Using the experiences of flight attendants, the author describes the stresses and effects of on-the-job "emotional labor". She also describes how dehumanizing such labor can be in an atmosphere of gender inequality, socioeconomic inequality, and the increasing rationalization of the workplace in the corporate pursuit of profits. An excellent and interesting read.

Fantastic work, great research...,great Subject, but need a follow up Book...to see how things are done now at DL...

the reviewer from North Carolina is a drunk - and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him-

Probably a first of its kind study about families with two-working parents. However, the writing is poor, redundant and cliched. The cases she presents don't suggest much variability except income and ethnicity. Additionally, she skimps on a serious evaluation of what would make a successful household with two working parents and instead leaves us with the overwhelming feeling that success is almost impossible.

Excellent examination of the Dual-Earner family and the changes this is causing to America's traditional familial structure. Hochschild brings attention to many of the tensions within the working family and discusses causes and solutions. Her idea of a stalled cultural revolution is riveting.

As a college-age male, one might think that I would have little reason to read a study about the struggles of working women. That is wrong.
This insightful, modest study of family life (witnessed by the capable Arlie Hochschild as a fly-on-the-wall) gives perspective on a dillemma everyone should think about before marriage: how to reconcile economic and personal needs with having children. This problem affects women and men, mothers and fathers.
Unfortunately, it is rarely talked about in our society. People are forced to muddle through using their parents as examples, or to try to construct new strategies from scratch. Hochschild provides a useful structure for discussing the problem and avoiding the emotional and marital cost of relying on "myths." Any serious couple should be able to talk about these subjects to avoid misunderstanding and conflict.
One problem with this book is the writing - the points do not always flow together, and sometimes the sentences are simply awkward. This study is also weighted toward middle class families, though it explores others as well. Despite being over a decade old, this book is still relevant.
Well worth reading, whether you are deciding on a career, getting married, or already trying to balance both.

Good books on work-family issues give us a window into the mind of the author, describe relevant issues in ways that make sense, and tell us what we can do to improve the world.  Great books do all of this, but also give us a glimpse into the author's soul, and leave us rethinking just about everything.  Arlie Hochschild's new book, "The Commercialization of Intimate Life," falls into the latter category.  That is does so is surprising: the book is a series of essays Arlie wrote over the span of three decades.  The key arguments from her most well-known books, The Managed Heart (1983), The Second Shift (1987), and The Time Bind (1997), all show up here, along with a piece on women, work and family in India, and her recent work on immigrant nannies and the children they leave behind in less-developed countries and those they raise in developed countries.  The toughest sledding are a couple of pieces that are critical of traditional sociology but help us see the grounding for Arlie's approach, and her relationship to traditional feminist thought as well.  That the word "approach" can be used in the singular for all of this work is amazing but accurate: the body of work is all marked by an understanding of work-family conflicts and their heavily gendered resolutions, along with a deep sense of caring about the adults and children involved.  The final essay, "The Clockwork of Male Careers," is one of the earliest, and a piece Joan Williams and I rediscovered with joy when working on our recent 'Half-Time Tenure Track' paper for "Change."  In the Clockwork piece, Arlie traces the dearth of women in academia to a male model of careers that leaves no room for family, but should.  As Arlie notes in an update at the end of the piece, the arguments unfortunately ring just as true now as they did when she originally wrote the piece in 1973.   I think that is accurate, but it is also true that far more of us are working today to make things better.  A must read!

This book was good for the first 40 pages but that's it. Hochschild gets across the interesting truth that some Americans work and don't spend time with their families because work is a reprieve from the stress of home and family life. This is really the crux of the book; the rest is mainly filler. Hochschild doesn't provide much more insight or scientific rigor and support to these observations. I agree with the above reviewer that the writing is quite poor: convoluted; however, I wouldn't even give the writing the compliment of being novel-like. The writing is trite and character placements a headache.

What can I say? Arlie Russell Hochschild says some interesting things about the state of the family unit in the 90s, but I just don't buy it. She writes pages and pages decrying capitalism and its corrupting influences after studying the employees at ONE COMPANY. If that seems credible enough for you, maybe you'll swallow this convuluted book. But even looking beyond her flawed argument, her writing style presents many problems. She writes not like she's presenting an intelligent sociological phenomenon, but like a novel already slated for the best seller list. And she provides case study after case study, in what looks like an attempt to bolster her thesis, but what turns out to be just boring. So try and skip chapters 5, 9, 10, 12, and 13. Actually, on second thought, just try and skip this book.

Summary:
The book is essentially a report of the findings of a 3-year qualitative study by the author, Arlie Hochschild, of a Fortune 500 company's 'family-friendly' practices. The author interviewed people in all tiers of the organization, conducted surveys, followed employees, and did participant observations to try to understand how the company's family-friendly policies were being implemented.

The result is The Time Bind. Though the company wants to give the impression that it is family-friendly, certain factors are working against the company actually living up to its policies. One is that for many of the managers at the company 'face time' or actually being at work is more important than actually doing anything at work. If your understanding of 'family-friendly' includes the possibility of working fewer hours, this is going to work against anyone that wants to participate in an hour reduction program.

Another thing that the author posits that is working against family friendliness is that companies are turning the work environment into a safe and comforting environment (though doing this actually covers up the temporariness inherent in companies) and in essence are replacing the home environment or turning the home environment into something more akin to what work environments have traditionally been seen as being (e.g. scheduling time for kids and spouses, running from one thing to the next, not being able to rest, etc.). The result is that many people actually want to spend more time at work then they do at home because they feel more relaxed at work then they do at home. (Read the book to understand this argument more fully.)

My Comments:
I think the book is great. Admittedly one could claim that the author is biased - perhaps she is a social democrat that hates capitalism and sees her efforts as a way of attacking capitalism. I guess that is a possibility. And it does lead to the one criticism I see in the book: Arlie Hochschild never openly states the perspective she brings to the table in exploring the ramifications of The Time Bind. At one point she does posit that children that are left home alone have a higher rate of drug and alcohol abuse than do kids that are not left home alone. So, I guess her bias does seep out through comments like that. But, for individuals that share her bias (which is probably most people), I think this book does a great job of illustrating that capitalism really does have some problems - one being the deemphasizing of the family and the focus on work instead. In this sense, I can't help but comment that perhaps Emile Durkheim, in claiming that the eventual dissolution of religious authority that lent solidarity to society would be replaced by the workplace, seems to find a home in The Time Bind.

Overall, the book is very well-written and engaging. The findings are presented using specific people and their stories which makes the book more like a morally laden collection of stories. But the scholarship does not appear to be influenced by the plight of the individuals. And, the author does not write this book at a scholarly level and fill it with sociological jargon. The book should be readable by anyone. I would highly recommend it.

Caveat:
There has been some follow up research done on Hocschild's theories about how the workplace has become more like home and vice versa. Most of the research says this isn't necessarily accurate. Though there could be some truth to this, the more likely cause of increased time spent working is due to managerial demands and more women working full time rather than people just wanting to be at work.

As the mother of five that relied on childcare during the many years of single parenting I think we tend to concentrate too much on the elite and their need for childcare. The notion that this childcare contributes to the foreign exchange is a little off base when in reality it contributes to an underground economy because the salaries are mostly off the books and taxes are not paid in any form. Safety issues also arise when you consider that most of the illegeal aliens caring for our children have never had childhood immunizations, and refuse the TB test. This may sound unimportant and nit picking but the reality is diseases we thought were erradicated like whooping cough can be traced to the unimmunized worker. Leaving your children behind to take care of mine is something we as a nation should give more thought about.

...Nevertheless, this book gives the reader valuable insight into the impact and opinions of women migrant workers in the service trades. All of the anthologized authors write in an accessible style free of academic jargon. I was particularly interested in the articles which did not have an American viewpoint and which presented the views of the women (and occasionally men) involved. For example, in various essays we get to meet Dominican women in the sex trade hoping to form relationships with European men; a college-educated Vietnamese women entering into an arranged marriage with an immigrant man holding an unskilled job in the U.S.; Filipina household workers laughing about the rules proposed by prospective Hong Kong employers; and a Sri Lankan man taking over the traditional woman's role to assist migrant relatives working in Saudi Arabia.

There are some gaps here, such as the lack of first-person narratives and the views of Eastern European women working in Western Europe, but no anthology can be all-inclusive. This book is a good start and will be an intersting learning experience for most readers.