Mobilization through Emotional Labor:How to Do "Good"Emotional Labor

I will try to show some aspects of emotional labor supported by the neo-liberalism in contemporary Japanese society.

　 When the idea of Emotional labor was invented in 1980’ at the U.S., a lot of scholars have criticized new style of alienation by using this idea. Then, this idea mainly focused on mental exhaustion, considering that the structure of works had become under the service industry. So, a lot of human labor had become emotional labor, so, many people feel fatigue to do emotional labor.

Since the 1980’, many theoretical and empirical studies have been proceeded to find out the effects of alienation in the emotional labor. Some research emphasized some negative incidents influenced emotional labor, others suggested some positive factors relieved workers.

Among them, some concepts (length, supervision, gender, autonomy,) have been discussed around the positive/negative aspects of emotional labor. However, these studies have slightly considered the social changes around the emotional labor today. So, I will try to show them by analyzing neo-liberal state in 2000’ Japanese society.

At first, almost all of works become emotional labor, and people become to be mobilized to be a “good” emotional workers. A lot of industries have become automation, or shifted oversea. Moreover, manually emotional labors have done by the lower-class, or foreign workers.

So, people want to get more high communication skill not only at the company but at the schools to get good job, social status, and recognition . Then, some activities, books, and Japanese traditions are praised as s source.

Secondly, AI has been a tool of the “good emotional labor”. Some companies use AI robots as emotional workers directly, and other companies use them as supporting tools for predicting clients’ hearts.

Through them, I will show why people will do emotional labor .