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Since Hochschild proposed the notion of a 'deep story' to address a collective emotional structure (particularly resentment) underpinning political attitudes and social divisions in the contemporary USA, this category has been widely embraced across social sciences to reflect upon links between sedimented emotions, motivations, actions and means of social mobilization. Simultaneously, however, criticism of this concept has been articulated which pointed out that Hochschild was inconsistent in her understanding of deep stories and the role this category performs in a sociological investigation. Acknowledging critical addresses presented so far, the article aims at the reconstruction of this concept as an analytical device which can be used to account for collective emotional dynamics accompanying prolonged social transformations. I propose that a deep story can be best understood as a social space in which emotions emerge through an interactional, collaborative process of storytelling. I draw, first, from social-psychological investigations into collective processes of meaning-making to analyse the interplay between the emergence of group-based cognitive categories and their affective implications. Second, I employ narrative theories to account for socio-psychological processes in which group-based, collectively generated cognitive and affective elements are integrated into actual lifeworlds and deployed in sense-making. Finally, I consider the insights pertaining to emotions collectively felt and practised to reflect upon the social dynamic of emotion-sharing. I argue that the notion of a 'deep story' is analytically useful only insofar it is embedded in clearly articulated theoretical assertions about cognitive and affective, collective and interpersonal, dynamics of meaning-making.

In this article, I analyze the meaning-making struggle within a major Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an online observation of interactions directly following the outbreak in Poland, and in-depth content and conversational analysis of selected conversations, I posit that the pandemic circumstances were experienced in this community as a pervasively ambiguous situation: ambivalent in cognitive, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. The article identifies collective social processes embedded in digital interactions through which this initial ambiguity was ordered, and narratives of the pandemic emerged, enabling the collective management of fear of the novel infection.

In this article, the author presents cultural theories of emotion and the concept of emotional culture' as a tool of sociological analysis. The cultural perspective, in her opinion, is worthy of sociologists' particular attention; it brings factors of a strictly social nature to the analysis of emotion, for instance, the impact of changes in social organization on the presence of emotions in social life. The idea of emotional culture is essential for this perspective. In the proposed meaning, it refers to the ordering of the 'emotionality' of a given collective at the supra-individual level. It comprises scenes for the appearance of emotions, manners of expressing emotions, emotional norms, ideas about emotions, the values attached to emotions, and the language of describing emotional experiences. Analyses from the cultural perspective connect changes in expression and emotional norms with changes in social organization, as is shown through the examples of Norbert Elias's and Cas Wouters's work.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: What Counts as Social "Reality?" -- Chapter 3: Emotions as Products of the Social: Extrinsic Accounts -- Chapter 4: Emotions as Constitutive Methods: An Intrinsic Account of the Social -- Chapter 5: Emergence of Collectives as "Status Groups" -- Chapter 6: Methodology and Methods of Data Collection -- Chapter 7: Emotional Deviance and New Emotional Reality -- Chapter 8: Concluding Points: Theoretical Models, Social Reality and Every-day "Practice"

Through the lens of modernization theories, the process of European integration can be perceived as Poland's second modernization, following the systemic transformation in the nineties. In this article, we analyze the divergent perceptions of the European Union, and attitudes toward European integration, as they coexist within contemporary Polish society. We introduce the notion of European integration as a triple modernization, encompassing economic, institutional, and cultural changes. Using a mixed methods approach based on qualitative and quantitative data from the European Values Study 2017, we demonstrate that Poles generally accept the peripheral status of Poland in the economic context and expect financial support from the core of the EU. Simultaneously, within the cultural context, there exists a marginal but salient attitude that is based on opposition toward cultural pressures and on a claim to an active role in the shaping of the European axiological agenda. Distinguishing the three aspects of this general process of European integration allows for the identification of the source of tensions that are described in literature as cross-European populist tendencies to question the very idea of European integration in member societies of the EU.