Love in the Time of Privatization

A professional engineer who applies project management strategies to her search for love; an event planner who designs weddings that pay tribute to the singular story of a couple’s romance, a story she will also write for them; a businessman whose firm suggests his wife and children complete a performance review of him as a parent to determine how he can be a better father—and therefore happier, and therefore more productive. These are the subjects of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s brilliant but flawed The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, a study of the commodification of family, friendship, and love that falls somewhere between scholarly analysis and pop sociology. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of party someone who specializes in “message platform and rebranding” would throw, read on.

Hochschild first coined the term emotional labor to describe the exchange of a socially desirable performance (“Just smile, honey”) for a paycheck. Her landmark 1988 work, The Second Shift, examined the stalled revolution that made employment outside of the home mainstream for American women while leaving them with the lion’s share of housework. A spiritual sequel to The Second Shift, The Outsourced Self is about the psychological and financial contortions that people go through to make the free market work in practice as well as in theory. Fortunately, it’s not the brooding misadventure in psychoanalysis that the title may suggest.