The past decades have seen significant advances in the sociological understanding of human emotion. Sociology has shown how culture and society shape our emotions and how emotions contribute to micro- and macro-social processes. At the same time, the behavioral sciences have made progress in understanding emotion at the level of the individual mind and body. Emotion and Social Structures embraces both perspectives to uncover the fundamental role of affect and emotion in the emergence and reproduction of social order. How do culture and social structure influence the cognitive and bodily basis
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these components in the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed.
Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Funding note -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Affective Societies - key concepts -- Affective Societies: theoretical and diagnostic perspectives -- A social theory perspective -- A diagnostic angle -- Connection and contestation: the role of concepts in research -- Challenges of a research program -- Working concepts: theory and research -- Format of the chapters -- Thematic parts -- Part I: affect and emotion: charting the landscape -- Part II: elaborating affect -- Part III: resonances and repertoires -- Part IV: collectives and contestations -- Outlook: the politics of Affective Societies -- References -- Part I: Affect and emotion: Charting the landscape -- Chapter 2: Affect -- Foundation: Spinoza's relational approach to affect -- Talking affect with Spinoza -- Toward a systematic understanding of affect and affectio -- Contemporary affect: ideas and directions -- Bodies-in-relation -- Affective arrangements: individual and milieu -- Affect and the "wild beyond" -- References -- Chapter 3: Emotion, emotion concept -- Emotions as realizations and conceptualizations of affect -- Examples from research -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: Feeling -- A brief history of the term feeling -- Feelings within 20th-century emotion research -- Feeling as bodily affection and meaningful world-orientation -- Outlook -- References -- Chapter 5: Gefühlsbildung (the formation of feeling) -- Education, socialization, Bildung, and theformation of feeling -- The formation of feeling in childhood and adolescence -- The formation of feeling in transnational social fields -- Emotion pedagogies on the move -- Outlook -- References -- Chapter 6: Attachment -- Attachment in affect studies
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Recent research has investigated the emotional underpinnings of support for the political new right. Some of these works focus on the supply-side of support, emphasising specific political styles and discourses, whereas others emphasise the demand-side, highlighting cultural, economic and emotional factors. Lacking from this research, in particular for the European context, is an understanding of how supporters of the new right experience and make sense of pertinent cleavages with regard to emotions. The present study sets out to acquire a more detailed understanding of the emotional narratives of supporters of the new right, in particular with regard to fear and religious cleavages. Using group interviews with supporters of new right parties and movements in Germany, we show that narratives involving fear pertain to the idea of a valued collective 'We' that consists of political and cultural elements, and serves as a reference point to collective identity and an antidote to existential insecurities. Further, the collective We is perceived to be threatened by cultural differences and changing majority-minority relations with respect to five domains of social life: demography, liberal democratic order, public majority culture, security and welfare.
Ever since Georg Simmel's seminal works, social relations have been a central building block of sociological theory. In relational sociology, social identities are an essential concept and supposed to emerge in close interaction with other identities, discourses and objects. To assess this kind of relationality, existing research capitalises on patterns of meaning making that are constitutive for identities. These patterns are often understood as forms of declarative knowledge and are reconstructed, using qualitative methods, from denotative meanings as they surface: for example, in stories and narratives. We argue that this approach to some extent privileges explicit and conceptual knowledge over tacit and non-conceptual forms of knowledge. We suggest that affect is a concept that can adequately account for such implicit and bodily meanings, even when measured on the level of linguistic concepts. We draw on affect control theory (ACT) and related methods to investigate the affective meanings of concepts (lexemes) denoting identities in a large survey. We demonstrate that even though these meanings are widely shared across respondents, they nevertheless show systematic variation reflecting respondents' positions within the social space and the typical interaction experiences associated with their identities. In line with ACT, we show, first, that the affective relations between exemplary identities mirror their prototypical, culturally circumscribed and institutionalised relations (for example, between role identities). Second, we show that there are systematic differences in these affective relations across gender, occupational status and regional culture, which we interpret as reflecting respondents' subjective positioning and experience vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality.
Crises such as European debt crisis, Brexit, and COVID-19 have challenged established relations between finance and the state in attempts at mitigating a broad range of crises-related risks. We ask whether and how these altered relations in themselves constitute novel uncertainties and risks between the two fields. To better understand these dynamics, we introduce the concept of "risk entanglement" to complement financialization as a key concept presently capturing these relations. Based on qualitative research in the German finance-state nexus, we show how financial and state actors mutually construe each other as risks that need to be managed and mitigated to safeguard their particular, field-specific logics and ends. We focus on systemic risk and political risk as two cases of risk entanglement: whereas systemic risk reflects the threat of a potential financial meltdown to the state, political risk reflects how the state endangers established risk practices in finance.
Informed by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, the current study explores how employee empowerment is discursively constructed as a management technique. Combing insights from labour process theory, Foucauldian approaches to governmentality and neo-Weberian interpretations of the ideological basis of capitalism, we develop an empirically informed theoretical framework that accounts for the multifaceted character of employee empowerment. Results show, first, that discourse justifies the necessity of this technique by presenting it as an efficient answer to perceived increases in competitive pressures and an ever-changing economic environment since the beginning of the 1990s. The discourse promotes advanced liberal modes of (self-)governance, which are created and maintained through a complex set of means for the control of labour. Second, although the ideological structure of the empowerment discourse is in accordance with the third spirit of capitalism, as identified by Boltanski and Chiapello, it also introduces changes by removing the neo-manager and granting the empowered employee a central role. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that empowerment is associated with strategies for reducing labour costs, such as de-layering and work intensification.
Emotions are prevalent in the rhetoric of populist politicians and among their electorate. We argue that partially dissimilar emotional processes may be driving right- and left-wing populism. Existing research has associated populism with fear and insecurities experienced in contemporary societies, on the one hand, and with anger, resentment, and hatred, on the other. Yet there are significant differences in the targets of right- and left-wing resentment: A political and economic establishment deemed responsible for austerity politics (left) and political and cultural elites accused of favoring ethnic, religious, and sexual out-groups at the expense of the neglected in-group (right). Referring to partially different emotional opportunity structures and distinct political strategies at exploiting these structures, we suggest that right-wing populism is characterized by repressed shame that transforms fear and insecurity into anger, resentment, and hatred against perceived "enemies" of the precarious self. Left-wing populism, in turn, associates more with acknowledged shame that allows individuals to self-identify as aggrieved and humiliated by neoliberal policies and their advocates. The latter type of shame holds emancipatory potential as it allows individuals to establish bonds with others who feel the same, whereas repressors remain in their shame or seek bonds from repression-mediated defensive anger and hatred.
This article expands on the discussion of social and cultural factors for refugees' feelings of belonging in the receiving society and assesses democratic, civic, and moral values as predictors of belonging. On the one hand, existing research considers shared values between refugees and the receiving society as hallmarks of integration. From this perspective, shared values (or value consensus) are considered predictors of refugees' feelings of belonging and the formation of social bonds with host-country citizens. On the other hand, values are seen as part of refugees' cultural capital. From this perspective, liberal and civic value contents, in particular, may promote feelings of belonging, irrespective of whether these values are widely shared with citizens of the host society. This article investigates these contrasting hypotheses, using data from a representative panel of refugees in Germany. Results show that refugees holding liberal democratic values are more likely to experience feelings of welcome in the receiving society. When operationalizing belonging also in terms of refugees spending time with host-country citizens, shared democratic and secular values become more important. Finally, this article suggests that the effect of value consensus on refugees' feelings of welcome is mediated by how much time refugees spend with host-country citizens members. Taken together, our findings emphasize that in the context of international migration, values are important hallmarks of social integration, although this should not be reduced to popular calls for shared values between immigrants and host-country citizens.
Emotions are prevalent in the rhetoric of populist politicians and among their electorate. We argue that partially dissimilar emotional processes may be driving right- and left-wing populism. Existing research has associated populism with fear and insecurities experienced in contemporary societies on the one hand, and with anger, resentment, and hatred on the other. Yet, there are significant differences in the targets of right- and left-wing resentment: a political and economic establishment deemed responsible for austerity politics (left), and political and cultural elites accused of favoring ethnic, religious, and sexual outgroups at the expense of the neglected ingroup (right). Referring to partially different emotional opportunity structures and distinct political strategies at exploiting these structures, we suggest that right-wing populism is characterized by repressed shame that transforms fear and insecurity into anger, resentment, and hatred against perceived "enemies" of the precarious self. Left-wing populism, in turn, associates more with acknowledged shame that allows individuals to self-identify as aggrieved and humiliated by neoliberal policies and their advocates. The latter type of shame holds emancipatory potential as it allows individuals to establish bonds with others who feel the same, whereas repressors remain in their shame or seek bonds from repression-mediated defensive anger and hatred. ; Peer reviewed
The rise of the radical populist right has been linked to fundamental socioeconomic changes fueled by globalization and economic deregulation. Yet, socioeconomic factors can hardly fully explain the rise of new right. We suggest that emotional processes that affect people's identities provide an additional explanation for the current popularity of the new radical right, not only among low- and medium-skilled workers, but also among the middle classes whose insecurities manifest as fears of not being able to live up to salient social identities and their constitutive values, and as shame about this actual or anticipated inability. This link between fear and shame is particularly salient in competitive market societies where responsibility for success and failure is increasingly individualized, and failure is stigmatized through unemployment, being on welfare benefits, or labor migration. In these conditions, we identify two psychological mechanisms behind the rise of the new populist right. The first mechanism of ressentiment explains how negative emotions -- fear and insecurity, in particular -- transform through repressed shame into anger, resentment, and hatred towards perceived "enemies" of the self and associated social groups, such as the refugees, the immigrants, the long-term unemployed, the political and cultural elites, and the "mainstream" media. The second mechanism is emotional distancing from social identities that inflict shame and other negative emotions, and instead seeking meaning and self-esteem from those aspects of identity that are perceived to be stable and to some extent exclusive, such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and traditional gender roles. ; Peer reviewed
Key elements of discourse on the recent economic crisis are attributions of crisis responsibility. Such attributions are assumed to have consequences for audiences' thoughts and actions in domains relevant to the crisis. Although studies have suggested ways to conceptualize attributions of responsibility, their effects on social action remain poorly understood. This essay develops an empirically grounded theoretical model and methodological tool to reconstruct ideal-typical attributions of responsibility from discourse along the dimensions of attribution targets and attributed logics of action. It further proposes that combinations of these ideal types constitute affective framings that influence how the crisis is perceived and how an audience may act in crisis relevant domains.
Recent research indicates that segregation is, in addition to many other undesirable consequences, negatively associated with social capital, in particular, generalized trust within a community. This study investigates whether an individual's residential neighborhood and the stereotypes associated with this neighborhood affect others' trusting behavior as a specific form of social exchange. Using an anonymous trust game experiment in the context of five districts of the German capital, Berlin, we show that trusting is contingent on others' residential neighborhood rather than on deliberate assessments of trustworthiness. Participants show significantly greater trust toward individuals from positively stereotyped neighborhoods with favorable sociodemographic characteristics than to persons from negatively stereotyped neighborhoods with unfavorable sociodemographics. Importantly, when stereotypes and sociodemographic factors point in opposite directions, participants' trust decisions reflect stereotype content.
