Exploring The Emotional Labour: Review Of Literature And Potential Future Research Directions

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive review of scholarly research on emotional labour during the last 30 years applying bibliometric citation analysis and elaborates an agenda for future research. The bibliography is compiled using the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases. It includes all articles with citations over the period 2004-2021 from Web of Science Core Collection database and 1988–2021 from Scopus database. Specifically, the review is carried out using 1298 articles across 65 countries published in 552 journals by 3097 authors from Web of Science core collection database. In same way, the review is carried out using 2224 articles across 79 countries published in 981 journals by 4183 authors from Scopus database. The area of emotional labour research is interdisciplinary, with articles mainly published in journals for business and management, but also in Economics, Psychology, Social Sciences, Nursing. We have analysed the existing emotional labour research by examining database which consists authors, universities, countries, key journals, and key articles and tried to outline possible future research avenues. The study explores new sub-research streams and visualizes how articles on emotional labour build on each other using science mapping and co-citation mapping technique. Based on the results of this analysis, we propose future research directions for further exploration of topic that offers the possibility to propel research on the emotional labour.