Pathways to Empathy: New Studies on Commodification, Emotional Labor, and Time Binds (Arbeit und Alltag, 6, Band 6) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 359339894X ISBN 13: 9783593398945

Verlag: Campus Verlag, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Arbeit und Alltag

Beiträge zur ethnografischen Arbeitskulturenforschung

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 government―outside of its military function―can 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 trends―the 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 powerful―and as yet under-theorized―impact 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 turns―in the absence of government services―to 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.com―picking 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 feel―happy, anguished, sad―we encounter rules about how much to feel―or 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 anxiety―he is too detached, alienated―and 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 spheres―market, 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 contributions―literally in the sense of “paying tribute to”―demonstrate 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 attachment―care, empathy). She thus provides a connection with her detailed studies on the commodification of life in contemporary societies, and simultaneously assumes a changed perspective on them. Her mapping out of the borderlands between alienated and fulfilling lives calls forth the “credit” side of our lives―that which makes up for what commodification sometimes subtracts. Hochschild thus introduces us to a central antagonist who, in everyday life, can be against the depersonalizing effects of commodification.

Empathy is part of human nature, and we may feel it even in the heat of conflict. The feeling can be strong or mild, laced with ambivalence or pure. And there is a “sociology” to empathy. Some social categories of people feel it more than others―women more than men, for example. And we differ in aim―some social groups empathize with the poor, others empathize with the rich. Some cultures provide feeling rules that promote wide-spread, race-blind, empathy. Others don’t. Hochschild shows that the links to commodification are far more multi-faceted and contradictory than we might first assume. In her paper, she maps out a landscape full of pathways which individuals may take on their way to achieving a wide-zone marked for empathy with many others. Without ignoring or downplaying the constraints placed upon individuals by the rules of the post-Fordist world, she also points to a way forward and to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Campus Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 359339894X
• ISBN 13: 9783593398945
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 213
• Herausgeber: Koch Gertraud, Everke Buchanan Stefanie
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Beltz Verlagsgruppe GmbH & Co. KG; info@campus.de; ; Werderstr. 10; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland