Broadening the sociocultural context in plagiarism A Response to Sarah Benesch’s “Feeling rules and emotion labor: Tools of English language teacher engagement” (Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2018)

Abstract

Hochschild introduced the term “emotional labor” (p. 11)—the process of regulating or
managing one’s emotion in the public domain to fulfill a job demand—to shed new light on the
exploitative and unfair labor practices upon which a market-oriented structure is built. In a similar vein,
Benesch’s leveraging emotional labor as a theoretical and methodological tool for examining plagiarism is
pertinent at a time when emerging global forces such as commodification, internationalization,
marketization, and digitalization of education have resulted in students’ developing new ways of
knowledge making and literacy practices. The ever-changing student literacy practices call for a paradigm
shift in the ways we approach plagiarism. Tapping into this emotional labor of ESL teachers allows us to
re-examine their roles in supporting English learners’ academic success in global contexts