International Workshop in Honour of Arlie Russell Hochschild, UC Berkeley

Working Cultures at the Crossroads of Emotion, Commodification and Globalisation Debating Spaces of Resistance and Boundary Work

12. /13. November 2011; Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen

[Download Program_Workshop with Arlie Hochschild]

In this workshop, we hope to explore answers to the series of questions, beginning with the following:

What is the impact of the free-market zeitgeist on modern life in Europe, the U.S. and parts of global South?

Across Europe and the U.S, over the last decades, we have heard an ever louder call for an expansion of the market, reduced regulation, and shrinking of government services. To many, the market can do no harm and the government – the civilian wing, at least – can do no good. And, since the l970‘s, we have witnessed a corresponding shift in fact– the rise of global corporate giants, the reduced power of labor unions and increased cooptation of governments. To be sure, market forces have risen along side other trends — the rise of science and bureaucracy, for example, (Tord Larsen 2011) which leave a similar but distinct mark on general cultural discourse, on the words people use to describe relationships to oneself and others, feeling rules and emotion management, paid and unpaid. (See Lofgren 2006 on meta-narrative). Taken as a whole, the free-market zeitgeist has produced a powerful – and as yet under-theorized – impact.

Through what personal standpoints do we experience the expanding market?

As workers, the pre-Fordist employee is now the post-Fordist “entre-ployee”. As such, he or she assumes risks and lives with insecurity like an entrepreneur, but works for others, like an employee. As consumers, the individual who once turned to family and friends to meet personal needs now turns – in the absence of government services – to the market.( ie to babysitters, eldercare workers, for pay dating-services, life coaches). As private individuals, the individual often draws from a market-colonized culture, ideas and images of the self (“personal brands.”)

To what degree does the market envelop the self?

The role of worker often encompasses nearly the entire self — body, mind and heart. And this has two sides (Moldaschl & Voss 2002: Hochschild l983, 2002). On one hand the worker can sometimes bring to work her ideas, tastes, habits. On the other hand, the work- place can exercise great influence over all these. And personal life itself draws from images pervading the market. (Illouz 2007)— though there are limits to market influence as Collin Williams shows (2005.)

How does the impact of the market differ by social class?

As workers, consumers, private individuals, the impact of the market is one thing for the rich, another for the middle class and yet another for the poor. Since the l970s, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and it is the poor who most absorb the cultural contradictions of market individualism. On one hand, life on the market is life at the mercy of powerful and unpredictable trends. On the other hand, one‘s personal fate is now understood as the result of one‘s own actions.

What are the personal “terms of engagement” with the market?

To what degree, does the individual ―draw a line‖ between self and the myriad everyday manifestations of market culture? By what feeling rules does he or she say, ―I will be emotionally attached to this.‖ But I will be ―detached from that‖? That is, in addition to rules about what to feel – happy, anguished, sad –we encounter within our selves rules about how much to feeling anything at all. Given these rules of attachment and detachment, what emotion work does an individual perform in an effort to abide by the rule?

Sometimes at a certain point in an interaction — an individual will encounter a moment of anxiety – he is too detached, alienated — and he will counter it using various “mechanisms of defense.” (Hochschild 2012). At other times, in the quest for efficiency, he sometimes finds himself “too emotionally attached.” (―I don‘t need to be best friends with the babysitter or have drinks with the dog-walker” one respondent told Hochschild.) It is through our various personal “rules of engagement” Hochschild argues, that we “regulate capitalism from inside.”

What ultimate damage is done by the cultural dominance of the market? In the realm of ideas, habits and wider arrangements of structure, what solutions hold promise?

It is the purpose of this conference to explore the complex forces of commodification and the many ways we embrace it, resist it and “muddle through”. We aim to delineate the practices – from childhood on – by which the individual asserts the un-alienated self, and the public discourses available for trying to seem that way. We aim to theorize the collective strategies by which we might achieve a better balance of social spheres—market, governmental, civic, personal, and so articulate an alternate cultural world in which to assert a humane self.