Download Learning self-employment: the emotion work of negotiating exclusion

Learning self-employment: the
emotion work of negotiating
exclusion
Kiran Mirchandani, University of Toronto, Canada
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of
East London
O
VER the past fifteen years a rich and multi-faceted literature has developed on the emotion work
done by health care professionals (Gubrium 1989; Aronson and Neysmith 1996), flight attendants
(Hochschild 1983), lawyers (Pierce 1995), bill collectors (Rafaeli and Sutton 1991) and customer service
representatives (Van Maanen and Kunda 1989). The term 'emotion work' has been used to describe the
often invisible dimensions of the relational work which people do as part of caring for their families or
performing their paid jobs. Daniels notes that emotion work involves four inter-related behaviours: '(1)
attending carefully to how a setting affects others in it...; (2) focusing attention through ruminating about
the past and planning for the future; (3) assessing the reasonableness of preliminary judgements...;and
(4) creating a comfortable ambiance' (1987:109). Emotion work includes monitoring one's own reactions
to situations, caring for others and establishing links between people, places and events.
The literature on emotion work in paid jobs has focused considerable attention on the differences in the
types of feeling work that individuals do, as well as on the expectations and norms which surround this
work. Two closely related concerns have dominated this literature. First, there have been a number of
attempts to illuminate the ways in which emotion work is fundamentally gendered, and second, there
has been significant attention paid to the differences in emotion work required in service as opposed to
professional occupations. I argue in this paper that relatively little attention has been paid to the
racialized dimensions of emotion work. In fact, analyses of emotion work have largely been based on
uni-dimensional understandings of stratification around either gender or class; there is little analysis of
how emotion work is situated within simultaneously occurring gendered, class-based and racialized
hierarchies. In this paper, I focus on the emotion work done by home-based self-employed women in
Halifax, Canada, and explore the ways in which their work is situated within interconnected racialized,
class-based and gendered hierarchies. The central questions I explore are, first, what are the forms of
emotion work done by women who are self employed, and second, how is this work situated within and
affected by interlocking race, class and gender hierarchies.
Women who are self-employed spend considerable energy dealing with the negative experiences they
have had with employers, clients, regulatory bodies and business partners, and casting these
experiences as 'learning opportunities'. They use a number of strategies to deal with these experiences
of exploitation - they take clients to court, they try to emulate the ideal of the aggressive entrepreneur,
and they create and conduct their businesses with the explicit intention of combating various forms of
social inequality and discrimination. These strategies are structured by the class resources which
women possess, their comfort and familiarity with the legal and economic system and the gender
relations within which they are embedded.
A number of women, all of whom are Canadian born white women, mention taking their clients to court.
One Canadian-born white woman, for example, won a court claim against a client who did not pay her
according to their contract. She says, I took them to small claims court - and I won that case.
But, I mean it was a huge [pause] learning experience. Huge ... You really have to be strong
minded. Like you have to be able to stand up for yourself and let people know that you mean
business. That you can't be walked all over. I mean you don't have to be a total (pause) hag,
but I mean, you have to be. (Respondent 15)
Across occupations, self-employed women do considerable emotion work to deal with the 'gap' between
themselves, and the ideal of the entrepreneurial and aggressive small business owner, although many
are ambiguous about this ideal. Many women look for a middle ground, where they can be assertive but
don't have to be 'total hags'.
While the ideal of the successful business owner is negotiated in these way by many of the Canadian
born white women in the sample, many of the women of colour experience this ideal as a source of
great anxiety. One woman of colour notes, I'm looking around and watching other businesses thrive.
I'm watchin' Leading Edge - um this I think is an interesting program. And I watch and I see
people who were up and coming people who you know have some excellent ideas for business
and I'm like good heavens, you know, they're out there doing it. What's wrong with me?
(Respondent 29).
Aside from the media, depictions of the ideal business owner are also communicated in training
programs. One immigrant woman of colour had attended a training program through which she
produced a glossy, professional looking business plan (in the form of a powerpoint presentation). She
had a grade six education, years of work experience in sewing, and was interested in setting up a
mobile clothes outlet in a van. Despite the business plan, she is unable to get funding because she first
needs a drivers licence. She says, I have my business plan. And the proposal, and a financial plan ...
[But] I'm never going on a steering wheel yet. I call up, and it's really expensive now. It's $500. And, you
cannot drive by yourself for six months.
And you cannot drive after six. There's lot of rules. And now, they sent me a letter in the mail
that [pause] I can't have somebody to help me outside to drive. I have to go into the driver's ed
school. (Respondent 16).
Living on a disability cheque (and in fear of losing it), getting a license and a car without any promise of
funding is a momentous task for this woman. Despite her business plan, therefore, she is no further
along after one year of attending the training program, except to hope that something might 'come
overnight' if she 'keeps her fingers crossed'.
Women deal with the discrimination they experience by focusing on the learning which they gained
through the exclusions they encounter. The African Canadian woman quoted above describes her
experience of a business partnership with a man who was from her own ethnic community who refused
to adhere to the terms they had verbally established as to the financial division of profits.
She says,
I was just furious. He tried to make it look like the dizzy bimbo syndrome ... [Now] I feel
stronger to do this [new business]. I mean, maybe that was a blessing in disguise to go through
that whole ordeal. It was a costly venture but hey, it was a learning, you know, process too.
One thing in business, you get things in writing and I'm realizing that you can't ... trust [that]
somebody is not going to pull the rug from underneath you ... I'm not so trusting anymore like I
used to be. And I am a little bit more verbal because ... if you don't speak up, people are gonna
run right over ya. Any it's you know, you can't (pause) I mean ... sometimes you can't even be
yourself because people take advantage. So you just gotta put on a different hat altogether
(Respondent 29).
Putting on this hat of the self-assured, assertive business owner is particularly difficult in the context of
sexist and racist stereotypes. The woman quoted above, for example, rented a small space for her
business, and recounts the time when the landlord came to get her signature on the lease document:
The gentleman that was here, he's a nice man but when he first brought the lease he explained it to me
like I couldn't read it! ( Respondent 29) These comments attest to the emotion work which women do in
trying not to be too 'negative' even in the midst of the experiences of exclusion, sexism and racism
which they may experience. Parkin notes that women's experiences of inequality in organizations are
accompanied by 'emotional costs' which may take the form of guilt, anger, fear, disgust, or the need to
suppress these feelings (1996:185). One Canadian born Pakistani woman, for example, notes that she
is not sure if her experiences of exploitation are related to racism, even though her friends believe this is
so. She says, I just don't notice these things, you know, I really honestly don't. Um you know, I notice
when I walk into a room and I'm the only person of colour, but I don't let it stop me. Not by a long shot ...
Clients who refused my work have turned me down. I mean, when you see my name you don't
automatically assume a person of colour. And with my voice they don't assume it either.
So when they see me they could get a shock of their life. So when they turn down further
consultations, it could well be [racism]. But I don't worry about it ... that's business.
(Respondent 17).
It is often difficult to separate clients' preferences based on racism from client preferences based on
products. The desire to not 'dwell on racism' (Respondent 29) reflects the need to focus on that which
women have some control over.
As the Canadian born Pakistani woman above says,
'if you're prejudice, or you have racist problems, then that's fine. That's your baggage... I have
enough worries, I don't want to worry about your worries' (Respondent 17).
At the same time, she says that given her ethics, she would not be interested in working with clients who
have a prejudice against her race or sexual orientation, even if it means losing business opportunities.
She does not see it as her responsibility to 'take on' individual acts of racism. A large component of
women's self-employment work therefore involves managing their own emotions in relation to the interrelated hierarchies and exclusions which they encounter by labelling these as 'not their fault' or 'not their
worries'. Based on her research on immigrant business owners in Europe, Morokovasic argues that
women often do not recognize their experiences as racism, hire white employees to deal with customers
or deal with clients over the phone rather than face-to-face. These strategies allow them to 'disappear
ethnically' (1988:44). The women in the present sample seem reluctant to concern themselves with
individual acts of racism but at the same time they maintain a strong commitment to challenging
systemic racism and sexism in the ways in which they conduct their work. One immigrant woman who
imports artefacts from her home country for sale in Canada notes:
Some people ...don't like to wear their national clothes because of the kind of embarrassment
they experience when they put them on ... You always stand out. So [we also have to] educate
people about our culture [and]... that because you dress differently doesn't mean that people
should single you out. So there's always been... an educational component. (Respondent 23).
Another woman, an African Canadian, set up a tourism business related specifically to Black history in
Nova Scotia.
She explains how she decided to set up her business:
I did that because Black history has been omitted in the textbooks and in the historical records
that are available for others to get to know of the history and so I thought, well you know, this is
something that has to be fixed (Respondent 5)
Self-employed women are situated within social and economic structures within which their race, gender
and class positions affect the nature of the emotion work which they do. Kunda and Van Maanen note
that 'survival for entrepreneurial agents depends not only on the usefulness or value of the services they
offer but also on their sales skills, communication abilities, and image-building talents, all matters
requiring considerable emotional labour' (1999:76). While this is so, the discussion above suggests that
the social location of entrepreneurial agents vis a vis the society within which they live affects the
emotion work which they do.
Part of the work of setting up a small business also often involves the creation of an appropriate space
for work. Clark studies the emotional strategies used by workers to produce a sense of place. She
argues that in face-to-face interactions, 'people use their own emotions strategically to elicit emotions in
others in order to mark and claim place' (1990:316). The work of 'claiming place' is significantly different
for people who work at home given their location in the private sphere which is traditionally associated
with leisure and family rather than with 'work' (Ahrentzen,1997).
Home-based self-employed women do a considerable amount of what Fine terms 'justifying work' (1996)
in order to legitimize their businesses and their workplaces.
Justifying work takes the form of the creation of the home as an ideal space for business - one that is at
once separate from family and 'non work' demands and at the same time highly personalized and
customer focused. A Canadian born white woman with a young child who works as an accountant talks
about her home-based business:
It makes a very homey atmosphere. A lot of people are kind of afraid of accountants [pause].
I'm often told that going to an accountant's like going to a dentist. And the [home] environment
is that much more friendly that I think that I get accounts because of that ... (Respondent 18).
Women often argue that they are able to provide better service to their customers because of the
location of their businesses. For example, a number of women mention that their customers call on
weekends, drop off or collect material after hours, and make last minute requests. Women adjust their
homes and structure their family lives so that their customers are as comfortable as possible. One
Canadian born white woman, a hairdresser, notes:
I try to keep it fairly professional because that's one of the things that [I heard from] a lot of
people - when you have a business in your home how it's not very relaxing for the person to
come in. So I do try to keep it ... geared toward ... not too much familiarity ... In the [salon]
where I worked they were very much into power booking... I don't like to be rushed or feeling
like I'm keeping someone waiting... Nobody really has to wait here coz I have control of the
book myself and I know how long it takes me to do it. (Respondent 3).
The creation of this ideal 'business space' often has an impact on family members. A woman who
provides physiotherapy in her home says that she does not allow her teenage children to use the living
room during working hours. She notes,
For the client's sake [pause] I think, you know, I wouldn't like to go to somebody's house and
have everybody sitting around. It just wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't look right. (Respondent 2).
The creation of an ideal space - one in which everybody is not sitting around - depends, to a large extent
on the nature of women's homes, and the control which they can exert over family activities. Women
with larger homes, and greater earnings (who are also the Canadian-born white women in the sample)
find it easier to maintain separations between their family space and work space and to create a more
conducive business space. These women do emotion work to stress the ways in which they are different
from less legitimate home-based businesses. Recognizing that they have 'appropriate' middle class
homes they do emotion work to create a 'homey' atmosphere which simultaneously emulates
professional norms of the separation of family and work spheres. Unlike the woman quoted above, an
immigrant woman of colour also working as a hairdresser is not able to impose restrictions on her
children, who often watch TV in the living room (which is adjacent to the room used as the salon). She
says that her teenage sons do not like the fact that she works at home, and often say that they need a
bigger house so they can have some privacy. She says that she understands their reaction: I don't mind
because, all my customers [are] like a friend.
But [my sons] are not close [to the customers] like me. Customers just see them - but not like a
friend. So they feel like not really comfortable. (Respondent 9).
Conscious of the gap between their own home businesses and the ideal of the segregated homeworkspace, an overwhelming number of the women of colour stress the fact that they compensate for their
work location by charging less for their services because they are home based.
The immigrant woman hairdresser quoted above notes:
It's really privacy for some people, maybe some people don't like it because they have to walk
past my living room ...that's not very nice ... If you have a shop outside, you have to charge
more ... [now] you charge a little bit of money and then people are happy to come to you ...
Even though I work very hard, put my heart to the work, I don't know [pause] at least I have to
be cheaper [than the shop]. ( Respondent 9).
Another woman of colour notes that customers expect the savings in business rent to be transferred
directly to them:
There's some stereotyping and stigmas that come with home based business. I'm not saying
that people tend not to take it as serious if it's home based ... the treatment I would get
because I was home based -like I'm cheaper, it's not considered a real business, it's a hobby,
undermining the skill ... I mean everybody's tryin' to get something for nothin'. (Respondent 29).
Systematic exclusions such as these create the social, familial and economic environment within which
the homebased business exists. While all women who do paid work at home do considerable emotion
work to establish the legitimacy of their business locations, poorer women, women of colour and
immigrant women often also negotiate the consequences of the fact that their homes do not fit the ideal
of the segregated, quiet and business-focused home environment.
Glazer (1993) notes that economic restructuring is often accompanied by the creation of new types of
activities which are seldom recognized as 'work'. The activity of employing oneself involves considerable
emotion work. The analysis in this paper suggests that a large part of creating one's work, one's
organization and one's workplace depends on the racialized, class-structured and gendered
environment within which a business owner operates. Emotion work in self-employment involves
negotiating the exclusions which are encountered in relationships with clients, colleagues and families.
Learning about these exclusions form the often unspoken social and cultural messages, rules, codes,
symbols which Casey has termed 'the hidden curriculum of work' (1995:78).
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