Emotion and Social Structures

The Affective Foundations of Social Order

Christian von Scheve

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317577751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 of emotion? How do large-scale patterns of feeling emerge? And how do emotions promote the coordination of social action and interaction? Integrating theories and evidence from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Christian von Scheve argues for a sociological understanding of emotion as a bi-directional mediator between social action and social structure.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of emotion, microsociology, and cognitive sociology, as well as social psychology, cognitive science, and affective neuroscience.

1 Self, society, and emotion

To achieve an understanding of emotions as bi-directional mediators between action and structure, existing sociological paradigms seeking to explain these links on more traditional and established grounds are particularly helpful. The question of how individual action brings about and reproduces social structures at higher levels of aggregation, which at the same time constitute the opportunities and constraints for social action, has been characterized as the "Holy Grail" of sociology (DiMaggio 1991). During the past decades, North-American sociology in particular has developed theories that focus on micro-social processes such as face-to-face interaction, routinization, and categorization in explaining macro-social phenomena. These studies are characterized by a shift from normative-discursive and resource-based notions of social order towards a more cognitive concept thereof, taking a middle path between methodological individualism and collectivism that has been described as "methodological situationalism" (Knorr-Cetina 1981, p. 2).

As cognitive sociologies in the broadest sense, these approaches shall serve as a basis for developing a genuinely sociological perspective on emotion that can be linked to both existing emotion research in other disciplines and established accounts of (micro-)social order. This cognitive turn in sociology can be seen as an abandoning of Durkheim's conceptualization of normative moral obligations as external social institutions as well as of Parsons's internalization model, which indeed emphasizes internal over external control, but ultimately sees social action as realizing established normative ends. This turn has placed more importance on phenomena that are assumed to be inherent to individuals, such as language and cognition, which play a fundamental role, for example, in the representation and interpretation of normative obligations. As far as action and behavior are concerned, it is primarily actors' stocks of implicit or tacit knowledge that are deemed most significant (KnorrCetina 1981, p. 4).

The crucial difference between this and more traditional normative perspectives on the formation of social order can be illustrated by looking at language. Just as the grammar of language is not consciously learned (nor is it hardwired, unless you are a Chomskyan), social and cultural patterns of behavior are—for the most part—not explicitly learned either. Rather, they are internalized and embodied during socialization. In contrast to, for instance, laws and legal norms, these behavioral patterns are not necessarily explicitly codified, and deviation is mostly subject to informal sanctions. In the case of the cognitive structures (or explicit and implicit knowledge structures) underlying social action, we are not dealing with the fonnal syntactic structures of linguistic competences, but rather with systems of meaning and significance that are in principle flexible and negotiable in social interaction. However, as later chapters will show, different forms of internalization and habituation may shape the cognitive structures and processes underlying meaning-making in a way that is similar to the rigid shaping of language. Affect and emotion play a crucial role in this shaping because they provide a distinct and bodily grounded level of meaning-making. Therefore, emphasizing cognitive structures and processes suggests a modified or even alternative stance to the emergence and reproduction of social order:

Instead of a society integrated by common values and moral constraints, it is the cognitive order of sense making and describing which emerges from microscopic studies of social life.... In a sense, the problem of social order is redefined by turning the traditional approach to social order on its head. Social Order is not that which holds society together by somehow controlling individual wills, but that which comes about in the mundane but relentless transactions of these wills. The problem of social order has not only turned into a problem of cognitive order; it has also turned from a macro-level problem to a micro-problem of social action.

(Knorr-Cetina 1981, p, 7)

From this perspective, the aim of this chapter can also be stated differently: Its purpose is to show that what we are dealing with is not simply a cognitive order of meaning-making, but also necessarily an affective and emotional order. To put it more forcefully, cognitive orders of meaning-making cannot exist or function in the ways proposed by existing accounts without corresponding affective orders. Ascribing a paramount role to cognitions and stocks of social knowledge in understanding social order suggests taking a closer look at those disciplines that have made cognition their very defining subject area: the cognitive sciences.

Interestingly, at least in the German-speaking academic community, virtually no convergence between sociology and the cognitive sciences can be observed to date (cf. Reichertz & Zaboura 2006), and also in the English-speaking countries such rapprochement is rare (cf. S. P. Turner 2002). This is all the more surprising since cognitive science usually considers itself a crossdisciplinary endeavor encompassing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and psychology. Many attempts to more extensively account for cognition in sociological analyses and to incorporate findings from cognitive science have come to grief, not least because of fears of a psychological or biological "reductionism" that (allegedly) cannot do justice to the complexities of the social world. This rather conservative view has been challenged emphatically by, among others, Paul DiMaggio (2002). He argues that psychology in particular can provide empirical tools that may help in making long-established sociological problems more readily accessible. Moreover, theories of social cognition can illuminate blind spots in sociological theory—DiMaggio cites the example of Bourdieu's (1992) concept of habitus. Last, they offer deeper insights into socially structured cognitive information processing.

In this vein, sociological social psychology has become an established area of research, both in psychology and (mainly North American) sociology. It is concerned primarily with the interaction between relatively stable cognitive structures (including, for example, values, attitudes, motives, and desires) and social structures (House 1981; Stolte et al. 2001). Sociological social psychology can be seen as a more psychological equivalent to microsociological theory. Unlike "standard" social psychology, however, sociological social psychology is not confined to investigating the influence of the social environment on individual minds. Rather it also seeks to contribute to the explanation of macro-social phenomena in the way more classical microsociology does. A basic assumption of sociological social psychology therefore is that stable social structures shape actors' cognitive structures, whose actions in turn reinforce these very structures and serve to reproduce corresponding social orders (House 1981; Stolte et ah 2001).

In this regard, however, Zerubavel (1997) emphasizes that such analyses are not a sufficient basis for satisfactorily explaining micro-macro linkages. He urges that the downplaying of individual differences in cognition must not be replaced by some sort of "cognitive universalism." The mere fact that cognition is highly flexible and shaped by the social environment does not mean that such shaping would lead to a general "homogenization" of cognition. Quite to the contrary, Zerubavel stresses that the cognitive differences and diversity that are found in different "thought communities," i.e. in distinct social units that shape cognitions in very specific ways, are of utmost importance to sociology (Zerubavel 1997, p. 9). In line with this view, I therefore advocate a comparative approach to cognition and cognitive structures that emphasizes the cognitive differences between as much as the similarities within distinct thought communities. This approach is, for example, mirrored by cognitive anthropology that has been concerned with intersections between culture and cognition for quite some time (D'Andrade 1981; DiMaggio 1997; Shore 1996; Sperber & Hirschfeld 2004). For cognitive sociology, however, the primary interest is not comparisons between cultures in an anthropological sense, but between cultures—as systems of cognitive structures and meaning-making— within societies (House 1981; Zerubavel 1997, p. 11).

Reflecting actors' embeddedness within these systems, cognitive structures determine how and what actors think and serve as a basis for this chapter's main argument in two ways: As facilitators of socially shared meanings and prerequisites for intersubjective understanding, cognitive structures necessarily require affective processes to be functional in the proposed way. In other words, the micro-macro-transcending effects ascribed to cognitive structures by certain branches of microsociology cannot be brought about without the involvement of affect and emotion. Second, these cognitive structures play a crucial role in the social structuring of emotion. If cognitions exhibit certain social and cultural patterns and are essential for the elicitation of emotions— as many emotion theories argue—then it necessarily follows that the resulting emotions exhibit similar patterns.

Aside from the question of how embeddedness into social structures and social orders affects thinking and feeling, a central problem for cognitive sociological theories is still that of scaling up micro-processes to macro-level structures, which, according to some, are the actual objects of sociology. In reviewing the possible mechanisms underlying the scaling of micro-social orders to macro-social structures, Knorr-Cetina (1981, p. 25 f.) locates existing accounts along two hypotheses: that of unintended consequences and that of aggregation.

The hypothesis of unintended consequences is not based on the assumption that macro-level phenomena can be completely reduced to micro-social events. Rather, it postulates that macro-level phenomena are a consequence of the unintended (and intended) consequences of micro-social episodes. These approaches argue in favor of the emergence of socially structured macrolevel phenomena that are in principle irreducible to individual action. The aggregation hypothesis, on the other hand, maintains that macro-level phenomena are constituted by the aggregation and repetition of patterns of micro-social events. It is a rigorous interpretation of cognitive sociology and implies that macro-level phenomena can logically be derived from a corresponding analysis of all relevant micro-level elements.

In an attempt to resolve the dilemma produced by these hypotheses—which is that (a) all social action takes place in micro-social situations and that (b) these micro-level situations exhibit a tendency to become interlinked, producing unintended consequences that in turn affect social action—KuorrCetina (1981, pp. 30 ff.) suggests a third view: the "representation hypothesis." This hypothesis assumes that micro-level episodes' unintended consequences are first and foremost based on actors' perceptions and interpretations and thus primarily exist as cognitive representations. The dilemma is resolved in so far as social reality is indeed made up of micro-episodes, but at the same time macro-level phenomena can be taken into account as factors endogenous to these micro-level episodes (Knorr-Cetina 1981). Consequently, and regardless of their reification or objectification, social structures are in some way also properties of actors and are reproduced through structured ways of thinking, acting, and—as I argue—feeling.

This perspective is not confined to cognitive sociology and is indeed reflected in the view that social structures and the social orders of meaningmaking are closely interlinked. Pierre Bourdieu's and Anthony Giddens's social theories, for example, are largely compatible with this perspective. Bourdieu's explanation for the formation and reproduction of social structures is concerned primarily with internalized, habitualized, and socially differentiated patterns of perception, categorization, and interpretation that systematically shape (but do not completely determine) social action. Correspondingly, the habitus locates the structures of the social world within actors' structures of thought and perception (Bourdieu 1992; Lizardo 2004; Pickel 2005). To that extent, Bourdieu's notion of habitus can also be seen as the integration of a psychological and sociological structuralism characterizing it simultaneously as a "subjective" and "objective" structure. In a similar way, Giddens emphasizes the dialectic characterizing "subjective" and "objective" structures in his "duality of structure" account view (Giddens 1984). According to this account, social order arises from the reproduction of structures in social interaction and through the routinization of everyday action, which in turn has its origins in "practical consciousness." Strictly speaking, this practical consciousness does not in fact denote a state of consciousness, but expresses the possibility that everyday routine action frequently takes place without conscious awareness and is thus not discursively and reflexively accessible. Practical consciousness rather refers to the general and socially distributed (tacit) knowledge structures that are shared by large numbers of individuals within a society.

In summing up these perspectives on micro-macro linkages, I argue that there are several good reasons to—also—locate social structures within actors instead of merely viewing them as exogenous to individuals. According to cognitive sociology, these "internal" social structures are coupled to (or even constituted by) cognitive structures, which in its weakest form implies a systematic correspondence between social stmctures and cognitive structures that give rise to orders of meaning-making. Since cognitions, in turn, are fundamental to social action and behavior, it is plausible to assume that cognitive structures are causally implicated in bringing about regular patterns of social action, which in turn reproduce the "objective" and intersubjectively shared structures of the social world.

In conjunction with most of cognitive sociology and sociological social psychology, the term "cognition" here is primarily used to denote mental and symbolic contents and processes, i.e. representations such as beliefs, desires, and intentions as well as processes of perception, decision-making, and the storage and retrieval of information. This is not to say that I am taking a "disembodied" view on cognition. In contrast, I fully acknowledge the principles of embodied or even enactive cognition (Clark 2008; Noë 2004; Wilson 2002). However, my main interest in the embodied dimension of being lies in its affective components, and I am referring to the representational aspects of knowledge and cognition primarily to establish connections with existing accounts of micro-macro linkage in sociology. This is of course a purely analytical distinction, but it also allows me to contribute to an understanding of embodied cognition that incorporates affect- and emotion-specific bodily processes.

In this spirit, I will show that, to substantiate this view on the emergence and reproduction of social structures and social order, it is essential to account for emotions and affects, as some sociologists—most empathically Randall Collins (2004) and Jonathan Turner (2007)—have already indicated. As noted earlier, I will argue that emotions are a bi-directional mediator between social action and social structure and in many respects corroborate comparable cognitive links in terms of their structural and structuring potential. In view of the corresponding paradigms in sociological social psychology and cognitive sociology, I seek to shed light not only on what and how actors think as a function of social structure, but also on what and how they feel.

Micro-macro perspectives in the sociology of emotion

The micro-macro linkages outlined above have in part been addressed by social structural approaches to emotion and also by a number of symbolic interactionist or social constructionist accounts. Social structural approaches assign a critical role to emotions as intermediaries between action and structure and tend to refrain from exclusively treating emotions as either independent or dependent variables (Clay-Warner & Robinson 2008). Rather, they attempt to do justice to the manifold interdependencies characterizing the interplay of emotion and society. One of the best-known works in this respect is probably Theodore Kemper's (1978) Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. Kemper's starting point is that social structures can be characterized primarily in terms of two dimensions: status and power. In Kemper's model, the interpretation of specific configurations of status and power leads to characteristic physiological reactions, which in turn elicit specific emotions. Kemper's approach thus links elements of social structure, which are primarily manifested in social interaction, with the subjective interpretation of those elements, which give rise to certain physiological reactions that in turn produce specific emotions. Consequently, these emotions reflect the structural characteristics of social situations.

In a similar vein, Randall Collins (2004) explicitly addresses issues of micro-macro linkage. His theory is based essentially on the exchange of two resources, namely "emotional energy" and "cultural capital." The basic assumption is that actors are disposed to constantly strive to maintain or increase emotional energy, which can be understood as a form of gratification (Collins 2004). Consequently, actors tend to prefer those interactions that they expect to increase their emotional energy and to avoid those that are likely to produce losses. As a result, emotions become a resource and part of actors' preferences. The social structures and forms of stratification that are produced by these ritualized exchanges are facilitated by emotions in three ways: First, as an expressive modality, they are both distinctive elements and representations of individuals' experience and their embeddedness into social structures. Second, they motivate social action, mainly in view of changing allocations of emotional energy. The third function is brought about by the first two: The structure of a society that is stratified by a particular distribution of resources is in turn reinforced by the structuring effects of emotion.

Jonathan Turner's (2007) theory of emotion is in some respects similar to Collins's approach, but places greater emphasis on the evolutionary and neurophysiological foundations of human emotion. A basic tenet of Turner's approach is that accounting for the neurophysiological basis of emotion is crucial to better understand many sociological approaches to emotion: "Without biology, our explanations will be incomplete and seem rather shallow" (Turner 1999a, p. 101). Turner's reasoning relies on neuroscientific studies indicating that affect and emotion are to a great extent processed nonconsciously, and that consciously experienced subjective feelings, as one component of an emotion, merely represent the tip of the iceberg (Turner 1999a).

The decisive question is to what extent the non-conscious and automatic pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Self, society, and emotion
• 2 Socially structured emotions
• 3 The affective structure of social action
• 4 The affective structure of social interaction
• Concluding remarks
• Notes
• References
• Index