Pathways to Empathy

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.

Contents

Introduction
Getting There: From Impediments to Pathways to Empathy
Gertraud Koch and Stefanie Everke Buchanan

Foundations

Empathy Maps
Arlie Russell Hochschild

Family and Work Life

Caring for Young and Old: The Care-giving Bind in Late-forming Families
Nancy Konvalinka

Channeling Time and Energy into Work and Home: The Rationales of Americans and Norwegians
Jeremy Schulz

Time for Business?! Time Binds of Female Founders and Their Familial Origin
Caroline Ruiner

Labor Feelings

Selling Feelings for a Wage: A Labor Process Perspective on Emotional Labor Power, Its Indeterminacy and Incomplete Commodification
Paul Brook

From Emotional Labor to Interactive Service Work
Wolfgang Dunkel and Margit Weihrich

Feeling Rules-Unfound Treasures for the Study of Work Cultures
Gertraud Koch

Emotion, Body Work and Autonomy

Hairdressers as Managers of Well-being: A Multi-dimensional Perspective of Emotional Labor in the Service Industry
Sarah Braun

Emotional Labor and Body Work in a Nursing Home for the Elderly
Petra Schweiger

Being Creative with Time Binds: Solo-entrepreneurs Negotiating Work and Private Life
Birgit Huber

Taking on an Idea

Encountering Arlie Hochschild's Concept of "Emotional Labor" in Gendered Work Cultures: Ethnographic Approaches in the Sociology of Emotions and in European Ethnology
Irene Götz

Biographical Notes

Index

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

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

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

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 detac