Emotional Labour in University Lecturers

Nachdem ich ein Jahrzehnt lang im Hochschulbereich gearbeitet habe, war ich fasziniert vom Emotionsmanagement am Arbeitsplatz und dem Vermarktungsprozess im Hochschulbereich. Ich konzentrierte mich mehr auf die emotionale Seite der Dozenten, insbesondere auf ihre emotionale Arbeitsleistung, und auf die sich verändernde Hochschullandschaft. Meine Interessen haben sich in meinem weiteren Studium weiterentwickelt und zu einem neuen Forschungsprojekt geführt.

The main focus of this book is to investigate emotional labour as one of the consequences of commercialisation of Higher Education, in university lecturers. In-depth interviews were conducted to examine academics' views and opinions on emotional labour itself and emotion management, coping strategies as well as to explore their attitudes towards commercialisation of Higher Education and lecturer-student as customer service-provider relationships. Overall, it was revealed that the interviewed lecturers hold mostly negative views on the HE commercialisation process and current lecturer-student relationships which, as they commented, should be based on a partnership, not on economics. Following Hochschild's (1983) framework of emotional labour, it was discovered that academics use surface acting mainly in short interactions with students. Deep acting is widely performed since lecturers tend to experience displayed emotions due to the nature of their job. It was also noted that when a good rapport between lecturers and students has been achieved, academics could move from deep acting to emotional consonance (no acting per se). The full results of this research can be found in this book