Arlie Russell Hochschild

Hochschild was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Alene (Libbey) and Francis Henry Russell, a diplomat who served in Israel, New Zealand, Ghana, and Tunisia.[7] In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Hochschild credits her first experiences reaching out and getting to know people different from her stems from her fathers profession as a diplomat.[8] Arlie Hochschild grew up in a household where her mother was the primary caregiver and her father was the provider. Her mother "volunteered for the PTA, and helped start a preschool program in Montgomery County, Maryland, all the while supporting [her] father's job as a government official and diplomat" (Hochschild, Commercialization, p. 3). Hochschild drew on her positive childhood experiences to study and write on caregiving and having a loving relationship with your children. In the preface of her book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she says that her mother was a wonderful woman who committed her life to care for her family and was excellent at it, but who never appeared pleased doing so.[9] Hochschild has been married to her husband, writer Adam Hochschild, since June 1965. They met at a Quaker work camp in Spanish Harlem when she was 20 and he was 17. Although they aren’t practicing Quakers, they still like to embody some of the Quaker values, which are also what drew her to Swarthmore.[10] Hochschild joined the Swarthmore community as a sophomore transfer student after spending one year in New Zealand for college, where her family was located at the time.[11] She and her husband, Adam used their knowledge from Swarthmore to participate in “civil rights work in Vicksburg, Miss.” before their marriage in 1965.[11] She later became a mother herself and raised two sons named David Russell and Gabriel Russell.

In Hochschild's early life, she became fascinated with the boundaries people draw between inner experience and outer appearance. Living internationally at a young age challenged her to see the world in a unique way.

As she writes in the preface to her book The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling, "I found myself passing a dish of peanuts among many guests and looking up at their smiles; diplomatic smiles can look different when seen from below than when seen straight on. Afterward, I would listen to my mother and father interpret various gestures. The tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul . . . I learned to convey messages not simply from person to person but from Sofia to Washington, from Peking to Paris, and from Paris to Washington. Had I passed the peanuts to a person, I wondered, or to an actor? Where did the person end and the act begin? Just how is a person related to an act?"[12] The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling explores how we grapple with the emotions we are truly feeling versus the emotions we think we are supposed to feel.[13]

Overall, Hochschild is a vibrant and curious person, who dedicates herself to her work and draws inspiration and content from her own experiences and surroundings. In this way, “By making herself a player in this evolving social phenomenon, she’s signaling, “You’re not just an insect being scientifically inspected by the white-coated scientists.” She is passionate about studying phenomena that affect everyday people and is dedicated to using her own life as a vehicle to learn. She has traveled to an infertility clinic in India to personally interview pregnancy surrogates, where she interacted with poor women who were “paid to carry fetuses for infertile American couples.” Here, she met an Indian journalist, Aditya Ghosh, who she later helped to get a Ph.D.[10] It is evident that her life experiences and the people she has met along the way are what have motivated her career choices and future research.

Hochschild graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962 where she majored in International Relations and was a member of the political action group and the peace corps committee.[10] After, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, whose faculty she soon joined. Prior to joining the staff at University of California, Berkeley, she was an assistant professor at University of California, Sant Cruz, from 1969-1971. She wrote her first book, The Unexpected Community: Portrait of an Old Age Subculture, which was focused on how community affects the differences in elderly peoples' mental health, in 1973. As a graduate student, Hochschild was greatly inspired by the writings of well-known sociologists, Erving Goffman and C. Wright Mills. In White Collar, Mills argued that we "sell our personality." This resonated with Hochschild, however, she felt that more needed to be added. As she writes,

"Mills seemed to assume that in order to sell personality, one need only have it. Yet simply having personality does not make one a diplomat, any more than having muscles makes one an athlete. What was missing was a sense of the active emotional labor involved in the selling. This labor, it seemed to me, might be one part of a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system—a system composed of individual acts of 'emotion work,' social 'feeling rules,' and a great variety of exchanges between people in private and public life."[14]

Hochschild went on to create concepts that illuminate the power of emotion in social life.

Although Hochschild identifies as more “left-leaning” politically, her work shows consideration and reflection on those opposite of her on the political spectrum. While she may not agree with them politically, she understands the importance of learning and connecting with those who do not agree with her personally on politics. In her book Strangers in Their Own Land - Anger and Mourning on the American Right, she discusses the motives behind members of the Tea Party learning about them and how their lives led them to support political figures such as Donald Trump. She spent five years in Lake Charles, Louisiana to examine their community, as it is a republican dominated environment.[15] As well, she tries to see if a liberal like herself can empathize with people who voted for him. In a discussion where Hochschild reflects on her research for this project , she says, “I knew I would have to climb an empathy wall”.[3] The book was a National Book Award finalist, as well as one of the top ten best non-fiction books of the decade by the Boston Public Library. Hochschild has also written political opinion pieces for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Los Angeles Times, as well as many others.

“Prior to writing Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild said she noticed the hostility developing in the political world, specifically between the two parties. As a liberal, it was easy to see where the left was coming from but she had a harder time understanding the right. In the book she says, "Since that time both parties have split their seams and Donald Trump has burst onto the scene, quickening the pulse of American political life. I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, I thought, but what was happening on the right?

Hochschild can be passionate about her political leanings, but she is equally willing to put them aside to try and learn from those who do not think similarly to her. She quotes in the discussion of Strangers in Their Own Land:

"What I’m really interested in is understanding how people feel. I’m not focusing pragmatically on policies, but trying to get into what it would feel like to be a person who has a certain set of experiences and lives in a certain social world and has certain news sources. I think that in itself is the whole project — turning your alarm system off and really listening."[16]

Through her work, Hochschild proclaims 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. She provides an example of the Tahitians, who have one word, "sick," for what in other cultures might correspond to envy, depression, grief, or sadness.[17]

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.[18]

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.[18] 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."[19] She explains that framing rules are the "rules governing how we see situations"[19] and how they "point to the cognitive, meaningful, and interpretive frame within which feeling rules are situated."[19] 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."[19]

Emotional expression and management are learned in the private sphere, then later through participation in public life.[20]

"Emotional labor", a term first defined by Hochschild, refers to the management of one's feelings and expressions based on the emotional requirements of a job.[18] 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 fear or anxiety. Bill collectors, as well, are often trained to imagine debtors as lazy or dishonest, so they can feel suspicious and intimidating.[18] As the number of service jobs grows, so too does the amount of kinds of emotional labor. In the era of COVID-19, she argues, many front-line workers will do the emotional labor of suppressing heightened anxieties about their own health and that of their families while dealing with the fear, anxiety and sometimes hostility of the public.[21] Hochschild claims “that emotional labor is now in greater demand than ever before as our society moves from factories and the production of material goods to a service economy requiring more face-to-face interaction”.[22]

Hochschild also explores the concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and emotional labor as they relate to class structure and how it can vary based on economic or social class. For example, she argues that middle class families prepare their children for emotion management more than working class families.[23] Similarly, the level of emotion management taught in a family is often related to the type of job the parent holds. A bank manager, for example, which is typically a middle class job, might need more ‘feeling rules’ than a working class job, which might instead involve more external behavior, such as assembling car parts. Overall, Hochschild argues that, “Given the general pattern of class inheritance, each class tends to prepare its children with the skills necessary to ‘its’ type of work environment and to pass on class-appropriate ways.”[23] In other words, middle class parents tend to try to control feelings, whereas working class parents tend to control behavior and/or consequences. Overall, she claims that the way in which we are taught to manage our feelings and emotions can depend heavily on our economic class and how we are raised.  

Finally, 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'".[24] "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."[25] 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."[2] These networks are created by the worldwide exchange of domestic services, which connect women all over the world. She connects her ideas about emotional labor to Richard Sennett's concept about "hidden injuries". Hochschild writes:

"The idea of emotional labor—and of a sociology of emotions in general—helps illuminate the "hidden injuries," to quote Richard Sennett, of all the systems we study, including the latest versions of sexism, racism, and capitalism".[26]

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 have and the men they come home to haven't changed as rapidly or deeply as she has; that is the stall. Hochschild argues couples have implicit "gender ideologies" when they marry; the marital role that the women will take on the domestic duties within a home. Mothers, specifically 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. Hence, when a mother is working full time during the day and must come home to perform the majority of the domestic work, this is her "second shift".[27] 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?[28] Even those who can balance work and family life face some difficulties. This includes a variety of high-funded daycare options, jobs with little flexibility for missing work to care for a sick child, school schedules that are based on having a stay at home parent, and the assumption that mothers will work a "second shift,"[27] meaning they will still take on the majority of domestic labor (Hochschild 1989). To be clear, Hochschild doesn't “advocate a simple return to traditional motherhood.” Instead, she is pushing for more equality of roles in society: for both genders to share the responsibilities of home life, creating a more manageable balance for mothers.[29] On the twenty fifth anniversary of The Second Shift, Hochschild did an interview with the Washington Post about the impact and legacy of the book. She claimed that we are now in the "second stall" and that progress has been made. In the original book, Hochschild claimed that there are three stalls, what happens to men, what happens in the workplace, and missing government help. Hochschild said, "Today, I think we are in stall number two. There’s good news, there’s old bad news and there’s new bad news. And the good news, is that, the revolution continues and women are now half the labor force and they’ve moved up in it, they’ve earned more. And have gotten into more training, and broken ranks in a number of professions. And men have changed substantially. We’re all beginning to understand that the family has been a shock absorber of larger trends. And we’re finally seeing that these are not individual, private problems, but that they point to a larger cause."[30]

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."[31] However, 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."[32] 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. When she asked informants "Where do you get help when you need it?" or "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."[31] She found, handled this strain in several ways. One way 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.[31] 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.[33] 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 the family."[34]

Hochschild goes on to “suggest that the flight into work is coerced at least as much as it is voluntary.” Because of a pervading feeling of dissatisfaction in home life, and a greater sense of home being given at work, Americans have taken refuge in their work more than ever before.[29] Hochschild described a friend on maternity leave who felt that her time at home with her newborn was at the expense of ‘sacrificing’ time at work. Furthermore, Hochschild acknowledges that this discontent with home life prompts more questions such as, “What kind of gratification do people get when they commit to the workplace as an alternative to the dissatisfactions of home life? And, why are people dissatisfied at home?” She does mention that one component could include the fact that contemporary managerial practices have started emphasizing a cohesive workplace family and a unified corporate culture”.[29]

Ultimately, Hochschild hopes for a society where “the desire to work doesn’t automatically trump the desire to raise children.” In order for this shift to occur, she argues, there is a need to challenge the culture of time as a measure of work commitment. This would involve a greater awareness of a variety of needs and preferences of working parents.[29]

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.[24]

Hochschild describes herself as politically liberal and religiously agnostic.[9]

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 the sense of being a stranger in one's land. These people have waited a long time to get what they want and now people are coming into America with more progressive beliefs and taking their possible chances away from them. In this situation, Hochschild believes the reward for this line is  a metaphor for the American Dream. Hochschild believes that the people living in this area are “insulated” in their ideas and beliefs. Similarly, the way the media depicts these people creates a strong narrative about them and their conservative beliefs (Zussman).[35]

In a 2020 OpEd for The Guardian, she proposes the concept of "emotional strategy"—a strategy of focusing primarily on emotion—which many politicians pursue as a minor part of an overall strategy, and others pursue as a central project.[36] She has added other "chapters" to the deep story that have occurred since 2016, which she relates in an interview Derik Thompson conducted with her in "The Deep Story of Trumpism" for the Atlantic Monthly.[37] She's suggested other ideas on politics through OpEds and book reviews.

Hochschild's work also describes the many ways in which each individual becomes a shock absorber of larger forces and focuses on the impact of these forces on emotion.

Looking again at Hochschild's concept of "global care chains," there have been more initiatives to feminize global migration with a concentration on these care chains.[38] (Hochschild 2000, 2002) When northern or Western women enter the paid labor market, they typically hire other women to care for their children and other dependents, most often what is considered a more poor woman from a developing country. Migrant caregivers are regularly forced to abandon their children in their home countries to be cared for by even destitute caregivers or family members who are already caring for others or working. The growth of global care networks has been impacted because of several reasons. In affluent countries, the entry of women into labor has resulted in high demand for paid domestic employees, with no corresponding increases in public childcare or gender-based distribution of extra requirements.

Hochschild critiqued the disengagement theory of aging. According to that theory, inevitably and universally, through disengagement, the individual experiences a social death before they experience physical death. This could be seen through an individual beginning to reduce the amount of "roles" they have in their life and society, leaving them with less obligations in their life, making it easier for them to accept a nearer death.[39] There are different "norms" of aging, she suggests, and ways of actually experiencing near-death and death. Specifically, Hochschild argues that the theory of disengagement itself is ‘unfalsifiable,’ partly because the conception or assessment of aging can vary based on the researcher and their constitution of aging. She also points out that a person’s age with implied relation to death and society’s stance towards disengagement is an independent variable, whereas the dependent variable is disengagement itself. In this way, the relation between age and disengagement can be modified.[40] In the low-income housing project she studied for her PhD Dissertation and later, The Unexpected Community, for example, the residents - a lively group of elderly midwestern women seemed to die un-disengaged, i.e "with their boots on." She even points out that “a higher proportion of women in their sixties actually have a larger "life space" than do those in their fifties.”[40] One example of this is that older women are more likely to see their children on the same or previous day than younger women, meaning they may have more opportunity for social engagement.[40] Across the world's cultures and sub-cultures, she suggests, groups and individuals differ in their ideals of aging. These various groups of people and individuals have differences in the feeling rules they apply to their experience of aging, dying and death. Thus leading to them all experiencing these phenomena, dying and death, differently.[41] However, it is important to note that she has considered the fact that disengagement has happened in all aspects of life thorough all time. She quotes "it must happen sometime in the individual's future if it is not happening now; it is also intrinsic, which I take to mean that social factors alone do not cause it".[39]

Through research and education on her various social theories, some students and sociologists have come to practice what they call "Hochschildian Sociology" in which they build on her ideas. This idea is reflected on within the book, At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging The Ideas of Arlie Hochschild, which is based on further exploring many of the sociological theories created by her. It has been noted before that Hochschild has done much to help engage and work with those who have been inspired to study her particular social theories further. As revealed in the book, "Hochschildian Sociology" works to analyze concerns within families, children, and "the private life". As well, it asks us to look at how relationships between people are shaped by our emotions and commitments to both our private and public lives, especially in consideration of the workforce. The influence Hochschild has over contemporary sociology can be proven by the fact that other sociologists look to create ways of thinking based on her own work.[46]

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell (1973). The unexpected community. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-936385-6.
• The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press. 1983. ISBN 978-0-520-05454-7.
• The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. Viking. 1989. ISBN 978-0-670-82463-2.
• The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Metropolitan Books. 1997. ISBN 978-0-8050-4471-3.
• The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. University of California Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-520-21488-0.
• —; Ehrenreich, Barbara, eds. (2003). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Metropolitan Books. ISBN 978-0-8050-7509-0.
• The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times. Metropolitan Books. 2012. ISBN 978-0-8050-8889-2.
• So How's the Family? and Other Essays. University of California Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-520-27228-6.
• —; Tronto, Joan; Gilligan, Carol (2013). Contre l'Indifférence Des Privilégiés: à Quoi Sert le Care (in French). Paris: Payot. ISBN 978-2-228-90877-1.
• Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press. 2016. ISBN 978-1-62097-225-0.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Rhiannon Williams. Coleen the Question Girl, Blurb, S.l., 2016. ISBN 9781367458970

Juvenile fiction

• Coleen the Question Girl. London, UK: Invisible Spaces of Parenthood. 2016. ISBN 978-1-367-45897-0. OCLC 1090643724.

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell (January–February 2017). "Great White hopes : why did the rural working class elect Trump?". The New Republic. 248 (1–2): 16–17.