Arlie Russell Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild (; born January 15, 1940) is an American professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally.

She is the author of ten books, including Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press, September 10, 2024), which explores life in a struggling Appalachian town, and focuses on the appeal of right wing populism -- and "emotional capture"- to those who've suffered loss of jobs, respect and hope. The book was chosen by Barack Obama as one of his ten "favorite books of 2024." Since the book was published, Hochschild has continued to check in with her informants to see how they are responding to the Trump presidency. She has also hosted a roundtable discussion among these diverse informants to promote productive engagement across the political divide. Stolen Pride is a follow-up to her last book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a New York Times Bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. Journalist Derek Thompson described it as "a Rosetta stone" for understanding the rise of Donald Trump.

In these and other books, she continues the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills by drawing links between private troubles and public issues. In drawing this link, she has tried to illuminate the ways we recognize, attend to, appraise, evoke, and suppress—that is to say, manage—emotion. She has applied this focus to the family, to work, and to political life. Her works have been translated into 17 languages. She is also the author of a children's book titled Coleen The Question Girl, illustrated by Gail Ashby.

Biography

Early life and family background

Arlie 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. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild says that her first experiences reaching out and getting to know people different from her stem from her own childhood idea that she was "daddy's helper" (probably not an idea he shared, she later reflects).

She married Adam Hochschild in 1965 and they have two sons, David and Gabriel. In 1964, she and Adam were civil rights workers in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Education and academic career

Hochschild graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962 with a major in International Relations.

Emotional labor has gone global, she argues. 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. Hochschild describes such a pattern as a global care chain.

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 have and the men they come home to haven't changed as rapidly or deeply as she has; that is the stall. 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." However, 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?" for some 20 percent the answer was "at work." For them, "family becomes like work and work takes on the feel and tone of the family."

In an interview with the Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild describes how capitalism plays a role in one's "imaginary self"—the self we would be if only we had time.

Disengagement theory

In her earlier work, 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. But in the low-income housing project she studied for her PhD Dissertation and later published as The Unexpected Community, she discovered among the lively group of elderly residents a culture of continued engagement. When they died, it seemed, it was "with their boots on."

References

External links

Arlie Russell Hochschild page at UC Berkeley
Biography in Context
The Outsourced Life (NYTimes.com: May 5, 2012)
Key Pedagogic Thinkers
Emotional Labor Around the World: An Interview with Arlie Hochschild
What Drives Trump Supporters?: Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild on Anger & Mourning of the Right
Arlie Russell Hochschild on "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the America" Part 2
"The Homes in Dorian's Path are in a High-Risk Area. Why Do They Cost So Much?" (The New York Times, September 4, 2019)
"How the White Working Class is Being Destroyed" (The New York Times, March 17, 2020)
When a Pandemic Strikes Americans Who Are Already Suffering (The New York Times, March 20, 2020)