Arlie Russell Hochschild

Disengagement Theory: A Critique and Proposal

This article examines the central theory in the sociology of aging-disengagement theory. It asks why the last decade of research bearing on it has been so inconclusive. The answer, the author suggests, lies (a) in the overlooked flaws in its underlying logic-the escape clause problem, (b) in the overly inclusive nature of its central variables-the omnibus variable problem and (c) in the level of reality it selects for study-the assumption of meaning problem. These three problems appear not only in disengagement theory but in much of the later research bearing on it. In an attempt to avoid these problems, the author sketches an alternative theory. This theory redefines disengagement and proposes new structural determinants of it.

Global Care Crisis A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons?

More and more of the worlds migrants are mothers who leave their families in the villages of the South to take up jobs caring for families in the North. Most current research on this trend focuses on the conditions of work that such migrant mothers face in the North or on the children she leaves in the South, understood as a rearrangement of roles in the family. Here, the authors call for a macro-analytic theory of the effect of such migration and consider two alternate views. According to one, the care of children in the South involves a transfer of “social capital” from South to North. According to the other, it involves a more fundamental erosion of the “commons” of the South by the markets of the North. The latter, the authors propose, best captures the full nature of this important hidden injury of global capitalism.

A Review of Sex Role Research.

This article describes four types of research on sex roles done in the last decade. The first type deals with sex differences, notably those reflected in measures of cognitive and emotional traits. Its theoretical focus is on the nature-nurture debate. The second type deals with sex roles as reflected in behavior and norms and draws on role theory. The third deals with women as a minority group and draws on minority group theory. The fourth, the politics of caste, looks at the sexes from the perspective of power. The article examines the different intellectual roots, questions, and data involved in each type and discusses the possible implications for sociology.

Rent a mom and other services: markets, meanings and emotions

In this essay, the author explores the impact of commercialisation on emotional life. She considers three approaches to the topic - theories of modernisation, of cultural variation and of capitalist encroachment. Drawing elements from each, she outlines what amounts to a preface to a sociology of emotions approach to commercialisation.

The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump

The day before the Louisiana Republican primary in March 2016, I watched Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 descend from the sky at the Lakefront Airport in New Orleans, Louisiana. Inside the crowded hangar, Elton John’s ‘‘Rocket Man’’ was playing. Red, white, and blue strobe lights roved sideways and up. Cell phones snapped photos of the blond-haired candidate as he stood before thousands waving and shaking signs that read MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. A small, wiry man bearing this sign with both hands, eyes afire, called out to all within earshot, ‘‘To be in the presence of such a man! To be in the presence of such a man.’’ There seemed in this man’s call, I wrote in my field notes—part of a five year ethnographic study of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana—a note of reverence, even ecstasy (Hochschild 2016:224). How do we understand the states of mind and situations of those to whom Donald Trump appeals? How does such emotional appeal work? Whatever Trump’s future, he has touched a cultural nerve we sociologists need to study. In this essay, I explore illuminating works in and around sociology before venturing an interpretation of my own. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the historian Richard Hofstadter (1996) traced the relationship between paranoid political rhetoric and ‘‘style of mind’’ as these periodically emerged in the United States through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The leader expressing such a style, he says, ‘‘does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . . This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes’’ (p. 31). Propelling such movements, he argues, is not just economic deprivation as narrowly conceived, but the loss of an older America, inward-turned, Protestant, secure, busy turning the wheel of a thriving local capitalism. As one of the original so-called birthers (who questioned President Obama’s place of birth and religion) and as one who has extended this suspicion to Hillary Clinton’s religion, Donald Trump fits in Hofstadter’s ‘‘paranoid style.’’ Still, Trump’s appeal reaches far beyond the style of mind through which it is expressed. Updating Hofstadter, the excellent The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (2012) takes an orchestral view of a wide array of forces, both predisposing and precipitating. The ferment of social class and status discontent, the Fox TV effect, the post-2008 bailout, highly upsetting to many, the financial backing of the oil billionaires David and Charles Koch—all these have led to the rise of the Tea Party. Part of supporters’ discontent, moreover, derives from their unsuccessful struggle for recognition—a key fact of social life noted by Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth (1995). In follow-up research on the power of Koch funding, Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (2016) take an

Stability and transformation in gender, work, and family: insights from the second shift for the next quarter century

Arlie Hochschilds The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home argued that the revolution toward gender equality in the USA has been stalled due to three factors: (1) women continue to do most of the ‘second shift’ – the unpaid work of childcare and housework; (2) insufficient flexibility in the workplace for accommodating family caregiving needs; and (3) a deficit of public sector benefits, such as paid parental leave. Since the books publication in1989, many aspects of the gender structure (how gendered opportunities, barriers, and cultural meanings are socially structured in the USA) remain the same. Yet many aspects have changed. This article looks at areas of stability in the gender structure and areas of transformation in the past quarter century. We then plumb the book for the analytical insights it generates for scholars today. We discuss how deep-seated cultural understandings of gender infuse all levels of analysis: macro-level policies, family and work institutions, and personal experiences of gender, intimacy, and moral commitments. These insights help illuminate paths forward for new research on how new economic developments, including economic insecurity, flexibilization (the increasingly reliance on temporary and contract labor), and the widening social class divide, continue to affect intimacy at home.

MAKING IT: MARGINALITY AND OBSTACLES TO MINORITY CONSCIOUSNESS

I should like to discuss not what makes a woman successful but rather, how being successful makes her feel less like other women. This was not stressed in the autobiographies we have read here. On the contrary, they often focused on their lonely migration into the male world of the physical sciences, and on the men who encouraged or discouraged them along the way. But in entering a male culture, they have left behind if not the female role (they are all wives and mothers), at least the female culture. This difficult transition creates personal problems that, to the women’s movement, are social issues, and at the same time it leads many professional women to reject the women’s movement. For example, in her autobiography one architect notes: “Now unwillingly, I seem to be part of the Women’s Liberation Movement, a fact that I resent because I refuse to be bunched up under the heading ‘women’ and then see all the things I must be or do. . . .” In this she speaks for many professional women. Her feelings may be in response to a mo7ement leadership ahead of its time, or a response to the media’s focus on the trivial (e.g. bra burning), or to the necessity in any social movement of dealing with people in categories. But I also have a feeling that something else is going on, something that could explain why the very women who are most likely personally (or through peers, almost personally) to suffer prejudice and discrimination, often resist thinking of women as a minority group.

Invited commentary: Can emotional labour be fun?

Can emotional labour be fun? Of course, but not in broken care systems. In understaffed, hyper-bureaucratised facilities, maintained by migrant workers torn from their families, where care itself is rendered invisible, it is harder to enjoy emotional labour. Indeed, a broken system calls for a secondary form of emotion work – dealing with how the broken system makes you feel.

Response to Reviewers

Responses in yellow. In addition we are providing, as requested, diff.pdf, which shows the differences between the file originally submitted and the one newly submitted here. This document answers to the editor’s request to include the following item when submitting our revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled ‘Response to Reviewers’.

The back and forth of market culture

Over the last half century in the USA and Europe, market culture has come to prevail over realms of life formerly governed mostly by norms of community and family. Is that true? Yes and also no. The exciting essays gathered here point both to the advance of market culture and to the revolts against it. To be sure, new paid services have appeared, calling for specialized forms of emotional labor that hardly existed when I wrote The Managed Heart – paid on-line dating services, life coaches, commercial surrogate mothers, potty trainers, eldercare managers, rent-a-friends, for example. And linked to these services or not, market-oriented ways of imagining relationships are alive and well. But as Andres Wittel suggests, ‘commodification can hit the wall’. And as these essays so richly show, it does so through a wide array of push-backs. Some occur in a lively spirit of resistance, others in a spirit of creating alternatives. But each push-back expands the cultural space in which we can express the values of civic, community and family life – giving and sharing the un-bought and un-sold, in what Hyde (2007) calls the ‘spirit of the gift’. Take push-backs expressed as resistance, for example. Paul Brook describes worker ‘communities of coping’ in which workers ‘goof off’. They misbehave. They sabotage. Some do so behind the back of management; others openly. In Soviet Russia of the l970s, I was told, some anonymous worker in a boot factory famously nailed the high heel of a woman’s shoe to a pair of men’s work boots. Through such forms of mockery, play, or sabotage, workers seemed to say, ‘production and profit aren’t all that matter; we’re human beings, too, you know’. In his essay, Orvar Löfgren describes a similar spirit of resistance in the realm of consumption. In Swedish homes and communities of the l960s and 1970s, he notes, an anti-commercial ethos arose – spear headed by the rising middle class. A culture of second-hand furniture, dressing down, reflecting what my father – referring to my own dress in the USA at the time – called ‘conspicuous under-consumption’. This informal – and financially freer – life style of the l970s, Löfgren observes, inspired businesses of the l990s to scavenge through past decade’s artifacts – such as washed-out blue jeans and retro furniture – to refashion and sell. So a rise of commercialism was met by a popular revolt against it, and a commercial response to – or we might even say revolt against – that popular revolt. Push-backs appear in other forms as well. Those who create and join in free-use digital communities are acting in the spirit of creative alternative-building. To be