The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times - Hardcover

Hochschild, Arlie Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080508889X ISBN 13: 9780805088892

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2012

Synopsis

From the famed author of the bestselling The Second Shift and The Time Bind, a pathbreaking look at the transformation of private life in our for-profit world

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 this title

About the Author

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, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

In her best-selling books The Time Bind (1997) and The Second Shift (1989), Hochschild examined how working mothers and two-income families balanced their home lives with the demands of holding down a career. Here she takes a look at personal life in the Internet age, where the trend is to reach for market services to fulfill needs traditionally met by family, friends, and the community. From online dating services to RentAFriend.com, where members pay $24.95 a month to review prospective “friends,” our basic capacity to develop personal relationships is being commoditized and outsourced. Hochschild examines the effect of market forces on marriage, child rearing, counseling, caregiving, and even death, where large, national funeral homes are supplanting traditional, local funeral parlors with a more consumer-based approach. This is a thoughtful exercise in taking stock of the aspects of life that get devalued in a culture that promotes the belief that “the market can do no wrong.” --David Siegfried

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080508889X
• ISBN 13: 9780805088892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320