Hochschild's Research

According to Hochschild, much of her current research is fueled by the “triumph of the market over so much else in life.” For example she is currently working on how the market shapes our personal identity. She has also made this a global issue in her current research and essay called “Love and Gold” that addresses is the issue of people who leave their homes and countries to care for children and elderly people of those in the U.S. Whatever research she is doing, Hochschild always keeps in mind the effects that the issue or problem has on people’s emotions. Much of her work and research deal with this particular aspect and is what she always keeps in mind when writing essays and/or books. (http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hochschild/index.htm)
Along with research how the market affects our identities and how people’s emotions are effected by all aspects of life, Dr. Hochschild also has done previous research on many other topics as well. For instance, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home and The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, are both books in which Hochschild addresses the issue of people allowing work to take over their lives and how work and the home connect and intertwine with each other. In researching and studying for The Second Shift book she found that most women who have demanding careers come home and continue to “work” by doing “about seventy-five percent of the housework in their homes and eighty percent of the child-care tasks in their families.” Along with this study she also studied the non-separation between work and home and the “imbalance of time allotted to work and family…” that is occurring so frequently these days. It is not the companies that are requiring people to be at work more or take home their work, it is the people that are failing to “take advantage of the company’s lenient policies intended to ease the strain of work on family.” http://0-www.galenet.com.library.uor.edu/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=redl79824&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=1&ste=6&tab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U14557139&n=10&docNum=H1000046077&ST=Arlie+Hochschild&bConts=2191
In another book of hers, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild deals with the issue of how people are essentially paid to suppress their feelings and emotions and sell “synthetic emotions as commodities” as part of their job. She researched the types of women that airlines hire and the way that they are required to play roles that require them to act rather than show their true feelings and emotions. Once again we see how people’s emotions are playing into Hochschild's research and areas of interest to do studies on.
Along with the multiple awards and honors that she has, Arlie has also been on the receiving end of many grants that support her research. One, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, was one that supported Hochschild’s research on “family-friendly policies in the workplace.” (http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hochschild/cv.htm). Another grant was the Ford Foundation Grant, which gave her support for her research on work –family policies. (http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hochschild/cv.htm).
In her review of Arlie Hochschild’s, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, Barbara Risman states that “Arlie Hochschild’s theoretical insights have shaped the sociological imagination of the late twentieth century.” (Risman, 1). Through this review we learn that Hochschild implies that the “social goes deeper than even many sociologists have imagined, shaping our very feelings of love, gratitude, and ourselves.” (Risman, 1).
As I am sure many other authors and researchers do, Hochschild draws on her own personal experiences in life to spark passion within her to decide what to write and research next. She draws on her life as a child and how her mother was the primary care giver in her family, and how at a young age she came to realize that her mother did very well in caring for her family, but never really seemed happy about doing so. This realization leads to her researching and eventually writing her book The Commercialization of Intimate Life. Using her personal experiences she dug deeper into the current problem of many mothers going into the work force and not being able to provide care for the families, and in a way being happy that they do not have to. Hochschild explains to us in the introduction of The Commercialization of Intimate Life, that “Less and less do we produce care. More and more we consume it. Indeed, increasingly we “do” care by buying the right service or thing.” (Hochschild, 3). By allowing herself to reflect back on her life as a child and having the strength to realize that her mother was a great caregiver, but was not particularly happy about it, gives her research and her book more life, making it more real and relatable for the reader.
Hochschild’s research and writings are important to both the fields of Women’s Studies and Sociology for many reasons. In the field of Sociology, Hochschild has been the pioneer for many of the concepts and theories we use and study today. The many concepts that she has introduced to sociology, such as “the second shift”, “the time bind”, “the stalled revolution”, “cautionary tale”, and “management of emotions”, to name a few, are relevant in many of the classes and courses taught on today’s campuses.
In Women’s Studies, she opened the door to studying the economic advantages and disadvantages of women in the work place. By Hochschild opening that door she is allowing us to learn more about our rights to equality in the work force, which in turn enables us to be agents of change and gives us the ability to continually strive to improve women’s status and rights within the work field.