Drawing the Line

Cook lecture will feature sociologist Arlie Hochschild

Would you "rent a womb" to carry your embryo?

Pay a love coach to find you a girlfriend?

Hire a consultant to potty train your child?

Some might not. But, how about buying dinner at a restaurant? Hiring a sitter?  We all "outsource" some activities that used to go on at home.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild will speak about "Commercialization of Intimate Life" at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 3 in Room 423 of the ILR Conference Center.

The Fifth Distinguished Alice Hanson Cook Lecture is free and open to the public. It begins at 4:30 p.m.

The lecture is held in honor of Cook, an ILR professor known for her scholarship and activism in support of working women.

The rise of the two-job family, the increase in work hours and other issues leave most American families, Hochschild said,  asking "how much is too much?" and "when we draw the line, how do we do it?"

A sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, she is the author of "The Second Shift," "The Time Bind," "Global Woman" and "The Commercialization of Intimate Life."

Her lecture will focus on a trend Hochschild says has grown dramatically during the past 30 years – the expansion of the "personal service mall."

"We've long had a personal service sector.  What's new this time is the sheer growth of services, the specialization they reflect, our greater dependence on them and a dearth of viable alternatives to them," she said.

The market, she said, "is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it answers the needs of working women and their modern families."

"In another sense, it raises new dilemmas, by creating new needs, detaching us from activities we have long used to define 'who we are' and 'how we relate,'" Hochschild said.

"We all draw lines between what we reserve to do ourselves and what we pay others to do for us.  but we don't know how to feel about each line we draw," Hochschild said in an interview this month.

"Sometimes, people feel a little jittery, without quite defining why," she said, when hiring someone to visit an elderly parent or walk the dog.

Consider the baby shower gift vignette gathered by Hochschild in her research.

A woman purchased a pre-selected gift from an on-line registry.

"I didn't go to the store," Hochschild said, echoing the woman's words to her. "I didn't hold the object.  I didn't wrap it, mail it or visit the baby.  A month later, all I remembered is how much I paid for it."

The woman ended up feeling alienated from the act of giving a gift, so she bought another gift, drove to the baby's home and offered the gift in person to the baby's parents, Hochschild said.

"The very act of shopping helped her feels as if she was really giving a gift to the family.  She didn’t make the gift; she bought it.  But, she 'drew the line' at outsourcing the act of shopping itself," she said.

"Paradoxically, she needed to be more personally involved in the market to restore a sense of sacrifice that symbolically went 'beyond' the market," Hochschild said. "In modern life, we all draw such lines and perform a rich variety of acts to restore the connection between ourselves and our symbols of connection."

As noted by Adam Smith and Karl Mark, the extension of the market -- with its increased division of labor -- is the foundation of modern capitalism, Hochschild said.

But, capitalism doesn’t happen to us, Hochschild argues, drawing from other theorists.

"Rather, we weave it in and out of our lives.  In that sense, we 'do' the daily emotion work of capitalism.  In light of the current recession, we are also‘re-doing’ it," she said.

"How much we do this," Hochschild said, "… depends on how the society itself draws the line between market, government and the civic commons – a matter connecting political debate and personal life."