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.[4] 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 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. Afterwards 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, conveyed 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?"[5]

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 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."[6]

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 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.[7]

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.[8]

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.[8] 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."[9] She explains that framing rules are the "rules governing how we see situations"[10] and how they "point to the cognitive, meaningful, and interpretive frame within which feeling rules are situated."[11] 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."[12]

Emotional expression and management are learned in the private sphere, then later through participation in public life.[13]

"Emotional labor" refers to the management of one's feelings and expressions based on the emotional requirements of a job.[8] 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.[8] As the number of service jobs grows, so too does the amount and number of kinds of emotional labor. In the era of COVID-19, she argues, many front-line workers do the emotional labor of bracketing heightened anxieties about their own health and that of their families while dealing with the fear, anxiety and sometimes hostility of the public.[14]

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'".[15] 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. [16] 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."[17]

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."[18] Who, she asks, is grateful to whom, and for what?[18]

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."[19] 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."[20] 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." [19] Parents, 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.[19] 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.[21] 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."[22]

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. [15]

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. In an 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.[23] 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.[24] She's suggested other ideas on politics through OpEds and book reviews.

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.

• Coleen the Question Girl. London, Great Britain: Invisible Spaces of Parenthood. 2016. ISBN 978-1367458970.