Research @ Schulich Podcast

A teacher assures a student that their low mark on a test isn’t the end of their academic career.

A flight attendant makes small talk with passengers on a delayed flight.

A security guard calmly escorts a trespasser from a building.

A server puts on a smile and offers free entrees to a table of angry diners who have “been waiting for hours” for service.

You’ve probably seen situations like this in real life – and you may have even personally experienced several of these situations yourself.

You may not know it, but these are all examples of “emotion work” – the process by which employees manage their own emotions to sustain and change a business or a market.

But emotion work (or, as it’s more commonly known “emotional labour”), is a complex issue that goes beyond the service economy and transactions in shops and stores. Emotional labour also includes the work put in by volunteers, community organizers and “committed consumers” – individuals who voluntarily invest significant time and effort to uphold the principles and operations of alternative marketplaces, such as farmers markets.

And while this may sound like a niche form of emotional labour, the work put in by volunteers to simply ensure that a community market stays active and running – and sticks to its principals – often matches the level of emotional labour used by staff at for-profit businesses.

Join us as Schulich Professor Eileen Fischer (Professor of Marketing; Associate Dean, Research; Anne & Max Tanenbaum Chair in Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise) talks about her research on emotional labour in alternative markets – and find out how managers, organizers and policymakers might be able to learn (and manage) the emotional labour costs of their fellow team members and staff.

Listen here:

You can read Eileen’s paper on emotion work entitled ““It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it”: Committed consumers’ voluntary emotion work in alternative market systems” here

Works Cited
Bentsen, K., Fischer, E., & Pedersen, P. E. (2025). “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it”: Committed consumers’ voluntary emotion work in alternative market systems. Journal of Consumer Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1454

When you hear the words “self-care” what comes to mind? A quiet walk along a lake? A luxurious bubble bath? A strict diet and workout regime? A day’s worth of retail therapy?

Self-care – which refers to actions we undertake to sustain and improve our lives, health and well-being- is a concept with a variety of meanings and interpretations.

But self-care isn’t just some random set of activities that you do when you’re trying to recover from a bad day or are working to better your health -rather, it’s a collection of moral considerations that shape your actions and, ultimately, drive your activities as a consumer to carry out a set of specific self-care “scripts”.

On the newest episode of the Research @ Schulich podcast, Schulich Associate Professor of Marketing, Ela Veresiu talks about how consumers are shaped by a variety of factors – from moral considerations to health influencers –  when making decisions about what types of “self-care” we individually see as valid, and what types we see as invalid – and how this sense of internal moralizing  can influence even everyday purchases.

Listen to Episode 6 of the Research @ Schulich podcast here

Ela’s paper “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” was published in Journal of Consumer Research. It can be read at the link below:

“Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care”