In private life we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotional work," just as we manage our outer expressions through surface acting. But what happens when this system of adjusting emotions is adapted to commercial purposes? Hochschild examines the cost of this kind of "emotional labor." She vividly describes from a humanist and feminist perspective the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an "occupational hazard" for one-third of America's workforce.
Arlie Russell Hochschild's most recent book The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, explores the many ways in which the market enters our modern lives. It looks at how we both turn to the market as a source of much needed help and also how we try to protect ourselves from the implicit emotional detachment it can involve. The book has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and was excerpted - "The Outsourced Self" - in the Sunday New York Times "Review" Section.
Her other books include: The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, The Unexpected Community and the co-edited Global Woman: nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy. In reviewing the Second Shift (reissues in 2012 with a new Afterword) Robert Kuttner noted her "subtlety of insights" and "graceful seemless narrative" and called it the "best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time." Newsweek's Laura Shapiro described the Time Bind as "groundbreaking." In awarding Hochschild the Jesse Bernard Award, the American Sociological Association citation observed her "creative genius for framing questions and lines of insight, often condensed into memorable, paradigm-shifting words and phrases." A retired U.C. Berkeley professor of sociology, she lives with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild in Berkeley, California.
