The “Heart” And Its Contexts: Research On The Emotional Labor Of Indigenized Social Workers

At present,despite its multiple achievements,China's social work has been faced with various challenges,such as the institutional marginalization,the weakness of the organizational competency,and the confusion surrounded the frontline workers.In such background,some social workers who aim to help the vulnerable groups emerged a kind of self-perception of subjective weakness paradoxically.It called us to explore the social workers' subjective world in their daily work,which is closely related to the complex and conflict emotional labor of social workers.Past studies on the emotional labor paid more attention to the analysis of the “publicinterest” labor represented by the business service industry,and focused on the onedimensional “employee-employer”(labor-capital)relationship,especially emphasizing the micro emotional scenes namely the capital's control on the labor,the lack of autonomy of the labor and the resistance tactics.The existing research paid less attention to the “public-value” labor dominated by altruism,therefore,those emotional labor in the multi-dimensional and multiple interactional contexts has been ignored,especially making other factors escaped from our horizon due to overstressing the power of the capital.It can contribute to enriching the theoretical boundaries of emotional labor to reconsider the “public-value” workers' emotional labor under the special social governance context of Chinese government purchasing service.We focused on exploring the characteristics and contextual factors of the emotional labor of the indigenized social workers,namely,exploring the social workers' “heart”and its contexts.This research adopted the qualitative method and the collection of the experiential materials mainly depends on the in-depth interview and the participant observation.On the basis of reviewing and developing a more inclusive concept of“emotional labor”,this research took the multiple institutional and cultural contexts relating to the government purchasing service as core analytic framework,through investigating the structural characteristics and the interaction in different contexts.The findings indicated that: in terms of the “heart”,social workers' emotional labor includes three types,which are emotional experience,emotional management and emotional adjustment.In particular,the emotional experiences are diverse and ambivalent,which not only has the negative experience of emotional suppression but also mixed with the positive experience of emotional empowerment.The emotional management represents the complex faces: using surface acting to hide the inside feeling and avoid conflicts,while using deep acting is mainly on the basis of the professional criteria of value.Unlike the surface acting and deep acting,the “real emotion expression” stresses the deliberate protection of self-image.Emotional adjustment usually refers to the body techniques by solving the problem themselves,cognitive techniques by the reconstruction of thought,and social techniques by social sharing,subjective boundary work and using the discretionary power.It must be acknowledged that social workers' “heart” is contextualized.So we need to further explore the specific contexts what influence their heart.In terms of the “context” behind the “heart”,the policy chain of the government purchasing service draws a unique picture of social governance context,which consists of the special institutional environment of social workers' living and development.The structural interaction between the social workers and the crucial contextual strength including “the purchasing context”,“the locating context”,“the organization context”and “the service user context” makes up of the real contextual strengths of modeling and suppressing social workers' emotional labor.To be specific,first,in the “purchasing context”,the personified bureaucracy,the paradoxical cognition containing misunderstanding mixed with the expectation,the role model of quasi-marketization and quasi-instutionalization in the contacting and the utilitarian logic through the costprofit control,mathematically management and trace management consequently shape the interaction of power inequality.Second,as the ending of national governmental system,the “locating context” has strong administrative inertia,bearing the stress from the higher authorities,lack of work autonomy,taking the different cognition of the social workers,and social workers make every effort to highlight their value and make cooperation.Third,the “operational context” has double faces,on one hand there are several “deprofessionalization” phenomena on the values,leadership and human resource management,causing the lack of formal support for the employees,on the other hand,the informal culture usually act as the emotional shelter of social workers.Last but not least,the “service user context” represents the lack of institutional trust,the ambiguity of public and private idea and passive self-change under the local cultural,institutional and historical influence,which is contrast from the ideal imagination of the “service user”.The energy released from these contexts not only has consistency,but also has heterogeneity even conflict.They all make impact on the social workers' emotional labor.The mainstream of the emotional labor theory paid too much attention to the micro and meso results,however,this research discussed the social results of social workers' emotional labor in contemporary governance context.Dialectically,on one aspect,conducting emotional labor can enrich social workers' professional reflectivity about the value,theory,method and culture.On the other aspect,it is worrying that social workers' emotional labor may mean the “public illusion”,in which we can see the gaps between the policy advocating and actual execution,the ideal belief and real service,the theoretical building and practice fragments.The professional social workers who conduct emotional labor are not only the “victims” of the public illusion,but also the participants of creating the illusion.On the basis of emotional labor theory,this research aimed to further explore the contextual transition from commercialization to the non-commercialization of the emotional labor theory,broaden the concept of emotional labor in the temporal and spatial ways.The influential factors and the related consequences of emotional labor will be extended through the specific structural contextual dimension.Furthermore,focusing on the frontline workers' cognition,feelings,expression and reflection in the multiple governance contexts can also provide some reference to us to “see” and understand the social workers' emotional labor more accurately,meanwhile,it will be useful for the future cross-culture study about this topic.