Power and Emotion

Jonathan Heaney, Helena Flam, Jonathan G. Heaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317631262
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection is concerned with two fundamental concepts of social science– power and emotion. Power permeates all human relationships and is constitutive of social, economic, and political life. It stands at the centre of social and political theorizing, and its study has enriched scholarship within a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, philosophy, and anthropology. The conceptual cluster of emotion, by contrast, had a more troubled time within these same disciplines. However, since the 1970's and the advent of the 'emotional turn', there has been a widespread re-evaluation of emotion in and for our shared social existence and, today, emotions research is at forefront of contemporary social science. Yet, although both concepts are now widely seen as fundamental, research on these two phenomena has tended to run in parallel.

This collection, featuring leading international scholars, seeks to unite and deploy both concepts, emotion and power, in a variety of ways, and on a diverse array of topics such as: education, organizations, social movements, politics, 'old' and 'new' media, rhetoric and in comparative intellectual history. The results are at the bleeding edge of scholarship on these concepts, and will make important reading for practitioners and students working in the sociology of emotions, social and political power, political sociology, organization studies, and for sociological and political theory more generally.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

Emotions and power: a bifocal prescription to cure theoretical myopia

This special issue marks an attempt to reunite two core concepts – power and emotion – in an illuminating, diverse and fruitful way. Power has been described as ‘the central concept of the social sciences’ (Clegg and Haugaard 2009). It permeates all human relationships and is constitutive of society, economy and politics. Its study has enriched scholarship and research within a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, philosophy, geography and anthropology. It has, in various ways, been at the heart of social and political theory since ‘the beginning’. The conceptual category of emotion, by contrast, has traditionally had a more difficult time within these same disciplines. Yet emotions are also central to the constitution of social life, to the maintenance of social order and the creative destruction of that order. I reviewed some of these issues in 2011, arguing that emotions and power should be viewed as ‘conceptual twins’ and be treated together. This special issue is the first step in this direction.

Despite their close relation, power and emotion – the two fundamental components of social life – have not received enough simultaneous attention. The mainstream power literature, for example, is mostly silent about the emotions. A range of factors have contributed to this, such as the separation of mind and body from Descartes on and the fetishization of rationality within the social sciences more generally. Emotions qua passions were seen as ‘illnesses of the mind’ and appeared as ‘cancerous sores for pure practical reason’ (Kant et al. 2006, p. 166). For much of the history of ‘Western’ (social) science, emotions were positioned as an ‘epistemological other’ (Somers and Gibson 1994). They were relegated to the losing side of the binary oppositions that structured intellectual life and work, and placed ‘beyond the pale’ of social scientific endeavour. Yet, when we probe a little deeper, it turns out that many of the well-known theorists of power, from Hobbes to Gramsci, from Lukes to Giddens and from Elias to Foucault, let emotions play a significant yet largely unacknowledged ‘underlabouring’ role in their work (Heaney 2011).

In fact, emotions – whether named feelings, passions or sentiments – were actually discussed quite often and at length in the Western tradition. This was, however, usually in negative terms. Emotions were spoken of (sometimes as gossip, ‘behind their backs’, sometimes excoriated ‘to their faces’) but were more often than not devalued. However, since the 1990’s there has been a widespread revaluation and recognition of emotions, and the fundamental role they play in social life, in what is sometimes called the ‘emotional turn’. Today, emotions research is at the forefront of contemporary social science, across and between the disciplines, particularly in Europe (Barbalet 2001, 2002, Flam and King 2005, Hopkins et al. 2009, Demertzis 2013), and the US (Hochschild 1979, 1989, Turner and Stets 2005, Stets and Turner 2006).

The intention of this special issue is to unite these two distinct streams of research via the adoption of a ‘bifocal lens’ comprised of both emotion and power. Both traditions, I suggest, suffer from a form of theoretical myopia. The power stream has focused productively on power and power problems, yet, with a few exceptions, has been blind or implicit when it came to emotions.

The emotions stream has sometimes been better able to address power. For example, in Kemper’s power-status theory of emotions, when in an interactive situation individuals gain in power or status, and see this as their own accomplishment, they experience ‘positive’ emotions such as satisfaction, happiness, confidence and security. When they feel belittled or deprived of power, and attribute this outcome to their interaction partner, they experience ‘negative’ emotions, such as fear, anxiety or loss of confidence (Kemper, 1990, 2006). Both power and emotions are at least visible through this Kemperian lens. But while the emotions stream has addressed questions of power, it has done so in a restrictive and cursory manner.

To stay with Kemper, his conception of power is restricted to a Weberian power-over, shared also by Scheff (1990) and Hochschild (1983) but given a much more differentiated treatment by, for example, Collins in his Conflict Sociology (1975). As Haugaard (2010), however, has argued following Wittgenstein, power should be seen as a ‘family resemblance’ concept or a conceptual cluster, incorporating a range of referents, including power-to, episodic power, dispositional power, systemic power, empowerment, legitimate power, domination, constitutive power and so on. This pluralism should not imply relativism nor be an excuse for laxity in the conceptualization or deployment of power, but is rather based on pragmatic criteria of usefulness and propriety to the task at hand. Indeed, this very journal itself attests to the excellent work done by virtue of this conceptual pluralism; as does this special issue.

Not only power, but also emotion has been a highly ‘contested’ (I eschew ‘essentially’) conceptual cluster. We are far from settled definitions, yet here too, multiplicity promises to be fruitful. I would advocate remaining open about how emotion and power can be conceptualized. And this is indeed what this special issue attempted. Without any a priori, it therefore looks at a range of social and political issues through the bifocal lens of power and emotions – variously defined. This is a lens that keeps both concepts, emotions and power, in focus throughout, without relegation of one or the other. It is by keeping purchase on both concepts – I am tempted to say in a way akin to ‘reflective equilibrium’ – that more insight is gained.

In this special issue, then, we have chosen eight papers that address both concepts, emotion and power in a variety of settings, including education, work organizations, social movements, politics, ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, rhetoric and in comparisons in the conceptualization of some core concepts between ‘the West’ and ‘the East’. The diversity of subjects and approaches in evidence in the papers testifies both to the ubiquity of power and emotions in all areas of social life in general, and the importance and illumination gained from exploring these concepts together.

We begin with two papers that, in different ways, address emotions and power in Western organizations, with a particular focus on compassion (see also the recent collection Sieben and Wettergren 2010). In the first of these, Helena Flam critically explores the emergent human rights movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJ&R), its power structures, values and institutionalization, from the perspective of the sociology of emotions (Flam 2000, 2005). The core theoretical insight driving this contribution suggests, drawing on Kemper, that the prevailing ‘emotional regimes’ (Reddy) within societies, and their corresponding ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild) are both defined by power holders within those societies (asymmetrically, to their advantage) and are an expression and symbol of their power – an insight that Elias elaborated on too. Yet, rather than applying this to specific nation-states, Flam turns this lens onto what she considers to be a newly emergent ‘Bourdiusian social field’, the transnational multi-actor system of TJ&R. Here a coalition of aspiring power holders, including various (Transnational) Non-Government Organizations, activists and medium-sized ‘like-minded’ states, were successful in pooling their combined resources and, as a result of this gain in social, cultural and symbolic capital, in institutionalizing a new transnational legal-moral regime for the persecution of violations to humanitarian laws, war-crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity (incorporated in bodies such as the International Criminal Court, and, partially, in various International Criminal Tribunals and Truth Commissions worldwide). This movement has advocated different emotions and feeling rules to accompany the new legal-moral regime, particularly on how to address distant or past human suffering, and when, how and to whom compassion should be shown. The Western ‘critics of the West’ for example (such as Boltanski and Sontag) advocate the adoption of a ‘mindful compassion’ (for the ‘deserving’ victim) or ‘cool indignation’ (for the perpetrator) feeling rules, but only after the ‘objective truth’ of the suffering of the victim and the guilt of the perpetrator are proven. Other actors within this system, such as activists or professionals, advocate similar feeling rules. Flam also looks at the feeling rules at work in the courts, tribunals and commissions themselves as they operate on the victims of atrocity. Here the therapeutic ethos appears to be dominant, with many more feeling rules imposed on the victims than on the perpetrators. Actual victims are expected to manage and control their ‘negative’ emotions, to not display their rage and hate. They are urged to forgive, forget and ‘heal’. Reconciliation is primary, truth and justice, secondary considerations. This is reflective of the asymmetric power relations within societies, but it is also an outcome of the emotional regime that various advocates of human rights addressing these institutions engender and maintain. Thus, Flam’s contribution shows how a critical deployment of this bifocal lens can illuminate important aspects of human rights, social movements and international politics that might remain occluded if one of these concepts in omitted.

Compassion is also the subject of the contribution by Ace Simpson, Stewart Clegg and Daphne Freeder, who explore the relationship between this emotion and power in organizations. They are particularly concerned with exploring how suffering and compassion are articulated within an organizational context, and how they are connected with organizational power. They investigate this using a specific empirical case – the response by various organizations in Brisbane Australia to the floods of January, 2011. Theoretically drawing on previous work on both power (particularly Clegg and Etzoni) and emotions (Flam and Fineman) in organizations, and on the wider work on compassion, they deploy qualitative data to argue that the extent to which organizations actually showed compassion in the flood crisis directly affected employee commitment outcomes toward those organizations (anger, cynicism and gratitude). This study raises critical questions for advocates of ‘positive’ organizational studies, by problematizing the processes at work when organizations act compassionately; both the outcomes and the motivations behind the deployment of compassion may be more complex and ambivalent than the growing literature on compassion in organizations acknowledges. It is necessary to excavate the power relations behind this deployment. Discourses on compassion should not be taken at face value. Instead – as this study shows – it is how organizations act towards their employees and how these employees perceive it that matters.

While the opening papers exemplify the utility and insight gained from a bifocal lens of emotions and power, they do so within an exclusively ‘Western’ context. The contribution by Jack Barbalet and Xiaoying Qi, by contrast, aims to compare how the concepts of power, emotion and reason have been articulated very differently within the Chinese intellectual tradition. This alone marks a valuable contribution to our thinking. Too often, in Europe and elsewhere, we operate within a default Eurocentric framework, if not always empirically, then more often at the level of conceptualization, not mindful of the fact that other cultures have rich alternatives within other intellectual traditions that could be beneficial to our work. At the centre of their discussion lies the opposition between reason and emotion. In Europe, this opposition was standard until recent decades, but at its base were relations of social power: those who were powerful were rational; those subject to power were irrational and emotional. As such, the basis of this conceptual opposition was fundamentally sociological, deriving from specific configurations of power relations and corresponding institutions and practices. By contrast, reason and emotion are unified in mainstream Chinese thought in the concept of ‘xin’, which translates as ‘heart-mind’; the binary opposition is absent. This, they argue, is a result of differing sociological developments and structures. This paper also outlines a specific Chinese approach to power, drawing on the conceptualization in evidence in the classic text, the Daodejing, which has been particularly influential in Chinese political theory. This is a conception based on paradox, suggesting that the weaker party is often more powerful than the stronger (water is soft but it moves mountains), but it is also methodological, assuming a world (reminiscent of Whitehead’s) characterized by change and flux. From this they go on to account for the related conception of action contained in the text, wuwei and contrast it with more mainstream accounts. Wuwei means ‘non-action’ or ‘non-coercive action’ and, if power is considered a type of action, wuwei appears closer to a form of power as anti-power; it represents a type of accommodation to the flux of the world that is non-willful; a type of ‘doing without doing’. All of these conceptualizations, of emotions, power, reason, action and their interconnections, provide an alternative view to the standard ‘Western’ ones, and may aid us in revisiting, if not revising, the ways in which power and emotion are taken for granted in the West.

Within these Western traditions, power and politics have always been synonymous. Yet, the extent to which politics has been based on emotions has only recently gained attention (Ost 2004, Demertzis 2013). Emotions are fundamental to politics; to gaining, holding and losing power; to mobilizing and influencing electorates; to both the building up, and the tearing down of political structures. Politicians engage in discourse and rhetoric to evoke emotional responses, for an ‘us’ and against an emotionally constructed ‘them’ – emotions are the very means by which the power game is played, and the media is increasingly the field of play.

Much more work remains to be done in combining emotions and power in the analysis of politics, political parties, parliaments and their dynamics than this special issue can offer. The contribution by Åsa Wettergren and André Jansson makes a step in this direction. It investigates the Swedish political landscape, and in particular the Swedish Christian Democrat leader Göran Hägglund’s discursive trope the ‘People of the real world’ (PRW), which he deployed during the 2009–2010 election cycle. Their inquiry is focused on how this trope is constructed, the power position it defends, the spatial constructs it draws from and which emotional processes it is designed to evoke. To achieve this, the paper draws on cultural theory (cosmopolitanism vs. localism), spatial and moral geography and the sociology of emotions, particularly Kemper’s power-status theory. The authors argue that the PRW discourse is deployed to evoke the fear and resentment of the ‘normals’, those who have lost power and status within the changing, mobile and globalizing world, while witnessing the advancement of previously marginalized groups, such as migrants, and their perceived domination by a left-wing cultural elite, such as feminists and intell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Emotions and power: a bifocal prescription to cure theoretical myopia
• 2. The transnational movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation as an emotional (rule) regime?
• 3. Compassion, power and organization
• 4. The paradox of power: conceptions of power and the relations of reason and emotion in European and Chinese culture
• 5. Emotions, power and space in the discourse of ‘People of the Real World’
• 6. The power of popular publicity: new social media and the affective dynamics of the sport racism scandal
• 7. A feeling for democracy? Rhetoric, power and the emotions
• 8. Memorial ceremonies in schools: analyzing the entanglement of emotions and power
• 9. Emotions, power and schooling: the socialisation of ‘angry boys’
• Index