Emotions in the Tourism Sharing Economy

• Emotional labour has for decades been addressed and investigated in tourism studies andtourism management. Originally coined by Arlie Hochschild in the late 1970s it has increasinglybeen elaborated upon in relation to tourism service work. This take on the originally sociologicalconcept has predominatly been managerial in tourism management studies, and contextualized asa clear-cut social interaction between employees and customers, with an employer in thebackground. Faithful to its mission to produce knowledge of value for the management of thetourist company (be it a hotel or some similar typical actor in the tourism industry) emotionallabour has thus been imagined, grasped and understood in specific more or less instrumental andfunctionalistic ways. Emotional labour is something that has to be formalized in a certain way inorder to be addressable and handable from a managerial rationality.However, with the rise of the sharing economy in tourism, with beacons like uber andAirbnb in the center, the employee becomes his or her own employer, and at the same time isregulated by an assemblage of digital technologies. The established view on emotional labour assituated within a triangle of employee, customer and employer does not apply in the same way.As a consequence, emotional labour as a societal phenomenon needs to be rethought, outside thecomfort zone of conventional managerialism. To some degree this has been done in tourismstudies, but this research is still in its cradle. In particular, there is a lack of reasoning of more(sociological) contextual and systematic, as well as critical but also nuanced, takes on emotionallabour in the tourism sharing economy. This paper offers such a contextual, systematic, criticalbut also nuanced (thus avoiding conventional neoliberalism-bashing) take on the phenomenon,with the highlighting the emotional labour of being an Airbnb host as a case.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

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