Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"What Are You Crying About? It's Not Your Real Job!” Emotional Labor And Communicative Sensemaking In Retail Customer Service Positions, Danielle M. Harkins

College of Communication Master of Arts Theses

Using Tracy and Trethewey‟s (2005) crystallized self metaphor as a framework through which to view organizational identity, the researcher bridges connections between emotional labor, job performance, meaning of work and communicative sensemaking within the organizational context of a grocery store. The purpose of this study is to seek the potential strategies that employees of this specific grocery store chain use to make communicative sense of their everyday realities in order to "get through" the day, especially with the great deal of emotional labor that takes place on the job. The researcher utilizes a combination of face-to-face interviews and participant observation …