Emotional labour and governmentality: Productive power in childcare

Abstract

This article examines the interplay between governance and cost-containment efforts in the public sector and the emotional labour and well-being of childcare workers. Care-work researchers have highlighted the complexities of power in emotional labour, such as the fact that emotional labour may simultaneously benefit the individual worker and reproduce inequalities that may be detrimental to workers’ well-being. The goal of this article is to develop a theoretical understanding of power in emotional labour and to show how power is related to emotional labour not only in terms of lack of control, status and resources, but also productively in terms of the subjectivities enabled by organisations. The article draws on the works of Foucault and Rose, particularly the concepts of productive power and governmentality, and suggests that emotional labour may be conceptualised as a technology of the self. The potential benefits of governmentality and productive power in terms of connecting emotional labour to larger structures are illustrated by qualitative interviews with Danish childcare workers, which show how emotional labour may become a form of self-governance that contributes to the individualisation of work-related responsibilities.

In recent years, the Danish public childcare workforce has been faced with increasing demand for cost containment and efficiency, as well as a new demand for documentation and evaluation (Ahrenkiel et al., 2012). These developments make it important to examine the interplay between governance and cost-containment efforts in the public sector and the emotional labour and well-being of childcare workers. Researchers have highlighted the complexities of power in emotional labour, such as the fact that emotional labour may both benefit the individual worker and reproduce inequalities that are detrimental to workers’ well-being (Boyer et al., 2013; Erickson and Stacey, 2013; Vincent and Braun, 2013). This calls for a reconceptualisation of power in emotional labour so future research takes into account the dual functions of emotional labour: to simultaneously reward and exploit workers.

Drawing on the works of Foucault (1991, 1995, 2001) and Rose (1999), this article suggests that it may be fruitful to understand this form of power by exploring the concepts of governmentality and productive power. These concepts make it possible to comprehend how emotional labour simultaneously helps verify workers’ identities and contributes to their exploitation through self-governance and their sense of individual responsibility for providing good care. Conceptualising emotional labour as a technology of the self allows new connections to be made between emotional labour, workers’ sense of self and larger power structures.

Post-structuralism has been influential within labour process studies, and a Foucauldian approach to power is prevalent (see Knights and Willmott, 1989; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). However, this approach has not been influential in emotional labour research. This is regrettable, since it leaves us without an understanding of the significance of emotional labour in the governance of workers through their subjectivities.

Important research has examined emotions and power in childcare work, showing how caregivers respond to children’s emotions (often ignoring, suppressing or denying them) and relating these responses to the intense emotional labour of childcare and to burnout (Leavitt, 1994). In contrast, I emphasise care workers’ understanding of their emotional labour and how care workers respond to the governance of the childcare setting. This article contributes to existing analyses of emotional labour by examining power in emotional labour in the context of non-profit public care institutions and by attempting to theorise emotional labour as simultaneously satisfying and oppressive, as has been suggested by previous research (Boyer et al., 2013; Vincent and Braun, 2013). Extant research has emphasised how childcare workers are positioned within gendered, classed and raced relationships and discourses of care, and how they struggle to invert oppressive subject positions by claiming moral superiority through counternarratives (Osgood, 2012; see also Skeggs, 1997). This article contributes to this research by suggesting that the caring identities and, importantly, the use of emotional labour to prevent children from suffering adverse consequences of resource deficits simultaneously allow workers to cope with their work conditions (and verify their identities) and reproduce repressive structures.

The article opens with a theoretical discussion of power in emotional labour, and then illustrates the interplay between emotional labour and governance through an empirical study within the Danish childcare setting.

Power in extant research on emotional labour

When Hochschild (1983) introduced the concept of emotional labour, she emphasised the use of emotional labour in commercial and capitalist production, and argued that emotional labour can have a negative impact on workers, leading to burnout, inauthenticity and alienation. According to Hochschild (1983), the commercialisation of emotions is problematic and entails a transmutation in which ‘private’ emotions are sold as commodities. Based on this influential work, several authors have discussed how emotional labour relates to power, particularly in terms of workers’ lack of autonomy regarding affective expressions (Erickson and Ritter, 2001; Grandey et al., 2005) and the hierarchies of gender, race, class and/or profession (e.g. Colley, 2006; Lively, 2000; Pierce, 1995; Vincent and Braun, 2013; Wharton, 2009; Wingfield, 2010).

However, Hochschild’s conceptualisation of power has been criticised for leaving the worker ‘crippled’, without any ‘active and controlling force’ (Bolton and Boyd, 2003: 290). Bolton (2005) developed the conceptualisation of power in emotional labour by using labour process analysis to highlight the potential for resistance among employees. However, Bolton’s view of power remains centred on issues of control; a broader view of power is needed in order to understand the interplay between emotional labour and institutional logics and inequalities.

Research on emotional labour has primarily discussed three dimensions of power: resources, status and control. The depletion-of-resources approach emphasises the mental resources that workers use when performing emotional labour (Grandey, 2000; Grandey et al., 2005). Such self-regulatory resources may be associated with the organisation of the work (and hence, power), since resources may be depleted if workers are required to constantly self-regulate (Grandey et al., 2012).

Status is important in feminist analyses that highlight the gendered nature of emotional labour. Such analyses show the high emotional demands and small affective latitude experienced by women and workers who are low down in the corporate hierarchy (e.g. Lively, 2000; Martin, 1999; Pierce, 1995). These analyses are important for showing the differentiation of affective demands and how emotional labour often perpetuates organisational hierarchies and the subordination of women.

Hochschild (1983) emphasised workers’ lack of control over their own expressions, implying that emotional labour does not necessarily strain workers if they have control over their emotional labour and choose to perform it themselves. The importance of control or autonomy has been noted in a range of studies (e.g. Erickson and Ritter, 2001; Grandey et al., 2005).

Despite the significant contributions of these strands of research, they share an important limitation. By focusing on resources, status and control, the strain related to emotional labour is caused by a lack: a lack of resources, a lack of status and a lack of control. Thus, the constraining forces of power have been emphasised. Although they are important, focusing solely on constraints makes researchers blind to what and how power produces, and how power may be crucial to emotional labour, even in situations not characterised by lack or constraints. Reconceptualising power as productive may increase analytical sensitivity to the myriad ways in which inequality and oppression are reproduced through workers’ activities.

Productive power

Hochschild (1983) distinguishes between subjectivity outside capitalist production and a transmutated subject within the grasp of capitalist power relations. The notion that subjectivity can exist outside of power would be rejected by Foucault (2001) and Rose (1999), since they see subjects as created through power relations. The concepts of power put forth by Foucault and developed by Rose allow us to examine the intricate interplay between subjectivity and power, since they sensitise us to the productive nature of power:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault, 1995: 194)

Power produces individuals who may perform emotional labour not out of fear of repercussions, but because they find it important and valuable (e.g. see Vincent and Braun, 2013). Hence, emotional labour does not simply repress workers’ selves; rather, workers actively take on particular subjectivities with particular possibilities for action. This productive power relates to the concept of governmentality.

Governmentality

Governmentality is a form of power that does not operate through coercion, but through knowledge and self-regulation (Foucault, 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992). It is a government that creates subjectivities capable of acting autonomously in accordance with the logic of the rule by addressing people as certain individuals (Rose and Miller, 1992). Governmentality entails the establishment of a homology between the ‘aspirations of authorities and the activities of individuals and groups’ (Rose and Miller, 1992: 183). Individuals’ self-regulation is aligned with political rationalities and institutional goals, meaning that individuals are governed through freedom, not repression or coercion. We are called on to be autonomous, independent and responsible subjects, and therefore to actively promote our own wealth, health and happiness by applying ‘techniques of the self’ (Rose, 1999: 11; Rose and Miller, 1992: 174). In this sense, power operates by creating subjectivities that self-govern in accordance with certain rationalities (Rose, 1999; Rose and Miller, 1992).

While emotional labour may be the subject of management surveillance and external control, many professions require workers to perform emotional labour outside of the view of management, especially childcare in day care centres. Here, emotional labour cannot be conceived through the direct control of management, and to understand emotional labour as resulting only from fear of user complaints overlooks workers’ identification with the emotional labour (e.g. see Stenross and Kleinman, 1989; Tracy, 2005). In this sense, emotional labour may be considered a form of self-government. Workers take it upon themselves to monitor and regulate their own affect in order to be professional, caring or other-oriented (Lively, 2000). Governmentality may entail the creation or enabling of particular subjectivities that make workers strive to be professional and caring, and therefore take it upon themselves to perform emotional labour. Emotional labour becomes a technology of the self – a way for workers to maintain work-related identities. Identity plays a central role in the subjugation of workers, since individuals are tied to particular identities that they seek to maintain (Foucault, 2001; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). Hence, power may create or enable particular subjectivities of individuals that henceforth strive to achieve the same goals as the organisation (e.g. user satisfaction). Workers regulate their emotions ‘freely’ and still contribute to larger dynamics of power and subordination in an organisation.

The power at work here is not necessarily harmful to workers. It is likely that the consequences of aligning workers’ personal and organisational goals depend on the organisational conditions for performing emotional labour. If workers are responsible for resolving organisational dilemmas (e.g. between documentation and care), such alignment may cause strain, but if workers are enabled by the organisation to perform emotional labour and achieve the goals they themselves strive for, productive power may result in job satisfaction.

In the remainder of the article, empirical data from a Danish childcare setting is used to illustrate and explore the interplay of emotional labour and governance.

The governance of the Danish childcare setting

In Denmark, municipalities provide childcare to the public (which is funded by taxes and has significant user fees). The Danish welfare state is a Nordic or Scandinavian model that, as an ideal type, has been characterised by universalism (services are available irrespective of income level), defamilialization (public provision of care responsibilities that are otherwise placed on families), and extensive publicly financed and provided care (Bettio and Plantenga, 2004; Rauch, 2007).

The governance structure of the Danish welfare state is marked by decentralisation from the state to municipalities – that is, ‘local governance’ with institutions and user committees that possess decentralised management competencies. Municipal governance employs management by objectives (political and economic) rather than detailed governance (Hansen, 1999).

New public management has affected childcare, even though care has not been marketised. ¹ It has resulted in important developments, such as a discursive shift towards consumerism and increased self-governance through the decentralisation of economic, staff-related and pedagogical matters, which are then centrally governed through increased demand for documentation and evaluation (Andersen, 2007: 49–50). The Danish childcare setting often uses a social pedagogical approach that emphasises child-initiated play and moderately adult-structured environments. However, due to increased demand for documentation, day care institutions must develop educational curricula with specified goals, methods and activities, and document their work with the educational curricula (Ahrenkiel et al., 2012). Discursively, the understanding of childcare has shifted from a societal institution (day care institution) to a service provided to customers/users (day care supply) (Ahrenkiel et al., 2012: 29–32).

Studies indicate that there have been cutbacks in the childcare field over the past 25 years as the number of children per childcare worker has increased (Statistics Denmark, 2012; Glavind and Pade, 2011). However, this has not decreased individuals’ reliance on the welfare state for care, since the proportion of children in day care has remained high; in 2011, 97% of children aged three to five were enrolled in day care institutions (Statistics Denmark, 2012). However, a significant change in the use of resources and discourses about care has taken place (Ahrenkiel et al., 2012: 27–32), and the amount of time workers spend performing administrative tasks away from the children has increased (Glavind and Pade, 2011).

In this study, I do not examine the governance of care in terms of how management creates a regime by fostering particular values, performance targets, testing or recruitment techniques (e.g. see Townley, 1993). Instead, I examine how the high level of self-governance and diminished resources available to providers of face-to-face care (and, hence, diminished resources available for emotional labour) interact with workers’ emotional labour, sense of identity and coping strategies. Thus, I do not examine the processes by which particular identities are created, but how the emotions and identities of workers make them particularly vulnerable to a specific form of governance.

Research design

The study examined paid care work performed in day care centres. Data was obtained from qualitative individual interviews with 17 childcare workers (pedagogues and childcare assistants) at day care institutions for children aged zero to six in two Danish municipalities (7 of the interviewees worked in kindergartens with children aged three to six and 10 worked in nurseries with children aged zero to three).

The interviewees were contacted through their workplace. In the municipalities under study, cutbacks were being negotiated or implemented at the time of the interviews. When establishing contact with the day care institutions, some managers declined to facilitate interviews with employees due to cutbacks or high workloads. Thus, there was a selection bias, as I could not interview employees in institutions with a severe lack of resources.

The interviewees were predominantly women; only one man volunteered to be interviewed (this is representative of the proportion of men in Danish childcare institutions aimed towards children aged zero to six). The interviewees ranged in age from 28 to 57, with an average age of 41. They were relatively experienced, with 5 to 30 years of experience (an average of 15 years of experience). Most of the interviewees were pedagogues (with 3 to 3.5 years of professional education), and only two were unskilled. The unskilled workers were not temporary workers; they both had more than five years of experience within their field.

The interviews were carried out at the interviewees’ workplaces and lasted from 30 to 90 minutes (an average of one hour). The interviews were semi-structured, and I used an interview guide with questions regarding emotional experiences, sense of identity, emotional labour, working life, coping strategies and collaboration with co-workers (see Appendix 1). Other experiences emphasised by the interviewees were also pursued. The interview guide did not include questions about governance and resistance, but these concepts emerged during coding and preliminary analysis of the data.

The interviews were coded using both condensation of meaning (Giorgi, 1975: 87) and a pre-structured code list reflecting the themes of the questions in the interview guide. After a first round of coding and recoding to ensure that emergent themes were coded in all the interviews, a preliminary analysis was performed. This was followed by recoding of the interviews according to a smaller selection of themes in order to validate the analysis and search for statements that might contradict the interpretation of the data.

The following sections describe the emotional labour of childcare workers and discuss the coping strategies and resistance of workers in terms of governance and the shift of resources in childcare.

Emotional labour, care and responsibility

Although they differed in terms of experience and education, many of the interviewees stated that they maintained a high level of job involvement, identified with caring, and had a sense of responsibility for the children. In the interviews, they noted that they had both a formal responsibility for the children and a personal responsibility that extended beyond the formal requirements of the job. For one pedagogue and manager of a day care institution based on Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogical philosophy, her personal responsibility for the care was related to her personal responsibility for the mood in the day care centre: ‘We are the ones who are responsible for the mood. It is really us adults. I am responsible for the mood here. And then I have to take a leave of absence if I can’t stay cheerful’ (Karen, kindergarten pedagogue). This suggestion is somewhat radical and is not a commonly held belief in the study, but it demonstrates the degree of personal responsibility individuals may feel regarding the emotional dynamics in care work (as noted by Boyer et al., 2013). It was not only the interviewees with significant formal responsibility who described a sense of personal responsibility for care; unskilled workers also demonstrated personal responsibility and engagement:

I think it’s fun with those children and so I don’t hope, but, well, if you get that feeling, ‘No, I don’t feel up to it and I don’t want to listen to the children and I don’t want to’, well, then you shouldn’t be here. (Lone, nursery childcare assistant)

Many of the care workers described situations where they performed emotionally responsive caregiving (see Leavitt, 1994) and explained how they performed emotional labour out of concern for the children:

We are here in order to allow the children to develop as positively as possible and because they should have attentive adults. (Marianne, nursery pedagogue)

So, I’m happy with my work. That is, it is hard, it is very hard, my work, even though some people say it’s just childminding, but it isn’t. It is a lot of small individuals you have to take care of and it is important for me to be happy, not falsely happy, but to have a positive attitude towards the children. (Johanne, kindergarten pedagogue)

The following is an example of what this form of emotional labour may entail:

Well, as to being affectionate, I just think that all children have a right to be loved; everybody has a right to be loved. So, I just decided that no matter how fucking awful and bloody annoying some kids can be, I usually know why they are like that and I just decide to have the balls to love them, even though they are simply bloody annoying from when they get up in the morning until they go to bed [laughs]. Just like that. No matter how extremely annoying they are, still, you take them under your arm and give them a hug and say, ‘I like you, do you want to play a game of Stratego?’ To do that. (Jacob, kindergarten childcare assistant)

In the above quotes, it is evident that caring for small children entails emotional labour, which is performed out of compassion for the children. Emotional labour is not motivated by management demands, but by values of child-centred care, a concern for the children’s well-being and development, and a moral project, as expressed in the last quote: ‘all children have a right to be loved’. None of the interviewees described being motivated to perform emotional labour by management demands, and only one interviewee referred to an experience that may be interpreted as an implicit management demand to perform emotional labour (she sensed that she ought to remain positive when hearing about future cutbacks). However, although emotional labour is motivated by altruistic concerns, it may be embedded in power dynamics.

The interplay of emotional labour and coping

The emotional labour described by the interviewees was driven by concern for the children. This concern motivated the care workers to attempt to make the best of situations with few resources (e.g. trying to be positive) and hide stress from the children.

When the interviewees expected resource cutbacks and increasing demands on their time, they sometimes approached the situation with a positive attitude. They also emphasised the importance of a positive attitude when they had an extraordinarily high workload because, for example, a colleague was ill and there were no resources for a substitute. One pedagogue expressed this positive take in the following manner:

Interviewer: How does it feel to be at work when you have days with a lot of colleagues with an illness and you’re busy and such?

Sophie: It depends on how I approach work in the morning and how my colleague does that. And if I arrive at work and see [in the book] that it says ‘three sick’ and I [say], ‘Oh no, how is it going to work out? How is it going to work out?’ then it will certainly be a very long and very tough day. If you arrive and say, ‘Well, oh my!’ and then laugh a little and say, ‘Well, then we have to figure out how we work now’, and my colleague arrives with the same attitude, then it helps. (Sophie, nursery pedagogue)

This pedagogue used a positive attitude to cope with excessive work demands. Care workers are sometimes left to resolve organisational dilemmas themselves due to a lack of resources. In these cases, the interviewees sometimes took it upon themselves to resolve these dilemmas through emotional labour, such as humour and a positive attitude.

Some of the interviewees described structural constraints due to a lack of resources. Some were able to cope with such constraints relatively easily, while others described a frustrating struggle to cope. In dealing with such constraints, caring, responsible and involved subjectivities appeared to make workers invest themselves in providing good care despite a lack of resources. One pedagogue expressed it this way:

I think my job means a lot to me. I think it means a lot to me that I feel I am doing my job well enough, that I don’t feel that I am letting the children down or that I feel that things are working. Well, I have some kind of sense of responsibility: of course, we have to make this run smoothly and, of course, it has to work out. The kids need to benefit from it and we have to benefit from it, and we have to do some things because you can’t lean back and say, ‘Well, we’ve been cut. We can’t do this and we can’t do that’. Well, of course, we can do it. It just takes thinking in a new way and planning in a new way. (Anne, nursery pedagogue)

This pedagogue was not motivated by management discourse, but by her own involvement and identification with her work. Her high involvement in her work motivated her to struggle to nurture the children despite cutbacks. She felt a personal responsibility not to ‘let the children down’ and therefore took it upon herself to make it ‘work out’. The empirical data showed that this type of coping was performed through both emotional labour (e.g. hiding stress, remaining positive) and practical work (e.g. planning, skipping breaks). Additionally, emotional labour was simultaneously motivated by empathy for the children and identification with one’s work, which is likely to retain the standard of care despite cutbacks.

Some care workers described their work as both constrained by a lack of resources and motivated by a personal responsibility for providing good care. They expressed that they personally struggled to resolve dilemmas caused by cost-containment efforts in their organisations. One pedagogue described this struggle as follows: ‘I must be able to do it better. I must be able to pull it off. These kids just have to have a decent day and I must be able to do it’ (Julie, nursery pedagogue). She was aware that the consequences of cutbacks were not her responsibility, but she found it hard not to claim responsibility for the consequences. Some of the interviewees described how a lack of resources affected the way they behaved when providing care, such as causing them to forget things they had promised the children they would do and, sometimes, to scold the children. Thus, a lack of resources affects the subjectivities of care workers, making some feel personally responsible for preventing the children from being affected by a lack of resources. A childcare assistant expressed this attitude clearly by distancing himself from other workers:

There are actually some pedagogues who simply let the children suffer the consequences of the fact that we have some politicians who don’t understand what the consequences of their laws and rules are. … But dammit, you can’t make me do it [care] worse for the kids. (Jacob, kindergarten childcare assistant)

Some of the workers stated that structural constraints should not be allowed to affect the care provided to children. In these situations, the workers acted as a buffer between cutbacks and the children. A similar role was noted in previous research among workers caring for the elderly (Dahl, 2009; Liebst and Monrad, 2008). Thus, it seems that workers are left to deal individually with the dilemmas of care caused by cost-containment efforts.

Resistance

In the empirical data, there are several examples of interviewees resisting structural constraints by struggling to provide care. This altruistic resistance can be seen as a defence of their identities (see Knights, 2002). These interviewees were not resisting their identities as care workers and the nurturing emotional labour their work entailed; their emotions and identities motivated them to resist inferior working conditions. Some of the workers described resistance as going against formal requirements or neglecting less important tasks (e.g. documentation). As one pedagogue stated:

What should you choose? Should you choose the children or should you choose the paperwork? Then I might as well get a job at an office. … It is unacceptable that it affects the children adversely, but I guess they’ll figure out in 10 to 15 years that the children become less well adjusted because there hasn’t been time for each child in the kindergarten or in the day care centres. (Isabella, kindergarten pedagogue)

For some, resistance was highly successful and resulted in identity verification. However, it is possible that the care felt for dependent children restricted the forms of resistance that workers could perform in their daily practices because they sought to protect the children from adverse consequences (Rasmussen, 2000). Some of the workers described a sense of powerlessness, and one interviewee quit her job because she felt there was nothing else she could do without losing her sense of integrity: ‘It just isn’t good enough, because we shouldn’t just say “yes” and “amen”. But then again, what the hell are we supposed to do?’ (Pia, kindergarten pedagogue).

The data shows that some care workers feel responsible for overcoming constraints and use their freedom to struggle to maintain their work-related identities and care for others. Hence, these workers assert and protect their identities through emotional labour (as has been found in other fields – e.g. see Curley and Royle, 2013). While this struggle to provide care can be considered a form of resistance, the organisation clearly benefits from workers’ efforts to maintain their identities (see Curley and Royle, 2013). Compassionate emotional labour may allow municipal authorities to require workers to perform documentation and evaluation as well as diminish resources without risking the quality of care and having to deal with complaints from users (at least in the short term). Thus, institutional goals are made possible through workers’ struggle to achieve personal goals.

Discussion and conclusion

Many of the interviewees described themselves as caring and stated that they performed emotional labour in order to create a positive, supportive environment for the children. Thus, emotional labour seems integral to the professional identities of childcare workers. I argue that the altruistic nature of emotional labour made the care workers particularly vulnerable to cost-containment efforts in the public sector. Because the workers identified as caring, loving and affectionate, and attempted to verify these identities, they might have maintained good care despite a lack of resources, but risked their own well-being.

The micro-level dynamics of emotional labour interact with structural constraints in disturbing ways. When some of the workers attempted to remain happy and positive towards both the children and work stressors, their emotional labour no longer only served their professional goals to provide good care and a supportive emotional environment, and verify their identity. Rather, emotional labour indirectly supported the rationalities of cost containment because the workers took it upon themselves to ensure good care in spite of constraints. The workers’ struggle to retain high-quality care might have made it possible for administrators and politicians to justify cutbacks – and even make them appear successful.

The childcare workers interviewed in this study often expressed that they felt personally responsible for providing good care, even when they lacked the resources to do so. Based on their care for others, the workers actively took on particular identities. Their attachment to caring identities and their use of emotional labour as a technology of the self to maintain such identities enabled a particular governance of care work, since the workers used their freedom to struggle to nurture the children.

The contradictions created by cost-cutting strategies undermine workers’ well-being but do not constrain emotional labour, as suggested by Bolton and Boyd (2003: 301). Rather, emotional labour becomes a way to deal with these contradictions on an individual level. Workers may attempt to remain positive and resist constraints, preventing the children from being affected by cutbacks. The struggle to provide good care with insufficient resources often requires an emotional effort that simultaneously allows workers to cope with their work conditions and reproduces repressive structures.

Throughout this article, I have sought to describe the role of emotions in power, which is simultaneously productive and constraining. I have suggested that emotional labour may be conceptualised as a technology of the self, and that childcare workers’ altruism and individual efforts to address larger structural problems should be analysed within a broader context of governmental power, since emotions play a central role in the subjugation of workers. Further research should examine why workers take on particular identities and how particular types of subjects are recruited or produced by this work regime (extending the work of Skeggs, 1997), such as through management and education, and connect this analysis to research on the learning of emotions in caring professions (Colley, 2006; Vincent and Braun, 2013). In addition, it would be fruitful to consider how resistance is made possible or minimised, and to study how childcare workers’ subjectivities and emotions affect their resistance or conformity to new working conditions. Finally, the relationship between emotional labour and governance should be analysed in the context of maternal discourses and discourses on professionalism, childhood and childcare (and hence extend the work of Osgood, 2012).