Hochschild's text is seminal and scholars like Sarah J. Tracy and Stephen Fineman have expanded on her concept of emotional labor.

When a person's feelings do not fit the norms of the situation, people engage in practices to bring them into agreement through a combination of cognitive, bodily, or expressive techniques.

Surface acting involves simply pretending to feel what one does not, primarily through body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.

Rather than the pleasant demeanor expected of flight attendants, the occupational norms for bill collectors were to maintain a suspicious view of debtors in order to get them to pay more effectively.

Hochschild's book constituted a major development in symbolic interactionism and the sociology of emotions, having influenced the work of scholars such as Nancy Whittier[3] and Kari Norgaard.