The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times by Arlie Russell Hochschild

The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times

Arlie Russell Hochschild

New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012

Reviewed by Maciej Musiał

The most recent book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, like her previous work, concentrates on the relationship between intimate life and the market or, in other words, between emotions and capitalism. The Outsourced Self is obviously a development in the field of sociology of intimacy and sociology of emotions; however, it may also be considered as an interesting diagnosis of contemporary western culture in general. In a similar fashion to her earlier books, The Managed Heart or The Commercialization of Intimate Life, in The Outsourced Self Hochschild investigates how deeply economic logic penetrates thinking about the family, love relationships and, as the title suggests, ourselves and our self-identities. In the following, some new results of Hochschild’s study as presented in The Outsourced Self will be analysed.

The book begins with an introduction, in which the author builds a contrast between two ideal types. The first one, the villager, is based on the memories of Hochschild’s family history from the beginning of the 20th century. The second type is drawn from the observations of contemporary culture, in which people have become outsourcers. By creating these ideal types of the villager and the outsourcer, Hochschild builds two contrasts. To be precise, the first is between the culture based on spontaneous help (the logic of ‘just do’ as the author puts it) and the spirit of a gift, whereas the second is built between the culture of calculated transactions and the spirit of consumption. The author differentiates the culture of personal relationships from the culture of economic transactions. Instead of the undermined community, people’s bonds have become relations of buyers and sellers, providers and consumers. Such a contrast seems to be a way of persuasion that the contemporary situation of relations between intimacy and capitalism is not as obvious as people – who easily ‘forget how quickly things that only yesterday seemed bizarre have become the norm today’ (p. 225) – believe it to be. As a matter of fact, Hochschild shows that contemporary intimacy is light years away from the intimacy of her great-grandparents’ generation, and that the basic difference is the way in which it is increasingly regulated by the market.

The main part of The Outsourced Self contains 14 chapters, each of them concerning a peculiar area in which villagers are gradually becoming (or sometimes have already become) outsourcers. The chapters also present specific ways in which the market invades intimacy. In each one Hochschild introduces particular situations of people she has interviewed. At this point it can be mentioned that the language and style of Hochschild‘s writing is outstandingly approachable and lively. All of the individuals are vividly characterized, and their appearance and personality are well presented. The book is also rich in descriptions of houses, gardens and other locations where the interviews and research take place. From the scientific point of view, these stylistic decorations may seem unnecessary or even unwanted; yet, on the other hand, the specific style makes the book accessible and potentially attractive for a ‘regular reader’. As a matter of fact, Hochschild’s mode of writing seems to be somewhere between formal and informal, and her language is also placed between scientific analysis and colloquial discourse.

Turning away from form and returning to the content, a closer look will now be taken at the chapters, where Hochschild argues for her main theses. One of them is, as mentioned above, that the market invades love life by the process of outsourcing, by hiring experts to help their clients deal with their intimate lives. Each chapter concerns a particular type of specialist in intimacy. It seems possible to distinguish two types of specialist. The first shows these experts as those who do some things that their clients cannot or do not want to do themselves. Such services involve wedding planning (chapter 2), kids’ party organization (chapter 7), childcare (beginning with nannies and ending with experts such as potty trainers, thumb-sucking specialists – chapters 9 and 10) or elders’ care (chapters 11 and 13). However, experts are needed not only to help to take care of children or the house, but also to guide people in how to take care of their own families. The latter is the second type of expert, the ones whose job is not to do something instead of their clients but to instruct them how to do it on their own.

The first type of specialist seems more obvious (though no less important); therefore, the second type is more interesting in terms of analysis. The first chapter of the book revolves around the topic of love coaches and dating via the internet. The sociologist tells a story of Grace, who decides to search for a soul mate on the web and hires Evan, a love coach whose task is to help her achieve her goal. Hochschild presents statistics which show the great scale of e-dating and the popularity of love coaching. In this light, Grace is not a kind of special case or a curious exception but an example of a wide phenomenon, which is still growing larger and stronger. In fact, a lot has been said about online relationships, especially about their dangers; yet Hochschild’s perspective seems innovative and original as she concentrates on the way in which economic logic invades love life. The first level of such an invasion is the language, especially the language of metaphors. Evan claims that searching for love is ‘like searching for a job’ (p. 24), and that the internet is a ‘love mall’ (p. 25). However, there are also further and deeper mechanisms, one of which is branding. Love coaches suggest that people should create their virtual images to attract as many viewers as possible. Their photos and their notes on the web should be the brand which will enable them to reach the appropriate target effectively. By an appropriate target Evan and other love coaches mean stimulating the interest of someone with the same or a higher rank. Rank is another mechanism of the market invading love. People who have their accounts on e-dating websites get marks that depend on their age, physical appearance, social status, number of children, etc. Therefore, a person who hires a love coach should observe the rise of his or her RoI (return on investment rate) (p. 27). RoI shows how many high-rank people have been attracted by one’s profile.

Although Grace does not get fully absorbed by branding, ranks and RoI ratings, and eventually her adventure with love coaching and e-dating is successful, Hochschild argues that economic logic makes people believe in dangerous illusion. In particular, one aspect of such an illusion is that there is always someone who will fully meet their expectations, just as there is always a product, be it a television set or a car, which will respond to one’s needs if one searches with enough precision. The sociologist states that people are ‘told to train their attention on finding – not making – connection. They were preparing to become consumers, not creators, of love’ (p. 41). Furthermore, Hochschild claims that, according to love coaches, creating a good brand, attaining a high rank and an effort to search is enough to achieve a successful relationship. Therefore, building up love is not as important as finding it, which, according to Hochschild, is a disturbing illusion that the market brings into thinking about love and intimate life.

Love coaching does not only involve interfering in one’s intimate life and implementing a market logic in it. An even more striking example of this process is the functioning of the company called Family360, which appears as a response to the success of Management360, a service that aims to improve the efficiency of big companies. As Hochschild puts it, ‘Family360 brings these ideas home’ (p. 132) by composing questionnaires for family members. They are designed to show the strong and weak sides of a rated person who, as a result, gains expertise through suggestions like ‘stimulate communication during dinner. Put preselected questions on (or under) the dinner plates of family members’ or ‘audit your family conversations’ (p. 133). For example, Peter’s intentions seem absolutely clear: he wants only to be a better father and husband, and to create happy memories in the heads and hearts of his family members. However, the means he chooses to achieve this goal, namely schedules, questionnaires and procedures, seem to be full of the aura of the market. Some people claim that the end justifies the means. Yet the results that are positive family memories that Family360 offers as one of their main products are not as obvious as they seem to be. At the end of the chapter, Hochschild raises a significant question: What will the memories of Peter’s kids be like? Will they contain moments of joy and happiness or rather a picture of a father constantly noting something down and handing out questionnaires?

Michael’s attitude is very similar to the approach of April, whose story is presented in chapter 6. April says: ‘I apply to myself the same logic my company applies to itself’ (p. 106). As a result, April believes that no one should ‘invest’ oneself in things that he or she is not good at (pp. 106–7). She sees family as a company that needs a professional management. As Hochschild claims, ‘April appeared to be bringing the corporate approach of defined goals to her mission of family management’ (pp. 107–8). Both Michael and April perceive intimate life as another task to be coped with. They hire professionals and try to become professionals themselves. Intimate life becomes a kind of work, a second shift which does not really differ from the first one.

The important leitmotif of The Outsourced Self is something that one may call, using the title of one of Hochschild’s essays, the commodity frontier. The sociologist observes that most of the people she has been interviewing draw a line that distinguishes the area of ‘normal’ outsourcing from an ‘exaggerated’ one. Most of the people feel that, at some point, outsourcing becomes out of line, over the top. For some this may mean hiring a nameologist to choose a child’s name, for others it can be something else. Yet Hochschild also presents cases in which it seems that no frontier exists. In chapter 13, with a significant title, ‘Anything you pay for is better’, the reader meets Rose, who does not want to draw a line. She believes that families cannot be happy by themselves, they always need some experts, and the more the better. In her opinion, help from a specialist is, in each case, better than a family member’s help.

At the end of the book, in the chapter entitled ‘The wantologists’, Hochschild summarizes the previous chapters and draws a radical conclusion suggested by the book’s title. She presents another kind of expert: the wantologist, whose task is to help people cope with their desires. In Hochschild’s opinion ‘existence of a paid “wantologist” indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?’ (p. 222). The disturbing question that the sociologist puts is whether a wedding organized by an expert is still a wedding of a bride and a groom; and, if so, is it theirs only because they have paid for it? Is a baby raised by nannies and taught by experts, a baby whose name has been chosen by a nameologist, still a baby of its parents? And what happens if a person hires a wantologist who decides about their desires? Does one’s self-identity really belong to oneself? Can one say ‘I am mine’ or maybe one should say ‘I am outsourced, therefore I am’? Villagers become outsourcers, the community and spontaneous ‘just do’ is replaced by the market and professional experts. Hochschild claims that the degradation of community and expansion of the market are interconnected in a very subtle way, namely:

[a] cycle effect gets going: The more anxious and isolated we are and the less help we receive from nonmarket sources, the more we feel tempted to fill the void with market offerings . … greater isolation results in greater demand for market services and professionals – life coaches, party planners, photograph-album assemblers – to fill in what’s missing. (p. 222)

In other words, degradation of the community creates confusion and loneliness and, consequently, the market becomes a form of therapy and escape. In particular, if one worries about something one hires a specialist, one feels lonely so one goes to a (love) mall.

To conclude, The Outsourced Self can undoubtedly be considered as an outstanding development in the field of sociology of intimacy and, probably to some extent, of sociology of emotions. It concerns phenomena ranging from love coaching, through marriage consulting to the, not mentioned above, surrogate service (chapters 4 and 5). However, Hochschild’s book is not only a research on contemporary intimacy but may also be interpreted as a diagnosis of contemporary society and culture in general. Hochschild earnestly presents the transition of the villagers into outsourcers. One could say that recently Habermas drew similar conclusions by writing about colonization of the lifeworld. However, the German philosopher has not shown how deep this process goes. It seems that he diagnosed this change mostly in the area of the public sphere, while Hochschild shows that it is invading deeper and deeper into people’s intimacy. She provocatively puts forward a question of whether there is any part of people’s lives that is really theirs, since people have decided to outsource almost everything. The sociologist also wonders if people are still self-conscious and autonomic subjects or only the products of external conditions, especially the market.

Despite all the valuable aspects of The Outsourced Self, the book also has some weak points that should not be ignored. The first issue is the lack of a theoretical approach. Although in The Managed Heart the sociologist creates an interesting theory of emotions, her recent books seem to be examples of a withdrawal from sophisticated theoretical accounts. The second drawback is that Hochschild strictly limits her dialogue concerning contemporary intimacy with other authors. It would be very interesting and stimulating to read her (probably critical) opinion of Giddens’ Transformation of Intimacy or (perhaps in a more approving tone) Bauman’s Liquid Love, not to mention the work of Eva Illouz, who – like Hochschild – is strongly interested in relations between emotions and capitalism. However, the above-mentioned factors (which for some people may not be issues at all) do not change the total value of The Outsourced Self. The book is still an important diagnosis of disturbing transformations in contemporary culture and helps in understanding the world in which human beings live.