Just a note to say that I have an essay in the Wall Street Journal "Culture" section about good work and its effect on identity and private life. Although her name is not mentioned (as it was in a longer, earlier version of the essay that did not make it into print), it is Arlie Russell Hochschild and her theories about the commercialization of the family inspired the piece; in effect, I am responding to Hochschild's (and before her, Karl Marx's) writing, not from within sociology, but from the viewpoint of a practicing psychiatrist.

I am convinced that Hochschild is right, that the private sphere has been commercialized and the work sphere made (sometimes falsely) intimate. And surely Marx was on target: workers can be alienated from what they produce; and marriage suffers from its economic burden and its divisions of labor. But it also seems to me that capitalism evolves (Hochschild says as much) and that the modern workplace, at least for knowledge workers, satisfies some of the requirements of the "early Marx," providing good variety and interest on the job. As psychiatrists, we take the world as we find it. If the office or factory is now a place to learn the social skills everyone needs at home, then our patients can take advantage of that opportunity.