Hvilken sociolog inspirerede Arlie Russell Hochschild under hendes kandidatstudie? 


Hochschild dimitterede fra Swarthmore College i 1962, hvorefter hun fik MA og Ph. D fra The University of California, Berkeley, hvorefter hun hurtigt blev ansat. Hun skrev sin første bog, The Unexpected Community, i 1973. Som kandidatstuderende var hun i høj grad inspireret af Erving Goffman og C. Wright Mills. I White Collar argumenterer Mills for, at vi "sælger vores personlighed". Dette gav genklang med Hochschild, omend hun følte, at der manglede at blive tilføjet noget, hvilket hun beskriver herunder: "Mills seemed to assume that in order to sell personality, one need only have it. Yet simply having personality does not make one a diplomat, any more than having muscles makes one an athlete. What was missing was a sense of the active emotional labor involved in the selling. This labor, it seemed to me, might be one part of a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system—a system composed of individual acts of 'emotion work,' social 'feeling rules,' and a great variety of exchanges between people in private and public life."
Stewart gjorde militærtjeneste under anden verdenskrig, som pilot. Han blev indkaldt til den amerikanske hær i marts 1941, og påbegyndte pilot-træning i USAAC, dette på basis af 400 akkumulerede flyvetimer som privat pilot.