Arlie R. Hochschild

Arlie Hochschild

Arlie R. Hochschild

Professor Emerita
Curriculum Vitae
Research Interests
Family, market culture, global patterns of care work, social psychology with a recent focus on the relationship between culture, politics and emotion.

In a follow-up to her 2016 book on the rise of the right (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right), Arlie Hochschild's most recent bookStolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press, September 10, 2024)—takes her readers to Pike County, Kentucky. There, in the nation's whitest and second poorest congressional district, she finds residents facing a perfect storm. Coal jobs had gone and a deadly drug crisis had arrived. And in 2017, a white nationalist march was coming to town—a rehearsal, as it turned out, for the deadly Unite the Right march soon to take place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Once at the political center of the country, the district voted 80% for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. In this book, Hochschild asks why this big shift took place. For a full answer, she offers the reader a lens on the relationship between politics, shame, and pride.

In other writing—such as her 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times—she interviewed child and eldercare workers, internet-dating assistants, wedding planners, even a "wantologist." Her 2013 So How's the Family and Other Essays is a collection which includes essays on emotional labor—when do we enjoy it and when not?—empathy, personal strategies for handling life in a time bind, and the global traffic in care workers.

Earlier work has been based on field work among older residents of a low income housing project (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform "emotional labor" (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a culture of workaholism (The Time Bind), and Filipina nannies who've left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman). Her work is available in 16 languages.

For activities, honors, and awards, please see her curriculum vitae (link above). For a brief introduction to her basic approach, please see the Spring 2008 issue of Contexts

 

Recent interviews

 

Recent book reviews

 

Recent op-eds

 

Representative Publications
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Cover image showing a dilapidated two story white house on a hill, overlooking an Appalachian town . It is twilight, and there is smoke issuing from the chimney of the house.

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (2024)

Description

Forthcoming: September 10, 2024

For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to an overlooked and powerful human feeling: pride. In Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press), Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Donald Trump has turned lost pride into stolen pride and channeled the pain of loss and shame into blame. She describes the emotional narrative through which Trump appears to "liberate" his followers even as he reveals his intention to undermine democracy "on day one."

Hochschild's research drew her to Pike County in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where its residents faced a perfect storm. The county was reeling: coal jobs had left, crushing poverty persisted, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region more powerfully than anywhere else in the nation. Although Pike County had been in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district's population voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild's brilliant exploration of how the town reacted to a 2017 white nationalist march through towna rehearsal for the deadly Unite the Right march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just fourth months latertakes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.

Stolen Pride offers an original contribution to the national conversation on bridging divides and healing our nation.

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Book cover showing an oil refinery in the hazy distance

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016)

Description

In Strangers in Their Own Land , the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou countrya stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets, among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accidentpeople whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.

Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dreamand political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in "red" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: Why do the people who would seem to benefit most from "liberal" government intervention abhor the very idea?

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Book cover showing a girl with a question mark above her head

Coleen The Question Girl (2016)

Description

"Coleen was born with a question in her mouth..." This children's book was first published in 1974 when Arlie Hochschild, sociologist and author, was the mother of a three year old. In 2016 it was rewritten, newly illustrated, and republished by Invisible Spaces of Parenthood. 

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Book cover depicting a child's drawing of a six-person family

So How's the Family? And Other Essays (2013)

Description

In this collection of thirteen essays, Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life.
 

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Book cover with image of three puzzle pieces printed with bar codes

The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (2012)

Description

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations. But here, drawing on hundreds of interviews, Hochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire, often transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.

Read a review here, and an excerpt here.

 

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Book cover reading "The Commercialization of Intimate Life"

The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes From Home And Work (2003)

Description

This book gathers some of Hochschild's most important and widely read articles in one place together with new work. Each chapter reflects the complex negotiations we make day to day to juggle the conflicting demands of love and work. Taken together, they are a compelling, often startling, look at how our everyday lives are shaped by modern capitalism. 

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Book cover reading "Global Woman" with a partial image of a woman's face

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2002)

Description

Co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich, this volume explores the mass labor migration of women around the globe, easing a "care deficit" in rich countries, while creating one back home.

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Book cover reading "The Time Bind"

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997)

Description

When The Time Bind was first published in 1997, it was hailed as the decade's most influential study of our work/family crisis. As she shows in her new introduction, the borders between family and work have since become even more permeable. The Time Bind stands as an increasingly important warning about the way we live and work.

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Book cover with an illustration of a woman in business attire, holding a baby and juggling a briefcase, a cooking pan, a laptop, a cleaning bucket, and a birthday cake

The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (1989)

Description

Over thirty years ago, Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with her bestselling book, The Second Shift. Hochschild's examination of life in dual-career households finds that, factoring in paid work, child care, and housework, working mothers put in one month of labor more than their spouses do every year. Updated for a workforce that is now half female, this edition cites a range of updated studies and statistics, with an afterword from Hochschild that addresses how far working mothers have come since the book's first publication, and how much father we all still must go.

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Book cover showing overlapping illustrations of a red heart, a blue dollar sign, and multicolored cogs

The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983)

Description

In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. But what occurs when emotion work and feeling rules are introduced into the public world of work? Here Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. Hochschild argues that we have not appreciated the occupational hazard of emotional laborestrangement from what one actually feels, the very means through which we are connected to those around us.

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Book cover showing a highly stylized illustration of a hand holding a cane, against an orange background

The Unexpected Community: Portrait of An Old Age Subculture (1973)

Description

In this book, Arlie Hochschild paints an ethnographic portrait of the older residents of a low-income housing project. Through descriptions of their vibrant communitya mutual aid society, a source of jobs, an audience, a sanctuary, and a subculture with its own customs, gossip and humorHochschild suggests an alternative to both the quietly devastating isolation of old age, and private and individual solutions to what is a public and collective problem.

Representative Publications

        Published Articles and Chapters

2016 "The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump," Contemporary Sociology, Vol 45, Issue 6, pp. 683-689.

2016 "How the 'Great Paradox' of American politics holds the secret to Trump's success," The Guardian, September 7.

2016 "No Country for White Men" in Mother Jones Magazine, September/October. 

2016 "The American Right: Its Deep Story," Global Dialogue, Volume 6, Issue 3 (September). 

2005 "Love and Gold" (expanded version) in Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges, edited by Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles and Margaret McFadden, London, Great Britain, Toronto, Canada.: Zed/Innana Books. This essay has also been translated into French by Laurence Bachmann for Nouvelle Revue Feministe (2004), reprinted in Sciences Humaines. It has also been translated into Polish by Znak, vLVII i6, 2005, pp. 41-63.

2004 "Let Them Eat War," European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counseling & Health, Volume 6, no 3, December, pp. 1-10. Also reprinted in William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, Voices of Dissent (forthcoming).

2004 "Through the Crack In the Time Bind: From Market Management to Family Management" in The New Work Society, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Jens Tonboe, Copenhagen, Denmark: Hans Reitzels Publisher (in Danish).

2004 "The Commodity Frontier," in Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs: Essays in Sociology, edited by Jeff Alexander, Gary Marx and Christine Williams (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), pg 38-56.

2004 "Emotional Labour in Health Care: Who Takes Care of the Caretaker?" Chapter 5 of Enriching the Art of Care with the Science of Care: Emotional and Interpersonal Dimensions of Health Services edited by Laurette Dubé, Guylaine Ferland, and D. S. Moskowitz, Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, pp. 67-72.

Other

2008 "Feeling Around the World," Contexts, v7, n2, pp. 80-80. Reprinted in the Swedish Sociological journal, Sociologisk Forskning.

2005 "Feeling Capitalism: A Conversation with Arlie Hochschild: Conducted 5 May 2005," Journal of Consumer Culture, by Nicholas H. Wilson and Brian J. Lande, v5(3), pp. 275-288.

2001 "Eavesdropping Children, Adult Deals and Cultures of Care" in Rosanna Hertz and Nancy Marshall (eds.) Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp.340-353.

2000 "Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value," in On the Edge: Globalization and the New Millennium, edited by Tony Giddens and Will Hutton, London: Sage Publishers, pp. 130-146.

2000 "The Nanny Chain" cover article in The American Prospect, vol. 11 no. 4, January 3, pp. 32-36.

1993 "Inside the Clockwork of Male Careers, with a 1990s Postscript," Kathryn P. Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace (eds.), Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women 1952-1972, University of Nebraska Press, pp. 125-139.

1989 "The Economy of Gratitude," David Franks and Doyle McCarthy (Editors), Original Papers In the Sociology of Emotions, New York: JAI Press, pp. 95-113.