‘The New Economy and the Privilege of Feeling’: Towards a Theory of Emotional Structuration

Emotions are becoming central to new economies and labour practices. Going by a variety of descriptive terms (for example Fourth Industrial Revolution, Industry 4.0, Post-Fordist), ‘new economies’ are characterized by the production of virtual/digital as much as physical goods and services, and by the use of entrepreneurial, flexible, piecemeal, contract-based, precarious labour. Their core processes are revealed in the increasing practice of recruiting labour from digital platforms to perform piecemeal gig work, attracting the moniker ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ economies (Olliverre et al, 2017; Berger et al, 2018).

These core processes both utilize emotional labour, and increasingly involve the commoditization of emotions. This commoditization is visible in the burgeoning wellbeing industry (Ahmed, 2010; Davies, 2015), in the commercialization of emotional landscapes (Löfgren, 2013) and emotionally laden media content (Patulny et al, 2020a), and in the capture, use and sale of data about emotional preferences (for example likes and preferences; Padios, 2017; Fumagalli et al, 2018). However, while the importance of emotions for new economic activity is clearly growing, it is questionable whether emotional labour and commodification practices will create opportunities for mobility to entrench the class positions of present and future workers into those in elite positions, those undertaking more precarious emotional work and those performing an emotionally challenging intermediary role between the two.

Performing and balancing emotionally laden work in the new economy is challenging (Patulny et al, 2020a), as the requirement to manage emotions has probably never been greater.