Arlie Russell Hochschild


Arlie Russell Hochschild is an American professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. 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. In The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, The Time Bind and others of her books, she continues the tradition of C. Wright Mills drawing links between private troubles and public issues.
Hochschild seeks to make visible the underlying role of emotion and the work of managing emotion, the paid form of which she calls "emotional labor." For her, "the expression and management of emotion are social processes. What people feel and express depend on societal norms, one's social category and position, and cultural factors." Her agenda is one that is committed "to understanding how the personal realm is continually altered by powerful institutions, economic and cultural trends."

Biography

Early life and family background

Hochschild was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Alene and Francis Henry Russell, who was the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, Ghana, and Tunisia. In Hochschild's early life, she became fascinated with the boundaries people draw between inner experience and outer appearance. As she writes in the preface to her book,

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, 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, Mills argued that we "sell our personality." This resonated with Hochschild, however 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.

Hochschild's Thought

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 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, 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.
In Hochschild's later work, she introduces the "concept of "framing rules", which provide the context for feeling rules." She explains that framing rules are the "rules governing how we see situations" and how they "point to the cognitive, meaningful, and interpretive frame within which feeling rules are situated." An example that clarifies the relationship between framing rules and feeling rules would be:
"The norm that women should be at home is a framing rule, while the norm to feel happy about being at home, or to feel guilty about being absent, is a feeling rule."
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 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 and number of kinds 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 focuses on the emotional labor of female immigrants, "So you have women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and 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'". Extending from the eldest daughter in a rural village who takes care of siblings while a mother cares for an employer's children in the city of a poor country to that employer's employer—and children—in a rich country, outsourcing care work creates a global care chain with a different emotional task at each link of it. Hochschild coined the term global care chain to refer to "a pattern of women leaving their own families in developing countries to care for the children of well-off families."

Work and family

In other books, Hochschild applies 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 she has; 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." She argues that working parents in the United States put in long hours at work not because "employers demand long hours nor out of financial need, but because their work lives are more rewarding than their home lives." For this reason, working parents feel 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 way was to reduce their idea of what they needed. 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. Thus, in the "time bind" Hochschild denotes this paradox of "reversed worlds, in which family becomes like work and work takes on the feel and tone of family."
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 function as totems to a ‘potential self’ or hypothetical self – a self we would be if only we had time”. It is also a self in danger of being perpetually in emotional debt to loved ones.

Politics and emotion

Her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is based on five years of immersion research 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 second poorest state vote for candidates who resist federal help? Why in a highly polluted state, do they vote for politicians reluctant to regulate polluting industries? Her search for answers leads her to the concept of the "deep story." A deep story is a story that feels true about a highly salient feature of life. One takes facts out of a deep story. One takes moral precepts out of the deep story. What remains is simply what feels true about a highly salient issue, and can be described through a metaphor, as the experience of "waiting in line" for a valued reward, and witnessing unwelcome "line-cutters." Everyone, she argues, has a deep story -- and for many on the right, it reflects a keen sense of decline, the sting of scorn, and sense of being a stranger in one's own land.
Taken as a whole, Hochschild's work describes the many ways in which each individual self becomes a shock absorber of larger forces, and focuses on the impact of these forces on emotion.

Honors

Hochschild was short-listed for the 2016 National Book Award for Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right and the book was a New York Times Bestseller. In 2015, she was awarded the 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 the Jessie Bernard Award, and the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology. 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.
was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the "Best Books of 2012." The last chapter was in The New York Times.
Hochschild has received honorary doctoral degrees from Swarthmore College Aalborg University, the University of Oslo,, the University of Lapland,, Mount St. Vincent University,, Westminster University and University of Lausanne.

Quotes

"Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework and child care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home."
"The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us."
"For many of us, work is the one place where we feel appreciated. The things that we long to experience at home- pride in our accomplishments, laughter and fun, relationships that aren't complex- we sometimes experience most often in the office. Bosses applaud us when we do a good job. Co-workers become a kind of family we feel we fit into."
"The deal we made with the workplace wasn't made with families in mind: to work year-round in eight hour workdays through thick and thin, newborns, normal childhood illnesses, difficulties at school, elderly people getting sick. In whose interest is this? And can't we change it, making of two nine-hour days three six hour days, creating an extra job and making life livable for everyone?"

Legacy

Within sociology, Hochschild is known as the founder of the sociology of emotion and, outside of it, as a public sociologist, contributing to publications, such as The New York Times op-ed page and Book Review, , Mother Jones, The American Prospect, Harper's Magazine, The Progressive and The New York Review of Books.
Concepts developed by Hochschild, such as "emotional labor," "feeling rules", the "economy of gratitude," and "global care chains" have been adopted by scholars in a range of disciplines. Capturing a range of 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 edited by Gertraud Koch and Stephanie Everke Buchanan. The book is based on papers given at an "International Workshop in Honour of Hochschild" at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. A monograph by Madalena d'Oliviera-Martins entitled Arlie Russell Hochschild: Un Camino Hacia El Corazon De La Sociologia explores the main ideas found in her work. . Her work appears in 16 languages

Books

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