The Outsourced Self: A Book Talk with Arlie Hochschild

The Outsourced Self, a pathbreaking look at the transformation of private life in our for-profit world, is the latest book by Arlie Hochschild, Professor Emerita and famed author of bestsellers The Second Shift and The Time Bind.

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.

Arlie Hoschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.