Arlie Russell Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild was born on 15 January 1940. She received her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and her doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for many years and is now professor emerita. Her research shows that emotions are not merely private and internal; they are shaped and regulated by social, economic and cultural structures.

Her international reputation began with The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). Drawing on research among flight attendants and bill collectors, she introduced the concept of "emotional labor": the effort workers make to produce or suppress feelings so that they match what employers and customers expect. She distinguished between "surface acting" and "deep acting," and spoke of "feeling rules," the unwritten norms that dictate which feelings are appropriate in a given situation. In this work she drew on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and on Marx's critique of the alienation of labor.

In The Second Shift (1989, with Anne Machung), Hochschild studied the lives of working couples and showed that women, after paid work outside the home, also carry the burden of housework and childcare. The Time Bind (1997) asks why employees of a large company, despite flexible work policies, spend more hours at the workplace while home becomes a place of pressure. She also researched migrant care work and the concept of "global care chains," including in Global Woman, which she co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) grew out of several years of research in Louisiana. In it she developed the "deep story," an emotional narrative that each group constructs to make sense of its experience, and spoke of an "empathy wall" between political camps. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award. In Stolen Pride (2024) she examined the link between feelings of humiliation and politics in a rural region of Kentucky. Her other works include The Outsourced Self (2012) and The Commercialization of Intimate Life (2003).