Arlie Russell Hochschild (/ˈhoʊkʃɪld/; born January 15, 1940) is an American professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley[1] and writer.

Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally.

[5] In these and other books, she continues the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills by drawing links between private troubles and public issues.

[9] Arlie Hochschild was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Alene (Libbey) and Francis Henry Russell, a diplomat who served in Israel, New Zealand, Ghana, and Tunisia.

She has written about residents in a low-income housing project for the elderly (The Unexpected Community), flight attendants and bill collectors who perform "emotional labor" (The Managed Heart), working parents struggling to divide housework and childcare (The Second Shift), corporate employees dealing with a culture of workaholism (The Time Bind).

She has also interviewed child and eldercare workers, internet-dating assistants, wedding planners (The Outsourced Self) and Filipina nannies who've left their children behind to care for those of American families (Global Woman).

In her forthcoming Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, she locates herself in the nation's whitest and second poorest congressional district, where she finds residents facing a “perfect storm.” Coal jobs had gone.

Hochschild explores a people’s strong culture of pride and struggle with  unwarranted shame, and finds in this a lens through which to see politics in America today, and in many other times and places.

For example, in The Managed Heart, Hochschild writes of how flight attendants are trained to control passengers' feelings during times of turbulence and dangerous situations while suppressing their own fear or anxiety.

In her essay, "Love and Gold," in Global Woman she describes immigrant care workers who leave their children and elderly back in the Philippines, Mexico or elsewhere in the global South, to take paid jobs caring for the young and elderly in families in the affluent North.

In The Time Bind, Hochschild studied working parents at a Fortune 500 company dealing with an important contradiction.

"[14] In an interview with the Journal of Consumer Culture, Hochschild describes how capitalism plays a role in one's "imaginary self"—the self we would be if only we had time.

[16] But in the low-income housing project she studied for her PhD Dissertation and later published as The Unexpected Community, she discovered among the lively group of elderly residents a culture of continued engagement.