About MARIAL Faculty, Fellows, and Staff Calendar of Events Research and Publications Fellowships Work-Family Resources Virtual Exhibitions	ANDREW WHITELEGG Ph.D., Urban Geography King's College, London Project title: "Life in the Air vs. Life on the Ground: Flight Attendants and Their Families" My project will examine the effects that work intensification has on the family life of flight attendants (cabin crew) in the airline industry. The creation of an increasingly contingent labor pool – including a rise in part-time flight attendants – brought on by widespread industry conglomeration and restructuring has placed new strain on workers and is bound to impinge on the quality of life outside the job. Issues regarding the dispersion of nuclear families and role balance within the family framework provide a necessary context to the project. The major line of inquiry will concern the construction of compensatory strategies by families and how these are manifested through the production and recreation of narrative, ritual and other devices. The relationship between work and home for flight attendants remains largely unexplored. Several facets of the job make it particularly pertinent within the contemporary economic and social climate. First is the question of emotional labor. In her study of Delta Air Lines cabin crew, Arlie Hochschild (1983) argued that the “commercialization of human feeling” results in psychological confusion for workers, as they could no longer differentiate between their “true” personalities and those they “adopted” for the purposes of labor – a tension between “deep” and “surface” acting. There has been significant growth in employment sectors requiring a parallel sale of one’s personality as part of the job description. Equally, the spillover between jobs with high quotients of emotional labor and the need for workers to provide emotional support in the home has become an increasingly important concern. A second issue for flight attendants is mobility. The job is necessarily difficult to reconcile with the operation and functioning of a conventional family unit. Crew are usually based near central airline locations, are often required to move from one location to another – including abroad – and are involved in intensified shift patterns that can lead to relatively long periods of absence from home. On international carriers, crew flying overseas usually have seniority and are therefore more likely to have children. For much of the twentieth century – and into the twenty-first, one might easily argue – job and family were seen as incompatible for women, particularly in an industry that often prohibited its female employees to be married or have children. A final aspect worthy of attention is the job’s pervasion of places and spaces beyond the immediate locus of employment. Flight attendants on overseas stopovers, for instance, are expected to behave as if they were company representatives even if they are not on duty. Strict weight regulations for women ensure that dietary concerns remain a constant worry and a manifestation of the invasion of the body by the job. My project will address these issues by analyzing the responses of flight attendants and their families. Do families employ rituals to help disentangle work and home? How does the everyday performance of social reproduction fit into the highly mobile and uncertain picture painted above? How is increased job intensity played out in the private sphere? What lessons can be learned and how are they transferable to other service sector jobs? How did the events of Sept. 11 impact the family lives of flight attendants?