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Abstract
According to Goffman, the society resembles the stage in the theater and individuals are actors. For successful performances, individuals must cooperate effectively to others and express proper behavior in front of the audiences. The reason why individuals regulate their emotions to match the display rules is affected by social norms. Individuals comply with social norms to communicate with others in everyday life, whereas the prescribed display rules guide employees to interact with customers in the workplace. However, some performers interact with others properly, whereas some ones cannot. This article introduces the metaphor of Goffman dramaturgy to reveal the relationship between social reality and organizational life and outlines the metaphor analysis to review emotional labor studies. The purpose of this study is to explore how the metaphor analysis facilitates researchers to experience participants' inner feeling by linguistic expression, and thereby to assist employers in interpreting employees' behavior.
Key Words: Metaphor; Dramaturgy; Emotional labor; social reality; organizational life
Introduction
An early work of Erving Goffman, the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), asserted that individuals resemble stage performers and that their social interactions resemble theatre stage or dramatic text. However, individuals cannot perform onstage as particular character without the assistance and feedback from other performers. According to Goffman, successful performances are usually staged, not by individuals, but by teams, who share both risk and discreditable information in a manner resembling that of a secret society (Manning, 1991). Restated, audiences and performers must cooperate effectively to achieve successful performances.
An application of the Goffman dramaturgical approach by Hochschild (1983) indicated that the service provider evokes passion in soul of the consumer, but an employee is only acting as if he had feeling. She proposed that employees, specifically those in service industries, are like actors and that the service environment is their performing stage. They perform in front of audiences, which in this case is their customers. Actors only show their genuine feeling offstage. However, emotional performance at work in the context of paid employment is referred to as emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). Emotions play an integral part of organizational life and are functional for organizations (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995; Tsai, 2009). However, an organization is an epitome of social reality so that employees are like...