Arbeit und Alltag

Beiträge zur ethnografischen Arbeitskulturenforschung

Hg. von Irene Götz, Gertraud Koch, Klaus Schönberger und Manfred Seifert

Dreißig Jahre nach Arlie Hochschilds einflussreicher Studie »The Managed Heart« über die Folgen der Kommodifizierung von Gefühlen für das Individuum ist die Ökonomisierung des vormals Privaten weiter vorangeschritten. Ausgehend von Hochschilds Konzepten beleuchtet der Band Ökonomisierungsprozesse in Schule und Bildung, Familie und Pflege, Dienstleistungsbereich und Management. Es wird sichtbar, dass sich neben Entfremdungstendenzen auch Kreativität sowie Widerständigkeiten im Umgang mit diesen entwickeln: Statt sich determinieren zu lassen, werden Spielräume ausgelotet und Autonomiegewinne organisiert.

"Eine hervorragende Lektüre, die detailiert herausarbeitet, welche grundlegende Bedeutung der Gefühlsarbeit in modernen Arbeitswelten zukommt." Stephanie Schmidt, Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, 16.10.2014

Vorwort
Arbeit und Alltag Beiträge zur ethnografischen Arbeitskulturenforschung Hg. von Irene Götz, Gertraud Koch, Klaus Schönberger und Manfred Seifert

Autorentext
Gertraud Koch ist Professorin am Institut für Volkskunde/Kulturanthropologie an der Universität Hamburg. Zuvor war sie an der Zeppelin Universität tätig, wo sie von 2003 bis 2013 den Lehrstuhl für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Wissenanthropologie inne hatte. Stefanie Everke Buchanan, Dr. phil., ist dort wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin.

Leseprobe
Introduction: Getting There: From Impediments to Pathways to Empathy Gertraud Koch and Stefanie Everke Buchanan Across Europe and the United States of America, over the last decades, we hear an ever louder call for an expansion of the market, reduced regulation, and shrinking of government services. Indeed, in the eyes of many, the market can do no wrong, and the governmentoutside of its military functioncan do little right. Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the rise of global corporate giants, the reduced power of labor unions and increased co-optation of governments by business. To be sure, market forces have risen alongside other trendsthe rise of science, technology and a rationalization of life reflected in all parts of life (Larsen 2011; Löfgren 2006 on meta-narrative). Taken as a whole, the free-market zeitgeist has produced a powerfuland as yet under-theorizedimpact on our lives. As a worker, the pre-Fordist employee is now the post-Fordist entre-ployee. She assumes risks and lives with insecurity like an entrepreneur. But she works for a boss, like an employee. As a consumer, the individual who once turned to family, friends and church to meet personal needs now turnsin the absence of government servicesto market services, i.e., to babysitters, eldercare workers, for pay dating services, life coaches. As private individuals, we draw from a market-colonized culture, ideas and images of the self. The individual is adviced to develop a personal brand. The internet dater is advised to count his R.O.I, i.e., return on investment. All this takes place within a larger culture of blur between companies seeking to add emotional appeal to the goods and services they sell, and individuals who seek to draw useful tips for successful living from the market (Illouz 2007). Workers bring to work personal ideas, tastes, habits. And for its part, the workplace exercises great influence over every aspect of the private individual (Moldaschl and Voss 2002; Hochschild 1983, 2003; Sieben and Wettergren 2010). Arlie Hochschild has studied the impact of capitalist forces on intimate life in many ways and from many perspectives. Her work carves an important path between those who barely acknowledge capitalism at all, and those who acknowledge it but assume that its influence is always alienating. Especially in The Outsourced Self (2012), she describes a large and well-occupied space for resistance. Adapting Freud's notion of mechanisms of defense she describes the various semi-conscious means through which individuals work to keep personal life personal. A woman pays a love coach to guide her through the many small acts of looking for love on Match.compicking a photo to post, a subject line, a self-description, for example. But when the coach says, Shall I scan the replies you get on line she says, No, I'll do that, because when I find my true love I want to tell him that that it was I who found him. She purchases a whole service, but elevates one act to symbolize her un-outsourced self. Or a middle-aged daughter comes to love the caretaker she hires to care for her elderly, brain-injured father, and so loves the father through an empathic reach to a proxy caregiver. In these ways and more, people carve out ways to detach themselves from a culture of detachment so often connected to market life. They protect both their autonomy and sense of relatedness to others. In line with this new emphasis in Hochschild's perspective, the authors of these essays are interested in the contradictions, counter moves, resistances and the daily practices individuals use to cope with the promise and demands of the market. For indeed, there are limits to market influence, as Collin Williams shows (2005). 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? In addition to rules about what to feelhappy, anguished, sadwe encounter rules about how much to feelor even whether to feel anything at all. Given these rules of attachment and detachment, what emotion work does an individual perform in an effort to abide by this rule? Sometimes at a certain point in an interaction, an individual will encounter a moment of anxietyhe is too detached, alienatedand he will counter it using various mechanisms of defense (Hochschild 2011, 2012). At other times, in the quest for efficiency, he 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. It is the purpose of this collection to explore the complex forces of commodification and the many ways we embrace it, resist it and muddle through. We aim to delineate the strategies 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 spheresmarket, governmental, civic, personal, and so articulate an alternate cultural world in which to assert a humane self. This shift of perspective from impediments to pathways to empathy is the leading paradigm for the contributions in this volume. In their work, many of these authors have developed ideas about ways in which the individual counters commercialization and point to welcome and unexpected spaces of resistance. The contributionsliterally in the sense of paying tribute todemonstrate to how many areas the thoughts of Arlie Russell Hochschild have flowed over the past three decades, and show the wide variety of fields her work has influenced. The Contributions Leading into the topic, Arlie Russell Hochschild sketches Empathy Maps and develops a novel way of looking at ways in which we direct our empathy, zoning people in one area of life to receive much empathy, and those in another area of life, to receive little or any. While proposing a metaphor-driven idea we can apply to all spheres of life, it clearly applies to the division between commercial life (for which the cultural rule is emotional detachment) and personal life (for which the rule is attachmentcare, empathy). She thus provides a connection with her detailed studies on the commodification o…