Arlie Russell Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild (/ˈhoʊkʃɪld/; born January 15, 1940) is an American sociologist and academic. She is professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions which underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally. She is the author of nine books including, most recently Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, and The Time Bind. In the tradition of C. Wright Mills, Hochschild continually tries to draw links between private troubles and social issues.

Early life

Hochschild was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Alene (Libbey) and Francis Henry Russell, who was the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, Ghana, and Tunisia. Hochschild early became fascinated with the boundaries people draw between inner experience and outer appearance. As she writes in the preface to her book The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling,

Education and academic career

Hochschild graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962 and then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, whose faculty she soon joined. She wrote her first book, The Unexpected Community, in 1973. As a graduate student, Hochschild was greatly inspired by the writings of Erving Goffman and C. Wright Mills. In White Collar, Mills argued that we "sell our personality." This resonated with Hochschild, but she felt that more needed to be added. As she writes,

Hochschild went on to create concepts which illuminate the power of emotion in social life. With her husband, writer Adam Hochschild, she raised two sons.

Concepts

Emotion as social

Hochschild starts with the thesis that human emotions-—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—-are, in large part, social. Each culture, she argues, provides us with prototypes of feeling which, like the different keys on a piano, attune us to different inner notes. Tahitians, she points out, have one word, "sick," for what in other cultures might correspond to envy, depression, grief or sadness.

Culture guides the act of recognizing a feeling by proposing what's possible for us to feel. In The Managed Heart Hochschild cites the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who writes that the Czech word "litost" refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief—a constellation of feelings with no equivalent in any other language. It is not that non-Czechs never feel litost, she notes; it is that they are not, in the same way, invited to lift out and affirm the feeling—instead of to disregard or suppress it.

Apart from what we think a feeling is, Hochschild asserts in The Managed Heart, we have ideas about what it should be. We say, "You should be thrilled at winning the prize" or "you must be furious at what he did." We evaluate the fit between feeling and context in light of what she calls "feeling rules," which are themselves deeply rooted in culture. In light of such feeling rules, we try to manage our feelings—i.e., we try to be happy at a party, or grief-stricken at a funeral. In all of these ways—our experience of an interaction, our definition of feeling, our appraisal and management of feeling—feeling is social.

Emotional expression and management are learned in the private sphere, then later through participation in public life.

Emotional labor

"Emotional labor" refers to the management of one’s feelings and expressions based on the emotional requirements of a job. For example, in The Managed Heart Hochschild writes of how flight attendants are trained to control passengers' feelings during times of turbulence and dangerous situations while suppressing their own fear or anxiety. Bill collectors, too, are often trained to imagine debtors as lazy or dishonest, and so to feel suspicious and be intimidating. As the number of service jobs grows, so too does the amount of emotional labor.

Increasingly, Hochschild argues, emotional labor has gone global. In her essay, "Love and Gold," in Global Woman she describes immigrant care workers who leave their children and elderly back in the Philippines, Mexico or elsewhere in the global South, to take paid jobs caring for the young and elderly in families in the affluent North. Such jobs call on workers to manage grief and anguish vis-a-vis their own long-unseen children, spouses, and elderly parents, even as they try to feel—and genuinely do feel—warm attachment to the children and elders they daily care for in the North.

In an interview with Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild explains the effects emotional labor has on female immigrants, "So you have women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Mexico leaving their children and elderly behind to take jobs caring for American, Canadian, Saudi, and European children and elderly. It was also not uncommon to hear nannies say, ‘I love the kids I take care of now more than my own. I hate to say it, but I do'". The globalization of care work affects not only the worker, but also the care-worker's family.

Emotional debt

Emotional debt comes from the idea that individuals owe spending time with family, friends, relatives or people in their community. Sometimes guilt is associated with emotional debt. In an interview with Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild explains how the work-spend cycle (a system where people work long hours then participate in consumption spending) can add to emotional debt, “Since the 1970s, the advice books have been telling working mothers to stop feeling guilty. Both those who feel guilty and those who tell them not to feel guilty anchor the problem in a context-free individual mother. But given the work-spend cycle, we can see this guilt as a form of emotional debt”.

Work and family

Other Hochschild books apply her perspective on emotion to the American family. In The Second Shift, she argues that the family has been stuck in a "stalled revolution." Most mothers work for pay outside the home; that is the revolution. But the jobs they go out to and men they come home to haven't changed as rapidly or deeply as has she; that is the stall. So working mothers end up doing the lion's share of the work—both emotional and physical—of tending the home, which leads her to feel resentment. Hochschild traces links between a couple's division of labor and their underlying "economy of gratitude." Who, she asks, is grateful to whom, and for what?

In The Time Bind, Hochschild studied working parents at a Fortune 500 company dealing with an important contradiction. On one hand, nearly everyone she talked to told her that "my family comes first." On the other, working parents felt a magnetic draw to work. For about a fifth of these working parents, she found, home felt like work and work felt like home. Where, she asked informants, do you get help when you need it? Often the answer was work. Where are you most rewarded for what you do, work or home? Often the answer was work. One man told her, "When I'm doing the right thing with my teenage son, chances are he's giving me hell for it. When I'm doing the right thing at work, my boss is clapping me on my back." Parents, she found, handled this strain in several ways. One was to reduce their idea of what they needed. ("Oh, I don't really need time to unwind.") Another was to outsource personal tasks. A third was to develop an imaginary self, the self you would be if only you had time. The "time bind" refers to the lack of time parents had to themselves, the feeling that they were always running late and the thought that they were confined to the limited hours of the day.

In an interview with Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild describes how capitalism plays a role in one’s “imaginary self”. She explains, “Many workers put in long hours, and return home exhausted. They turn to television as a form of passive ‘recovery’ from work. In the four hours of television, they’re exposed to thousands of amusing, fun advertisements. Those ads function as a conveyor belt to the mall. At the mall, they spend the money they’ve earned on objects that, I argue in The Time Bind, function as totems to a ‘potential self’ or hypothetical self – a self we would be if only we had time”.

Politics and emotion

Taken as a whole, Hochschild's work describe various ways in which each individual self becomes a shock absorber of larger forces. Her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is based on five years of immersion among Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party. It explores the role of emotion in politics by first posing a paradox. Why, she asks, do residents of the nation's poorest state vote for candidates who resist federal help? Why in a highly polluted state, do they vote for candidates who resist regulating polluting industry? Her search for answers leads her to what she calls their "deep story," a metaphorical expression of the emotions they live by. The people she studied may not be voting for their economic self-interest, she found, but they are voting for their emotional self-interest as members of a group which feels marginalized, scorned by coastal liberals, and left behind.

A list of Hochschild's writings can be found on her UC Berkeley website.

Honors

Hochschild has been short-listed for the 2016 National Book Award for Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. In 2015, she was awarded the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, Ireland. Hochschild has also won Guggenheim, Fulbright and Mellon fellowships, and three awards granted by the American Sociological Association—the Charles Cooley Award (for The Managed Heart) the Jessie Bernard Award (for The Second Shift, The Time Bind and Global Woman), and the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology (for lifetime achievement). In awarding Hochschild the Jessie Bernard Award, the citation observed her "creative genius for framing questions and lines of insight, often condensed into memorable, paradigm-shifting words and phrases."

The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, and Strangers In Their Own Land have been named "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times.

The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the "Best Books of 2012." The last chapter was excerpted in The New York Times (May 5, 2012).

Hochschild has received honorary doctoral degrees from Swarthmore College, Aalborg University Denmark, the University of Oslo, Norway, the University of Lapland, Finland, and Mount St. Vincent University, Canada. Her work appears in 16 languages.

Legacy

Within sociology she is known as the founder of the sociology of emotion and, outside of it, as a contributor to the New York Times op-ed page and Book Review, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, Harper's Magazine, and The Progressive. Hochschild has become a public sociologist because her work has influenced audiences outside of the academy.

Concepts developed by Hochschild, such as "emotional labor," "feeling rules" and the "economy of gratitude" have been adopted by scholars in a range of disciplines. Capturing some of the recent research and debate, a collection published in 2011, At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild, critically explores some of her key concepts. Another collection of papers devoted to her work is Pathways to Empathy: New Studies on Commodification, Emotional Labor and Time Binds (2013) edited by Gertraud Koch and Stephanie Everke Buchanan (Campus Verlag-Arbeit und Alltag, University of Chicago Press). The book is based on papers given at an "International Workshop in Honour of Hochschild" at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany (November 12–13, 2011).

"Hochschildian sociology" reflects a concern with the private life of the individual, which includes the family and children. This sociology focuses on the nature of human relationships and the obligation, emotion, and care that bring people together in all parts of life. Hochschildian sociology works to understand how the personal, private, and familial parts of a person’s life continues to be altered by institutions like the workplace, or by forces of commodification that operate globally.

Books

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Juvenile fiction