Hochschild's sociological theories
Through her work, Hochschild proclaims that human emotions—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—are, in large part, social. regarded and transmitted separately. culture, she argues, ensures us with prototypes of feeling which, like the different keys on a piano, attune us to different inner notes. She allows 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 Hochschild cites the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who writes that the Czech word "litost" referenced to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief—a constellation of feelings with no equivalent in all other language. it is for not that non-Czechs never feel litost, she notes; it is that they are not, in the same way, so-called to lift out and affirm the feeling.
Apart from what we think a feeling is, Hochschild asserts in , we have ideas about what it should be. We say, "You should be thrilled at winning the prize" or "You must be furious at what he did." We evaluate the fit between feeling and context in light of what she calls "feeling rules," which are themselves deeply rooted in culture. In light of such feeling rules, we attempt to render our feelings—i.e., we effort to be happy at a party, or grief-stricken at a funeral. In any of these ways—our experience of an interaction, our definition of feeling, our appraisal, and management of feeling—feeling is social.
In Hochschild's later work, she introduces the "concept of "framing rules", which give the context for feeling rules." She explains that framing rules are the "rules governing how we see situations" and how they "point to the cognitive, meaningful, and interpretive frame within which feeling rules are situated." An example that clarifies the relationship between framing rules and feeling rules would be:
"The norm that women should be at home is a framing rule, while the norm to feel happy about being at home or to feel guilty about being absent, is a feeling rule."
Emotional expression and management are learned in the private sphere, then later through participation in public life.
", Hochschild writes of how flight attendants are trained to domination 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 be intimidating. As the number of usefulness jobs grows, so too does the amount of kinds of emotional labor. In the era of COVID-19, she argues, many front-line workers will 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.
Hochschild also explores the opinion of ‘feeling rules’ and emotional labor as they relate to a collection of things sharing a common qualifications structure and how it can reform based on economic or social class. For example, she argues that middle classes families set up their children for emotion management more than working class families. Similarly, the level of emotion management taught in a family is often related to the type of job the parent holds. A bank manager, for example, which is typically a middle class job, might need more ‘feeling rules’ than a workings class job, which might instead involve more outside behavior, such(a) as assembling car parts. Overall, Hochschild argues that, “Given the general pattern of class inheritance, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things class tends to prepare its children with the skills necessary to ‘its’ type of work environment and to pass on class-appropriate ways.” In other words, middle class parents tend to try to control feelings, whereas works class parents tend to control behavior and/or consequences. Overall, the way in which we are taught to manage our feelings and emotions can depend heavily on our economic class and how we are raised.
Finally, Hochschild argues, emotional labor has gone global. 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 known 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. In an interview with Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild focuses on the emotional labor of female immigrants, "So you have women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and Mexico leaving their children and elderly late to take jobs caring for American, Canadian, Saudi, and European children and elderly. It was also non uncommon to hear nannies say, 'I love the kids I take care of now more than my own. I hate to say it, but I do'". "Extending from the eldest daughter in a rural village who takes care of siblings while a mother cares for an employer's children in the city of a poor country to that employer's employer—and children—in a rich country, outsourcing care work creates a global care office with a different emotional task at each joining of it." Hochschild coined the term global care chain to refer to "a pattern of women leaving their own families in development countries to care for the children of well-off families." These networks are created by the worldwide exchange of domestic services, which connect women all over the world. She connects her ideas about emotional labor to Richard Sennett's concept about "hidden injuries". Hochschild writes:
"The image of emotional labor—and of a sociology of emotions in general—helpsthe "hidden injuries," to quote Richard Sennett, of all the systems we study, including the latest versions of sexism, racism, and capitalism".
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." nearly 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 argues couples have implicit "gender ideologies" when they marry; the marital role that the women will take on the domestic duties within a home. Mothers, specifically working mothers end up doing the lion's share of the work—both emotional and physical—of tending the home, which leads her to feel resentment. Hence, when a mother is working full time during the day and must come home to perform the majority of the domestic work, this is her "second shift". 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? Even those who can balance work and family life face some difficulties. This includes a variety of high-funded daycare options, jobs with little flexibility for missing work to care for a sick child, school schedules that are based on having a stay at home parent, and the precondition that mothers will work a "second shift," meaning they will still take on the majority of domestic labor Hochschild 1989. To be clear, Hochschild doesn't “advocate a simple usefulness to traditional motherhood.” Instead, she is pushing for more equality of roles in society: for both genders to share the responsibilities of home life, making a more manageable balance for mothers.
In The Time Bind, Hochschild studied working parents at a Fortune 500 organization dealing with an important contradiction. On one hand, nearly programs she identified to told her that "my family comes first." She argues that working parents in the United States add in long hours at work not because "employers demand long hours nor out of financial need, but because their work lives are more rewarding than their home lives." For this reason, working parents feel a magnetic draw to work. For about a fifth of these working parents, she found home felt like work and work felt like home. Where she asked informants, do you receive assistance when you need it? Often thewas work. Where are you most rewarded for what you do, work or home? Often thewas work. One man told her, "When I'm doing the modification thing with my teenage son, chances are he's giving me hell for it. When I'm doing the right thing at work, my boss is clapping me on my back." She found, handled this strain in several ways. One way was to reduce their idea of what they needed. "Oh, I don't really need time to unwind." Another was to outsource personal tasks. A third was to build an imaginary self, the self you would be whether only you had time. The "time bind" refers to the lack of time parents had to themselves, the feeling that they were always running late, and the thought that they were confined to the limited hours of the day. Thus, in the "time bind" Hochschild denotes this paradox of "reversed worlds, in which family becomes like work and work takes on the feel and tone of the family."
Hochschild goes on to “suggest that the flight into work is coerced at least as much as it is voluntary.” Because of a pervading feeling of dissatisfaction in home life, and a greater sense of home being precondition at work, Americans have taken refuge in their work more than ever before. Hochschild described a friend on maternity leave who felt that her time at home with her newborn was at the expense of ‘sacrificing’ time at work. Furthermore, Hochschild acknowledges this discontent with home life prompts more questions such as, “What kind of gratification do people receive when they commit to the workplace as an choice to the dissatisfactions of home life? And, why are people dissatisfied at home?” She also does reference that one factor could put the fact that sophisticated managerial practices have started emphasizing a cohesive workplace family and a unified corporate culture”citation
Ultimately, Hochschild hopes for a society where “the desire to work doesn’t automatically trump the desire to raise children.” In cut for this shift to occur, she argues, there is a need to challenge the culture of time as a degree of work commitment. This would involve a greater awareness of a variety of needs and preferences of working parents.
In an interview with Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild describes how capitalism plays a role in one's "imaginary self". She explains, "Many workers put in long hours, and return home exhausted. They make different to television as a form of passive 'recovery' from work. In the four hours of television, they're exposed to thousands of amusing, fun advertisements. Those ads function as a conveyor belt to the mall. At the mall, they spend the money they've earned on objects that function as totems to a 'potential self' or hypothetical self – a self we would be whether only we had time". It is also a self in danger of being perpetually in emotional debt to loved ones.
Her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is based on five years of immersion research among Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party. It explores the role of emotion in politics by first posing a paradox. 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 they vote for politicians reluctant to regulate polluting industries? Her search for answers leads her to the concept of the "deep story." A deep story is a story that feels true about a highly salient feature of life. One takes facts out of a deep story. One takes moral precepts out of the deep story. What maintain is simply what feels true about a highly salient issue, and can be described through a metaphor, as the experience of "waiting in line" for a valued reward, and witnessing unwelcome "line-cutters." Everyone, she argues, has a deep story—and for many on the right, it reflects a keen sense of decline, the sting of scorn, and the sense of being a stranger in one's land. In a 2020 OpEd for The Guardian, she proposes the concept of "emotional strategy"—a strategy of focusing primarily on emotion—which many politicians pursue as a minor factor of an overall strategy, and others pursue as a central project. She has added other "chapters" to the deep story that have occurred since 2016, which she relates in an interview Derik Thompson conducted with her in "The Deep Story of Trumpism" for the Atlantic Monthly. She's suggested other ideas on politics through OpEds and book reviews.
Hochschild's work describes the many ways in which regarded and identified separately. individual becomes a shock absorber of larger forces and focuses on the affect of these forces on emotion.
Looking again at Hochschild's concept of "global care chains," there have been more initiatives to feminize global migration with a concentration on these care chains. Hochschild 2000, 2002 When northern or Western women enter the paid labor market, they typically hire other women to care for their children and other dependents, most often what is considered a more poor woman from a coding country. Migrant caregivers are regularly forced to abandon their children in their home countries to be cared for by even destitute caregivers or family members who are already caring for others or working. The growth of global care networks has been impacted because of several reasons. In affluent countries, the programs of women into labor has resulted in high demand for paid domestic employees, with no corresponding increases in public childcare or gender-based distribution of additional requirements.
She is a "liberal" in politics and an Agnostic in religion. She belongs to the American Sociological Association, the Sociologists for Women in Society, the American Gerontological Society, the American Federation of Teachers, the Sociological Research Association, and the International link for Emotion Research. and The Philosophical Society.
Hochschild critiqued the disengagement theory of aging. According to that theory, inevitably and universally, through disengagement, the individual experiences a social death before he or she experiences physical death. This could be seen through an individual beginning to reduce the amount of "roles" they have in their life and society, leaving them with less obligations in their life, making it easier for them to accept a nearer death. There are different "norms" of aging, she suggests, and ways of actually experiencing near-death and death. Specifically, Hochschild argues that the theory of disengagement itself is ‘unfalsifiable,’ partly because the conception or assessment of aging can vary based on the researcher and their constitution of aging. She also points out that a person’s age with implied explanation to death and society’s stance towards disengagement is an self-employed person variable, whereas the dependent variable is disengagement itself. In this way, the representation between age and disengagement can be modified. In the low-income housing project she studied for her PhD Dissertation and then book, for example, the residents - a lively multinational of elderly midwestern women seemed to die un-disengaged, i.e "with their boots on." She even points out that “a higher proportion of women in their sixties actually have a larger "life space" than do those in their fifties.” One example of this is that older women are more likely to see their children on the same or previous day than younger women, meaning they may have more opportunity for social engagement. Across the world's cultures and sub-cultures, she suggests, groups and individuals differ in their ideals of aging, in the feeling rules they apply to their experience of aging, dying and death, and in the experience of these. However, it is important to note that she has considered the fact that disengagement has happened in all aspects of life thorough all time. She quotes "it must happen sometime in the individual's future if it is not happening now; it is also intrinsic, which I take to intend that social factors alone do not cause it".