Gendered Emotional Labor; As A Normative Conformity of Hospital Organizations to the Gender Institution

Abstract

This study examines the normative effects of gender context on emotional labor. Those effects had been observed, in the frame of an organization (hospital) and with three agents: manager, employee (hospital hostesses) and customer (patients/patients’ relatives). In this regard twenty-five semi-structured interviews and one focus group meeting were conducted in Yalova. According to our findings; as a survival practice, hospitals conform to the institution of gender via formal (job description, customer satisfaction policies) and informal organization designs (norms directing the related job descriptions). The agents of this conformity play an active role in the reproduction and continuity of “normative role of the gender context on behavior” and “gender-based inequalities”. This study intends to overcome the limitations of Hochschild’s emotion theory in order to explain those normative effects of the context, with the help of New Institutional Theory and Norm Theory.