Editing Arlie Russell Hochschild (section)

==Areas of research==
Using in-depth interviews and observation, Hochschild's research has taken her into various social worlds. She has written about residents in a low-income housing project for the elderly (''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]]''). She has also interviewed child and eldercare workers, internet-dating assistants, wedding planners (''[[The Outsourced Self]])'' and Filipina nannies who've left their children behind to care for those of American families (''Global Woman''). Her 2013 ''So How's the Family and Other Essays'' is a collection that includes essays on emotional labor—when do we enjoy it and when not?—empathy, and personal strategies for trying to have fun and “make meaning” in a life with little family time.

Her last two research projects have focused on the rise of the political right. ''[[Strangers in Their Own Land]]''  is based on five years of ethnographic research among Louisiana supporters of the [[Tea Party movement|Tea Party]]. 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 voters prefer politicians reluctant to regulate polluting industries? Her search for answers led her to the concept of the "deep story.” 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.

In her forthcoming ''Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right'', she locates herself in the nation's whitest and second poorest congressional district, where she finds residents facing a “perfect storm.” Coal jobs had gone. A tragic 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 rally|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. Hochschild explores a people's strong culture of pride and struggle with  unwarranted shame, and finds in this a lens through which to see politics in America today, and in many other times and places.

===Emotion in social life: Feeling rules and emotional labor===

Hochschild proposes that human emotions—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—are partly social. Each culture, she argues, provides its members 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. 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.

We don't simply feel what we feel, Hochschild suggests. We "try to" feel the way we wish to or think we should feel based on socially derived [[feeling rules]]. And we do this through [[emotional labor]]. For example, in [[The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling|''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, as well, are often trained to imagine debtors as lazy or dishonest, so they can feel suspicious and intimidating. As the number of service jobs grows, so too do different forms of emotional labor. In the era of COVID-19, she argues, many front-line workers 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.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Stix |first=Gary |date=2020-11-01 |title=Emotional Labor Is a Store Clerk Confronting a Maskless Customer |url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/emotional-labor-is-a-store-clerk-confronting-a-maskless-customer/ |access-date=2024-05-20 |website=Scientific American |language=en}}</ref>

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."<ref>{{Cite journal | doi=10.1177/0730888411418921|title = The Sociology of Arlie Hochschild| journal=Work and Occupations| volume=38| issue=4| pages=459–464|year = 2011|last1 = Wharton|first1 = Amy S.|s2cid = 145525401}}</ref>

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.<ref name="Wilson">Wilson, N. H., & Lande, B. J. (n.d). Feeling Capitalism: A Conversation with Arlie Hochschild. Sage Publications, Ltd.</ref>

=== 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.<ref name="Hochschild 553">{{Cite journal |last=Hochschild |first=Arlie Russell |date=October 1975 |title=Disengagement Theory: A Critique and Proposal |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2094195 |journal=American Sociological Review |volume=40 |issue=5 |pages=553–569 |doi=10.2307/2094195 |issn=0003-1224 |jstor=2094195|url-access=subscription }}</ref> 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."<ref name="Hochschild 553" /> Across the world, she suggests, individuals differ in their ideals of aging, in the feeling rules they apply to life, and may even differ in the very experience of death.<ref name="Hochschild 553" />