T he attempts people make to shape how they feel is by now a well-known and well-studied topic in sociology. Scholars have looked at feeling management in many social roles and contexts: flight attendants (Hochschild 1983; Bolton and Boyd 2003), rescue workers (Lois 2001), and wheel-chair users (Cahill and Eggleston 1994); law firms (Pierce 1995) and support groups (Francis 1997). Sociologists have revealed how social structure constrains management. This impor- tant theoretical contribution uncovers the depths of social control. Yet in focusing on constraint, we fail to consider how social structure facilitates feeling management. My goal is to broaden how sociologists of emotions conceptualize the relationship between social structure and feeling manage- ment through a case study of novice and semi- professional stage actors. Emotion manage- ment is a critical aspect of the work actors do in rehearsal and onstage, be it the suppression of pre-performance anxiety and other feelings not associated with a role, or the evocation of emotion in a particular scene. This manage- ment is not done in a system of rigid con- straint, but in a highly resourced and support- ed setting. I conceptualize actors as members of a particular type of emotion manager, what I will refer to as privileged emotion managers. I argue that the structural resources and insti- tutional support available to actors in my field sites are defining characteristics of this privi- leged status. BACKGROUND The theoretical framework for under- standing the manipulation of emotion and the substantive interest in structural constraint are rooted in Arlie Hochschild’s early work (1979, 1983). Hochschild uses the terms feeling man- agement and emotion management to refer broadly to those attempts to regulate how we feel, regardless of context ([1983] 2003). 2 Management is guided by feeling rules, social norms embedded in everyday life that specify how we should feel (1983). Often we only Social Psychology Quarterly 2008, Vol. 71, No. 2, 143–156 Privileged Emotion Managers: The Case of Actors* DAVID ORZECHOWICZ University of California, Davis Theatre 1 provides a unique set of conditions for the management of emotions. Drawing on participant observation from one repertory theater, three university productions, and inter- views with stage actors, directors, and acting instructors, I conceptualize actors as privi- leged emotion managers. Actors access structural resources that enable their ability to man- age feelings onstage. Theatre’s division of labor, the rehearsal process, and formal training give actors important advantages in managing emotions compared to many other social set- tings, and demonstrate structural recognition of and support for feeling management. These structures outsource some of an actor’s emotion management and provide a set of institu- tionally prescribed strategies that actors use to manage feelings during a production. 143 * I would like to thank Laura Grindstaff, Ming-cheng Lo, Lyn Lofland, Kegan Marling, Kirk Prestegard, the Power and Inequality Workshop, and Cecilia Benoit for feedback and guidance. Please direct all correspondence to David Orzechowicz, Department of Sociology, University of California-Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616; djorzechowicz@ucdavis.edu. 1 In this paper, I use theater to refer to the physical space in which stage performances occur, and theatre as an umbrella term to refer to the artistic activity and art worlds associated with the production of a stage perfor- mance. Two on Emotional Management 2 While Hochschild states that emotion work and emo- tion management are synonymous in The Managed Heart (1983: 7f), she uses the latter term to describe the man- agement of feeling in both private and public contexts. She further distinguishes between public emotional labor and private emotion work, a distinction I do not make in this paper. The feeling management done by Bay Rep and the University Players demonstrated qualities associated with both work and labor, and a discussion of the blurring of these categories is beyond the scope of this paper.