The child of diplomats, Hochschild early became fascinated with the boundaries people draw between inner experience and outer appearance. As she writes in the preface to her book, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling,

Hochschild earned her M.A. and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she later became a professor. With her husband, writer Adam Hochschild, she raised two sons. As a graduate student at Berkeley, Hochschild read the writings of C. Wright Mills. In White Collar, Mills argued that we "sell our personality." This resonated with Hochschild, but she felt that more needed to be added. As she writes,

Hochschild starts with the thesis that human emotion and feeling—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—is, in large part, social. Each culture, she argues, provides us with prototypes of feeling which, like the different keys on a piano, attune us to different inner notes. Tahitians, she points out, have one word, "sick," for what in other cultures might correspond to ennui, depression, grief or sadness.

Culture guides the act of recognizing a feeling by proposing what's possible for us to feel. In The Managed Heart Hochschild cites the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who writes that the Czech word “litost” refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief—a constellation of feelings with no equivalent in any other language. It is not that non-Czechs never feel litost, she notes; it is that they are not, in the same way, invited to lift the feeling out and affirm it—instead of to disregard or suppress it.

Apart from what we think a feeling is, Hochschild asserts in The Managed Heart, we have ideas about what it should be. We say, "You should be thrilled at winning the prize" or "you should be furious at what he did." We evaluate the fit between feeling and context in light of what she calls "feeling rules," which are themselves deeply rooted in culture. In light of such feeling rules, we try to manage our feelings—i.e., we try to be happy at a party, or grief-stricken at a funeral. In all of these ways—our experience of an interaction, our definition of feeling, our appraisal and management of feeling—feeling is social.

This perspective led Hochschild to propose the idea of "emotional labor"--the effort to seem to feel and to try to actually feel the "right" feeling for the job, and to try to induce the "right" feeling in certain others. In The Managed Heart Hochschild shows that flight attendants are trained to manage both passengers' fear of turbulence and their own upset at cranky or abusive passengers. She illustrates the process by which bill collectors are trained to restrict compassion or liking for debtors. As the number of service jobs grows, so too does the amount of emotional labor performed.

Increasingly, Hochschild argues, emotional labor is going global. In her essay, "Love and Gold," she sets the concept of emotional labor in a larger political context. She describes a South-to-North "heart transplant" as immigrant care workers from such countries as the Philippines and Sri Lanka leave their young, their elderly and their communities in the poor South to take up paid jobs caring for the young and elderly in families and communities of the affluent North. Such jobs call on workers to manage grief and anguish vis-a-vis their own long-separated children, spouses, and elderly parents, even as they try to feel—and genuinely do feel—joyful attachment to the children and elders they daily care for in the North.

"Is an emotion a resource like gold or ivory that can be extracted from one place and taken to another?" Hochschild asks. Rich countries indeed do "extract" love from poor ones, she concludes, in the broad sense that they are taking caregivers away from the South and transferring them to the North. But what is extracted, she argues, is the emotion a person has partially displaced, in the psychoanalytic sense, from its original object (her own baby left behind) onto another (the baby she is now paid to care for). That displaced love is then further "produced" and "assembled" in Los Angeles or Athens, or elsewhere in the rich North, with the leisure, the money, the ideology of the child, the intense loneliness and the intense sense of missing her own children. Thus, Hochschild argues that love is gold but the gold is created through a social alchemy which blends a pre-modern childhood (as lived in rural areas of the Philippines, Thailand, India) and a post-modern American ideology of intensive mothering and child development, with the loneliness and separation of migration. In "Love and Gold," Hochschild shows us a way of seeing the emotion of maternal love through the lens of global capitalism.

Other of Hochschild's books apply her perspective on emotion to the American family, which is still stuck, she proposes in The Second Shift, in a "stalled gender revolution." (Most mothers now do paid work outside the home; that is the revolution. But the jobs they go out to and men they come home to haven't changed as rapidly or deeply—that is the stall.) Hochschild explores how couples divide up the emotional as well as physical work of making home feel like home. She traces links between a couple's division of labor and their underlying "economy of gratitude." Who, she asks, is grateful to whom, and for what, and how is gratitude influenced by the external "rate of exchange" for male help at home?

In The Time Bind, Hochschild studied how couples working at a Fortune 500 company fared in their efforts to expand family time, and explored a major contradiction that their lives expressed. On one hand, nearly everyone she talked to expressed the deeply held feeling that "my family comes first." On the other hand, given the lack of family time, absence of community and kin support at home, and a strong and alluring culture at work, working parents felt the pull of cultural magnets that worked in the opposite direction. Hochschild finds that in about a fifth of families, it was at work and not at home that the person felt most competent, most appreciated, most supported ( i.e. could get help with mistakes) and even most secure. Their values pulled them one way, while cultural magnets pulled them in another. Meanwhile, Hochschild noted, working parents dealt with this contradictory pull between values and magnets through the deployment of various strategies. One was the strategy of “emotional asceticism,” the curtailment of emotional needs; another strategy was to permit personal needs and hire others to meet them; a third was to develop a "potential self"--an imaginary self one would be if only one had time. Hochschild argues that these strategies were ways in which families absorbed the emotional strains of a stalled revolution, without altering the conditions that caused those strains.