When work came home: Formation of feeling rules in the context of a pandemic

Sarah Rudrum; Elisabeth Rondinelli; Jesse Carlson; Lesley Frank; Rachel K Brickner; Rebecca Casey

doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100861

When work came home: Formation of feeling rules in the context of a pandemic

Emot Space Soc. 2022 Feb:42:100861. doi: 10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100861. Epub 2021 Nov 20.

Authors

Sarah Rudrum¹, Elisabeth Rondinelli¹, Jesse Carlson¹, Lesley Frank¹, Rachel K Brickner¹, Rebecca Casey¹

Affiliation

¹ Sociology, Acadia University 15 University, Wolfville, NS, B4P 1K8, Canada.

Abstract

The shift of middle-class jobs to home settings, which occurred as a result of COVID-19 health measures that also closed schools and daycares, introduced dynamic changes to everyday life. We investigate these changes drawing on data from our study in which participants in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were working at home due to the pandemic, wrote journal entries in response to weekly prompts. Participants not only documented changes to their routines and challenges of managing work and parenting simultaneously and in the same physical space, but also reflected on their conflicted emotions about life during the pandemic and their vision for life as things return to "normal." Their narratives prompt us to consider these experiences and emotions in relation to Arlie Hochschild's scholarship on feeling rules, emotion work, and gender and work more broadly. We find that from our participants' struggle to meet existing expectations on activities and emotion while simultaneously managing new sets of protocols and feeling rules what emerges is a resistance to norms of busyness, productivity, and exhaustion.

Keywords: Arlie Hochschild; COVID-19 pandemic; Canada; Gender; Sociology; Work.