Arlie Russell Hochschild (born January 15, 1940)
Is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include: The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life and the co-edited Global Woman: nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy. The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the "Best Books of 2012." The last chapter was excerpted in The New York Times (May 5, 2012). Her latest book is So How's the Family? And Other Essays. Hochschild explores the many ways we manage our emotions in personal life and also perform emotional labor in the American workplace and around the globe (See Emotional Labor Around the World: An Interview with Arlie Hochschild).
Early Life
The child of diplomats, Hochschild early 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?"
