Monday, April 16, 2007

Biography/Autobiographical Information/ Current Status/ Curriculum Vitae


Arlie Hochschild was born in Boston Massachusetts on January 15, 1940. Her father was Francis Henry a diplomat and her mother was Ruth Russell. Arlie married Adam Hochschild who is a magazine editor in June 1965 and has two children of her own, David Russell and Gabriel Russell. Dr. Hochschild also has one granddaughter as well, a possible muse for her children’s book, we can only suggest. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1962, her M.A. in 1965 and Ph. D. in 1969; she received both of these degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.
Hochschild grew up in a very gendered home, with her mother being the care taker and her father the breadwinner. Although her mother did more then be solely the homemaker wife, she also “volunteered for the PTA, and helped start a preschool program in Montgomery County, Maryland, all the while supporting my father’s career as a government official and diplomat.” (Hochschild, Commercialization, 3). From this experience of home life as a child, Hochschild drew on these experiences to enable her to do research and write about care giving and having the caring relationship with your children. She explains to us in the introduction of her book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, that her mother was very good one and she devoted her life to caring for the family and was great at it, but never really seemed happy to be doing so.
Politically she is “liberal” and religiously she is Agnostic. She is a member of the American Sociological Association, the Sociologists for Women in Society, the American Gerontological Society, the American Federation of Teachers, Sociological Research Association, and lastly, the International Association for Research on Emotion.
After reading parts of her books and her thoughts on her research and others reactions to her books, I feel that Hochschild takes her research and findings and uses them to shape how she leads her own life and how she provides care for her own children and grandchildren as well. Being able to draw on her own experiences in life, gives her passion for what she is researching next and you can see it in her writings as well. This passion and interest that she has is what makes her books so relatable to the readers.
She is currently both a writer and a teacher. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz as the assistant professor of Sociology from 1969 to 1971 and at the University of California, Berkeley where she is currently the professor of sociology from 1983 to now, but before that she was the assistant professor from 1971 to 1975 and then associate professor from 1975 to 1983.
““Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is one of a privileged breed, an academic with a popular following,” wrote Suzanne Mantell in Publishers Weekly.” (galenet, 4). Her writings about the “second shift, and the “time bind” may both be a result of her own personal life and the results of her trying to juggle both success and family. While she was beginning at the University of California at Berkeley, Hochschild was the mother of two children and was probably struggling with trying to make it in “a man’s world” and being a good mother at the same time.

The Way Arlie Hochschild Became an Academic

The three writers that Hochschild refers to as opening her eyes to sociology were: “Erving Goffman, David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd), and C. Wright Mills (Power, Politics, and People, and White Collar.)” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). She later tells us that when she got to Berkeley in terms of the feminist movement, it was “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan; The Second Sex and The Feminist Mystique were important texts, but they were only the match that lit a kind of fire, an intellectual fire, that very much influenced my thinking.” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610).
When she first got to Berkeley there was not much to study about on women, so she started thinking, “what if sociology was shaped not around just the lifestyles of men but of women...Are you just comparing father and son or mother to daughter or father to daughter?...” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). This type of thinking got her into a whole new realm of learning and teaching. Although she claims that it was really the first three theorists that were the started her on this path, it was really when she “got to Berkeley and participated in really what was a collective rethinking…that was very influential for me.” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). When asked the question, “When did you become a feminist, do you think?” Hochschild responded by saying, “Oh…age three. I had an older brother who was very much favored in the family.” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). Along with this Hochschild also remembers her mother telling her that, “Well what the girls do is just as important as what the boys do.” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). Hochschild believes that it was this statement that struck a cord within her and began her thinking on sociological level. “I think I was a sociologist already at a very young age-that there were underlying realities that you had to expose to live-to understand what’s happening to you. So very early…” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610).

Dr. Hochschild's Teaching

In the course of her teaching at the University of California, at Berkeley Arlie Hochschild has received two awards for her teaching abilities there. They are: Distinguished Teaching Award for the Division of Social Sciences 2000-2001, University of California at Berkeley (August 2001). This award is to recognize the ability of some teachers to go above and beyond the call of duty and inspire. “Such teaching rises above good teaching: it incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning, and has a life-long impact.” (http://teaching.berkeley.edu/dta.html).
In a recent interview, Dr. Hochschild commented on her career as a teacher and referred to teaching as “…has been for me a calling; it’s not a job.” (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610). It is nice to see those professors that like to teach and are proud of what they are teaching and want to actually teach it and get their knowledge out there. Dr. Hochschild is one of these professors that truly enjoys what she does and desire to teach other about her findings and spread her knowledge around. In the same interview Hochschild comments on Nancy Chodorow’s writings, saying that they are great and that although much of her work, Hochschild’s work, is not ”psychoanalytic in the sense that [Chodorow’s] work is,” Hocschild desire to one day develop that area of her writings as well. (http://www.genderonline.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2007010610).

Community Action or Involvement

Besides being a very influential sociologists and bringing to the field many concepts and phrases that are becoming the focus of study in many classrooms, Hochschild may also be seen as an activist. She feels very strongly that women do need to be more involved in the work force and do so higher up in the businesses. She is also a strong activist for a mother’s right to be able to balance equally her job that earns an income and her job of being a caring mother, as well as a homemaker. Along with her strong stance on the above issues, Dr. Hochschild has been the director of the Center for Working Families since 1998.

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.

Dr. Hochschild's Accomplishments

Dr. Hochschild is a woman of many talents; at least that is what I gather from her many awards, publications and honors she has received. She has three Honorary Doctor of Philosophy degrees, from three different colleges, one in Denmark and another in Norway. Hochschild is also the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Social Sciences department. “Such teaching rises above good teaching: it incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning, and has a life-long impact.” (http://teaching.berkeley.edu/dta.html). Along with that distinguished award she has also received the Outstanding Teacher Award at Berkeley as well. To tag another one up, related to UC Berkeley, she was also inducted into the Outstanding Women at UC Berkeley Hall of Fame in 1995.
The American Sociological Association, the association for which Hochschild was nominated twice as a Candidate for the Presidents position, also awarded her two awards. One of these awards was the 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Sociology of emotions section. The second award was and award for her Public Understanding of Sociology, which she received a year earlier than the Lifetime Achievement award. “The Public Understanding of Sociology Award is given annually to a person or persons who have made exemplary contributions to advance the public understanding of sociology, sociological research, and scholarship among the general public.” (http://www.asanet.org/page.ww?section=Awards&name=Public+Understanding+of+Sociology+Award)
On a more personal professional kind of level, Dr. Hochschild is the author of 6 published books and of over 40 published articles. Hochschild has also spoken nationally and internationally well over 50 times. To me it sounds as if she could not possibly fit another thing into her schedule, but she finds a way and is a member of the Sociological Research Association and the International Association for Research on Emotion as well.
Two of her four academic books, The Managed Heart and The Second Shift were both “named notable social science books of the year by the New York Times Book Review in 1983 and 1989 respectively.” (http://socsic.colorado.edu/SOC/SI/si-hochschild.htm).
More privately, if you may consider this an accomplishment, Arlie is married and has two children of her own. She is also the author of a children’s story, so we can see that Dr. Hochschild has a knack for teaching young one’s as well.
Theses are just a selected few of Dr. Arlie Hochschild’s achievements, distinguished awards and honors. To see more of her accomplishments visit her school website at: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/hochschild/cv.htm

Interesting Facts


Arlie is the author of many well noted books, even more articles and essays, yet there is one book that she is not necessarily known for writing. This book is a children’s book, Coleen the Question Girl, which she wrote in 1969. From this information we can only assume that this book is a result of her experience with motherhood in raising her own daughter. Much of what Hochschild writes about is from her personal experiences. For instance she was a mother of two trying to make it as a University teacher, which at the time was very much a male dominated field.
She is also known for coining many catch phrases that are used in today’s sociological field. Some of these phrases are: “emotion work” or “emotional labor”, “second shift” and “time bind” are a few of the phrases that Hochschild is known for inventing and using.