The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private life—love, friendship, child rearing—is being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and original research, Hochschild follows the incursions of the market into every stage of intimate life. From dating services that train you to be the CEO of your love life to wedding planners who create a couple’s “personal narrative”; from nameologists (who help you name your child) to wantologists (who help you name your goals); from commercial surrogate farms in India to hired mourners who will scatter your loved one’s ashes in the ocean of your choice—Hochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.
Sharp and clear-eyed, Hochschild is full of sympathy for overstressed, outsourcing Americans, even as she warns of the market’s threat to the personal realm they are striving so hard to preserve.
About Arlie Russell Hochschild
Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of The Time Bind, The Second Shift, and The Managed Heart. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Her articles have appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, andPsychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.
Editorial Review
Hochschild (Sociology/Univ. of California, Berkeley; The Commercialization of Intimate Life, 2003, etc.) approaches her subject from three directions: her personal experience, the stories of providers of an array of services and the stories of people who sought their services. Some of the services, such as child care, have been around for a long time; others, such as online dating and wedding planning, are more recent inventions. The author examines every stage of life, from birth to death. Hochschild interviewed women who act as surrogate mothers for infertile couples, as well as those who hire others to bear children for them; she talked to a man who has made a business of scattering the ashes of the dead. She also looks at people who help women select a wedding gown, help a couple choose a baby’s name and teach a man how to become a better father. There are even “rent-a-friend” services. Perhaps the most surprising service that she uncovered is that of a wantologist, who “helps you name your goals.” Hochschild’s personal story, which she returns to from time to time, is a far more common one—that of trying to find the right care for an elderly ailing relative. The book, chock-full of quotes from the numerous people she interviewed, has a casual and at times almost gossipy feel, and the author gives short shrift to what all this means and how we are dealing with it. – Kirkus Reviews
Paying for Labors of Love - ‘The Outsourced Self,’ by Arlie Russell Hochschild
The New York Times Book Review – May 25, 2012 (Excerpt)
There’s one mistake I worry readers will make about this book, so let me correct it right away: “The Outsourced Self” is not a work of journalism. Though it isn’t exactly not one, either. I guess you’d call it popular sociology, but I think of it more as an act of mourning. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s look at how we meet some of our most personal needs with the aid of paid strangers doesn’t try to be exhaustive; goes light on figures and statistics; and, when itemizing the most outrageous advances in the market for love and care, never lapses into that magazine journalist’s tone of wry amusement.
By the time her book went to press, her reporting was probably outdated, anyway. Who can keep up? Love coaches, wantologists, therapy apps: these former absurdities are now normal. The next phase will surely include “sparking,” in which dating Web sites match customers according to DNA-based immunological profiles. As the chief psychologist at the eHarmony laboratory tells Hochschild, all he needs to do is figure out how to collect cheek swabs.
In any case, Hochschild isn’t really interested in the extremes of the outsourced life. She wants to know what it feels like to be caught in the middle of it. An ethnographic sociologist rather than a quantifier of social trends, Hochschild elicits thoughtful reflections from ordinary people. Then she uses those reflections to chart the confusing intersections between commerce and private life that we all have to navigate now that the purveyors of personal assistance have built strip malls on nearly every acre of our inner selves. Hochschild’s great subject is “emotional labor,” which we usually think of as the psychic work we do, voluntarily, for ourselves and our intimates, to keep our relationships and communities alive. But emotional labor, for her, is also the psychic work we do for pay, so that both we and our clients can gloss over the nakedly transactional aspect of the services on offer. Or it’s the work we do to tamp down our guilt and shame about contracting out undertakings we think we ought to do ourselves. Yet another form of emotional labor involves toggling between all the different kinds of emotional labor without being fazed by the self-alienation and contradictions involved. [Read the full article...]
THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL
