Existing literature has highlighted the importance of recognizing health fraud offenders’ intentional manipulations of victims’ vulnerabilities. However, the manipulation tactics of health fraud have received little attention. This study aims to extend the current understanding of health fraud by incorporating the concept of emotional labour. Nested in the Chinese context, which owns the most populous ageing population, three sets of qualitative data were collected, including 13 semi-structured interviews, 233 judicial documents, and 197 media reports. The findings suggest that health fraud offenders utilized three types of emotional labour as means of committing crime: including the labour of anxiety relief, the labour of filial piety, and the labour of social networking. This article not only provides novel insights into understanding health fraud, but also contributes to introducing the concept of emotional labour in criminological and socio-legal studies.

What role do emotions play in state repression? Building upon ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this paper explores the emotional labour performed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. The petition system serves as an official channel through which the Chinese government receives complaints and grievances from citizens. Notwithstanding its institutional inefficiency in addressing petitioners’ requirements, this system plays a critical role in maintaining social stability. I investigate the process by which frontline petition officials manage petitions. I argue that channelling petitioners’ emotions has become one of these officials’ core functions. Petition officials have developed three types of emotional strategies – emotional defusing, emotional constraint and emotional reshaping – to absorb petitioners’ complaints. This study of emotional repression offers a fresh perspective on the affective dimension of contentious politics and also contributes to the theoretical discussion on how authoritarian regimes deal with dissent.

Caring for people in distress or illness is emotionally draining and physically demanding. This article focuses on the experiences and needs of health service staff as professional carers. It overviews the current circumstances in the UK and links readers to the findings of: the Stevenson/Farmer Review of 2017; the report of the General Medical Council on the state of medical education and practice of 2018; and the British Medical Association survey of doctors and medical students published in 2019. We review the sources of stress that affects healthcare practitioners and introduce the concepts of emotional labour, psychological safety and psychosocial resilience. We draw attention to the vital importance of social support and leadership to protecting healthcare staff. We conclude this review of the topic by outlining a stepped model for actions that aim to: develop staff of healthcare services and help them to thrive at work; support staff who are struggling at work; and intervene to care for staff who are distressed or unwell whether they are continuing to work or not.

While a wealth of evidence exists about failure in organisational settings and the emotions evoked by failure, researchers have paid less attention to failure and its related emotional consequences in academic life. Given that failure is often a cause of significant stress, which in turn can lead to damaging consequences, we argue that this is an issue deserving of greater consideration. In this article, we adopt Ashkanasy’s five-level model of emotion in organisations, and explore the potential role of emotions in academics’ experiences of failure at five levels: within-person, between-persons, interpersonal interactions, groups and teams (and leadership), and organisation-wide. In doing so, we draw on findings from scholarly literature, anecdotal evidence, and our own experiences as academics to build arguments. Following discussion of the model, we suggest how academics might begin to normalise the experience of failure in academia and to build resilience in the coming generations of young scholars.

Professional boundaries may help care staff to clarify their role, manage risk and safeguard vulnerable clients. Yet there is a scarcity of evidence on how professional boundaries are negotiated in a non-clinical environment (e.g. the home) by the home-care workforce in the context of complex care needs (e.g. dementia, end-of-life care). Through analysis of semi-structured interviews, we investigated the experiences of home-care workers (N = 30) and their managers (N = 13) working for a range of home-care services in the South-East and London regions of England in 2016–17. Findings from this study indicate that home-care workers and their managers have clear perceptions of job role boundaries, yet these are modified in dementia care, particularly at end of life which routinely requires adaptability and flexibility. As a lone worker in a client's home, there may be challenges relating to safeguarding and risk to both clients and workers. The working environment exacerbates this, particularly during end-of-life care where emotional attachments to both clients and their family may affect the maintenance of professional boundaries. There is a need to adopt context-specific, flexible and inclusive attitudes to professional boundaries, which reconceptualise these to include relational care and atypical workplace conventions. Pre-set boundaries which safeguard clients and workers through psychological contracts may help to alleviate to some extent the pressure of the emotional labour undertaken by home-care workers.

The relationship between sex workers and their clients is generally characterized as being based entirely on the direct exchange of sexual favours for money. However, this received wisdom cannot account for a nation such as China which attaches significant value to “face,” social status and interpersonal dignity. This paper draws parallels with high-end sex workers elsewhere in Asia as well as globally. With a focus on the high-end sector, I examine how workers and their clients engage not only in pecuniary transactions but also in genuinely intimate and non-remunerative relationships. High-end sex workers make use of their earned economic capital to acquire cultural capital, and use online apps as marketing tools to target local elites and expats to forge longer-term intimate relationships. Male clients in more commercialized, post-industrial cities in China continue to seek diverse types of sexual experiences, with some clients seeking genuine intimacy. Furthermore, I explore how Chinese and foreign clients overcome social barriers to develop such relationships with sex workers. Building on this sociocultural perspective, this paper analyses ethnographically both sides of the female sex worker–client relationship in high-end karaoke lounges and bars in Dongguan, southern China.

This paper focuses on themes of emotionality and emotional labour derived inductively from retrospective narratives constructed by employees who experienced rapid organisational change and specifically addresses the question: ‘How do people talk about the need to “dull down” their emotions during situations of organisational change?’ We highlight themes of loss associated with retrospective displays of emotion and argue that loss and emotion management are most typically associated with issues concerning transition from the past or resistance to the future. We show how emotional labour serves both to mute and, ironically, to heighten emotions in the talk of change and extend studies of emotional labour beyond the service encounter and into the realm of organisational change.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is concerned with occasions when feelings are managed to create publically observable emotions in organizational settings in ways that involve them being ‘sold for a wage’ and therefore taking on an ‘exchange value’ (Hochschild (1983: 7). Drawing on an in-depth literature review, this paper explore grounds for arguing that business academics in Australia are experiencing emotional labor. The authors consider the application of findings concerned with emotional labor in a variety of occupations in relation to the context of university business schools. More specifically, they discuss how two decades of increasing marketisation, commercialisation and service orientated university practices may have contributed to emotional labor in Australian university business schools. The paper draws two conclusions. Firstly, educational managers need to be better informed about the positive and negative implications of emotional labor so that they can develop appropriate strategies, guidelines and workplace environments at the organizational level. Secondly, that a review of the literature suggests that empirical research is warranted in order to address the question posed in the title of the paper.

Conflicting empirical findings in studies assessing the relationship between emotional labour and negative job outcomes are partly due to the lack of clarity regarding the conceptualisation and measurement of emotional dissonance. Emotional dissonance has been variously described and measured as an antecedent or as a consequence of the performance of emotional labour, as well as an inherent component of emotional labour. Recent conceptualisations of dissonance have proposed a mediator role for emotional dissonance between emotional labour and the outcome of emotional exhaustion. Concepts from cognitive dissonance theory support this conceptualisation and were used to empirically test this proposed relationship with a sample of 181 staff from two tourism based organisations providing a range of visitor/customer services. The results demonstrated a significant partial mediation role for emotional dissonance in the relationship between emotional labour and emotional exhaustion, supporting the use of a more theoretically and methodologically consistent measure of emotional dissonance.

The cluster of reforms to English social care associated with personalisation mark a break with recent thinking about what spaces are considered relevant and appropriate for people with an assessed social care need. The promise of personalisation from a spatial perspective appears to be twofold: expanding the physical spaces that are available to people, while at the same time contracting interpersonal spaces between people and those who support them to emphasise attentiveness and particularism. However, there is a danger that personalisation is much more variable in its impacts. The physical spaces for some are expanding while for others they contract, and these opportunities are likely to be unequally distributed in ways that overlay other forms of inequality. The attentiveness and particularism promised by personalisation is again patchily distributed, with wide variation in the quality of support planning and person-centred care. For the formal care workforce, the two concepts of space (physical environment and interpersonal closeness) intersect as physical spaces shape the capacity to deliver attentive, responsive care. The article brings these concepts together through a discussion of ‘caring labour’ at the intersection of the physical and emotional aspects of space.

Although there is much written on the emotional labour of nursing, there is little research grounded in the experience of so-called ‘unqualified’ care assistants. This paper is drawn from an ethnographic study conducted with care assistants on three dementia care wards in one mental health trust within the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS). We describe the emotional labour carried out by care assistants in their attempts to provide personalised care for people whose cognitive degeneration renders conventional relationship-building very difficult, produces unpredictable ‘challenging behaviour’ and calls into question the notion of ‘feeling rules’. This context requires the ability to strike a balance between emotional engagement and detachment, and it is the complexities of this relationship that are the focus of this paper, arguing that a degree of detachment is a prerequisite to engagement in this context. In conclusion, we argue that the contribution of care assistants in this context needs to be better acknowledged, supported and remunerated.

Many European countries are experiencing a redistribution of care work from family members to paid migrant workers in private households. This involves not only a commodification of the practical tasks of care work, but also a redistribution of the emotional element of care. This study explores the emotional experiences of migrant care workers from Central Eastern Europe providing care work in private households in Austria. Based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with migrant care workers, the article investigates the emotional dimensions of migrant care work and the ways in which the regulatory context impacts on these dimensions.

This article contributes to our empirical understanding of self-respect in rising meritocracies by focusing on the experiences of unemployed, low-skilled people recruited as workfare volunteers in the Netherlands. As many theorists have argued, the long-term unemployed struggle to maintain self-esteem. We found that workfare projects that introduce them to voluntary work can help them regain self-respect through four types of emotional labour: feeling respected through their newfound status, enjoying a craft, being able to perform in less stressful working environments, and taking pride in the meaning bestowed by voluntary work. But the emotional labour necessary to experience their situation more positively also increases the risk of experiencing negative emotions, thereby posing new threats to the fragile self-respect of unemployed citizens.

In this study, we examined the relationship between emotional labour and successful ageing among older Hong Kong Chinese workers. We also investigated whether job satisfaction mediated the association between emotional labour and successful ageing in the workplace. Results show that deep acting was positively related to successful ageing in the workplace, whereas surface acting was negatively related to the same. Structural equation modelling shows that job satisfaction partially mediated the association between emotional labour and successful ageing in the workplace. The limitations of the study and further recommendations are also discussed.