emsenn

Arlie Russell Hochschild

3 min read

Arlie Russell Hochschild (born 1940) is an American sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work examines how emotions are managed, prescribed, and commodified within institutional and economic systems. Her concepts of emotional labor and feeling rules transformed the study of affect from a matter of individual psychology into a question of social structure and political economy.

Core ideas

  • Emotional labor: the work of managing one’s feelings to produce a publicly observable facial and bodily display as part of a job. Hochschild developed this concept through her study of flight attendants, who were required not merely to perform cheerfulness but to cultivate genuine warmth as a condition of employment. Emotional labor names the commodification of feeling — the extraction of affective output by employers who treat emotional self-management as a productive input.
  • Feeling rules: prescriptions from external systems for which emotions count as appropriate responses to given situations. Feeling rules are not personal preferences but social conventions with normative force — they tell people what they should feel and how much. Violating feeling rules produces guilt, confusion, or social sanction.
  • Emotion management: the active process of shaping, suppressing, or evoking feelings to bring them into alignment with feeling rules. This includes both surface acting (adjusting the outward expression) and deep acting (working to change the feeling itself).
  • The managed heart: the condition in which the boundary between authentic feeling and institutional demand becomes impossible to locate. When deep acting succeeds, the worker can no longer distinguish between what they feel and what they are required to feel.

Significance for this research

Hochschild’s framework is central to emsenn’s analysis of how knowledge production operates under conditions of commodification. In “Storytelling [stop] cop city” (2025-09-14), emsenn deploys feeling rules to show how Hannah Kass’s academic paper structures the dialectic of carceral state versus abolitionist resistance entirely through affect: grief and terror map to Cop City (necropolitics), while creativity and community map to resistance. Since Cop City was built and opened while repression succeeded, the feeling rules of each genre — abolitionist and juridical — allow incompatible narratives to coexist, both “true” because they match their genre’s prescribed affects. This is what emsenn calls industrial intellectualism: the conversion of thought into narrative products that perform the right feelings.

Notable works

  • The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983)
  • The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (1989)
  • Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016)
  • The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (2012)

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