses of two government & two private hospitals. This paper picks up the idea of emotional labour & nursing & talks about narratives of nurses, barriers related to gender & profession which includes emotional labour in health, interrelation of gender & emotional labour, linkage between emotional labour & psychological capital etc.