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Arlie Russell Hochschild

b. 1940

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Many jobs require us to manage and sell our feelings, like the flight attendant’s smile – and working women often face a second shift of housework at home.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · North America · Society & History, Gender & Feminism

Coined the concept of “emotional labour”: feelings are managed according to social rules and sold as part of a job – and at home, working women do a “second shift”.

Key ideas

  • Emotional labour
  • Feeling rules
  • The second shift
  • Global care chains
  • Empathy wall and deep story

Teachers: Erving Goffman

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Influence

Influenced by 3

  • Karl Marx

    influenced by

    Hochschild opened The Managed Heart (1983) with Marx’s child worker in Capital: as factory work estranged workers from their labour, emotional labour can estrange them from their feelings. A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983); K. Marx, Das Kapital I (1867)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Karl Marx › 1818–1883

  • C. Wright Mills

    influenced by ✓

    Hochschild started from Mills’s ‘personality market’ in White Collar (1951), where salespeople sell their personality, and studied how such emotional labour is managed (The Managed Heart, 1983). A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983); C. W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

    Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata

    C. Wright Mills › 1916–1962

  • Erving Goffman studied with

    studied with

    Hochschild studied sociology at Berkeley (MA 1965, PhD 1969) and names Goffman among the teachers there she was privileged to work with; The Managed Heart (1983) builds on his dramaturgy. Classroom teaching, not supervision. UC Berkeley, Department of Sociology, alumni page “Arlie Hochschild (1962)”; A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Erving Goffman › 1922–1982

Influenced 1

  • Eva Illouz

    influenced

    Illouz built on Hochschild’s feeling rules and emotional labour (The Managed Heart, 1983) to describe how capitalism and intimacy shape each other (Cold Intimacies, 2007). E. Illouz, Cold Intimacies (2007); A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Eva Illouz › b. 1961

Works

  • 1983The Managed Heart

    Flight attendants and debt collectors are paid to produce feelings: “emotional labour” turns the management of one’s own emotions into a commodity.

Position

Hochschild helped found the sociology of emotions on the insight that feelings are not only private states but are shaped by social rules. In The Managed Heart (1983), based on research with Delta Air Lines flight attendants and with bill collectors, she showed that many service jobs require “emotional labour”: workers must produce a feeling in others – calm, trust, fear – by managing their own. “Feeling rules” prescribe what one ought to feel at a funeral or a wedding, and we comply by “surface acting” or, more deeply, by changing the feeling itself. When the company owns the smile, workers can become estranged from their own emotions, much as Marx’s factory workers were estranged from their labour. The Second Shift (1989) found that employed mothers in dual-earner couples still did most of the housework and childcare – a “stalled revolution”. Later she followed care across borders in “global care chains”, in which migrant women look after children in rich countries while others look after their own children at home. In Strangers in Their Own Land she tried to climb the “empathy wall” between liberal and conservative America by reconstructing the “deep story” – the story as felt – behind people’s politics.

Life & context

Arlie Russell Hochschild was born in Boston in 1940. Her father was a diplomat, and she later recalled wondering, as a child at her parents’ receptions, whether the diplomats’ smiles were real. She studied international relations at Swarthmore College and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where Erving Goffman was among her teachers, and took her doctorate there in 1969. After teaching at Santa Cruz she returned to Berkeley in 1971 and taught there until her retirement; she is professor emerita. She is married to the writer Adam Hochschild. Beyond academic sociology she has reached a wide public: Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), about Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Further main works

  • The Second Shift (with Anne Machung, 1989)
  • The Time Bind (1997)
  • Strangers in Their Own Land (2016)
  • Stolen Pride (2024)

Appears in

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

As of November 2026 · Sources · Improve this page · How Agora is made

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