Theory & Event

In my Introduction to Sociology course, I tell my students that even if they never take another Sociology course, I hope that the ability to be a critical observer of their own cultures will serve them well as they attempt to navigate their lives and make wise choices. I argue that the best sociological work can demonstrate how the central questions regarding who and what are important in a culture can often be “mined” from the minutiae of daily interactions. Next Fall, when I explore the promise of sociology with my students, I will use Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. The Commercialization of Intimate Life powerfully combines many of the highlights from the last three decades of Hochschild’s research and scholarship, through which she has examined how we produce, consume, and negotiate the emotional cultures of home and work. To her previous scholarship on familiar themes including emotional labor, the time bind, the second shift, and work/life balance, she adds new reflections on commodities, advice books, mother-daughter relationships, children’s eavesdropping, global economies of care, and gift exchange. While her data varies from advertisements and bibliotherapy to snippets of phone conversations overheard by children, each essay acts like a separate window into her central concerns about the care deficit in the U.S.

While these brief snapshots from her larger studies lose some of the rich ethnographic detail contained in her previous books, bringing together the heart of each of her studies in one volume enables her central concern about the commodification of care to emerge: With the majority of women and even mothers of young children in the workplace, who will do the caring work of our culture? In her now classic book The Managed Heart, Hochschild was the first to address what she coined “emotional labor.” Her study of the trained management of feeling among flight attendants and bill collectors enabled Hochschild to explore what she then defined as “an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward our native capacity to play, wittingly and actively upon a range of feelings for a private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations” (1983: 20). Whereas in her earlier books, Hochschild developed a language to identify how both feeling and time are transformed into commodities to be used in the service of capital, in The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she adds to those concerns a new attention to the problem of the “care gap”. Here Hochschild examines how the “stalled revolution” of gender inequality has allowed women entry into the workplace without significantly altering expectations about work and home, thus producing a gaping hole of care at home. She worries not just about young children, but also who will care for the elderly, and how to solve a growing care gap in rich nations.

Hochschild’s work can be mistaken for a polemic against women’s entry into the marketplace. In fact, it is just the opposite. She argues that “American culture incorporated what of feminism fit with capitalism and individualism, but it resisted the rest” (254). She is concerned that global capitalism has succeeded in commercializing even the most intimate, precious aspects of life. Creating homes where cost-benefit analysis, needs-reduction, and time shortages are the norm, global capitalism drives adults to look forward to work as a less Taylorized, less complicated haven from home. As workplaces develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to encourage employees to bring their “whole self” and their “real self” to work, intimate life suffers from workers who feel they have nothing left to give, be it to children, friends, or extended family. It is not that she is nostalgic for a time when women stayed home and did the work of caring, but rather that she tracks the pain and loss experienced by individuals as they try to make their way through these no...