A professional engineer who applies project management strategies to her search for love; an event planner who designs weddings that pay tribute to the singular story of a couple’s romance, a story she will also write for them; a businessman whose firm suggests his wife and children comple­te a performance review of him as a parent to determine how he can be a better father — and therefore happier, and therefore more productive. These are the subjects of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s brilliant but flawed The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, a study of the commodification of family, friendship, and love that falls somewhere between scholarly analysis and pop sociology. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of party someone who specializes in “message platform and rebranding” would throw, read on.

Hochschild first coined the term emotional labor to describe the exchange of a socially desirable performance (“Just smile, honey”) for a paycheck. Her landmark 1988 work, The Second Shift, examined the stalled revolution that made employment outside of the home mainstream for American women while leaving them with the lion’s share of housework. A spiritual sequel to The Second Shift, The Outsourced Self is about the psychological and financial contortions that people go through to make the free market work in practice as well as in theory. Fortunately, it’s not the brooding misadventure in psychoanalysis that the title may suggest.

Hochschild is primarily concerned with the changing landscape and terms of service work — who does it, for whom, for how much, and why. Here, she takes the same documentary approach to market relations (what she calls “intimate life”) as she did to the study of the feminization of the labor force, using as a starting point not data but experience; the deceptively individual arrangements of everyday existence that, when assembled holistically, reveal the systemic contradictions at the heart of capitalism.