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Doing Care, Doing Citizenship pp 63–90Cite as

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Macro-Structural Relevance of Emotions

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Abstract

This chapter illustrates Collins’ theory of Interaction Ritual Chains (Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004) describing social structures in terms of processes which are interactionally and situationally reproduced through emotional dynamics. This chapter also clarifies how this theoretical approach challenges our conventional views of care-related inequality and helps us shedding light on less visible and less explored implications of care.

The study of emotions in everyday life helps remedy the failure of the social and psychological sciences to appreciate the hidden sensual and aesthetic foundations of the self.

Jack Katz

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In sociology , Gordon (1981) distinguished emotions as relatively undifferentiated bodily arousals from sentiments as combinations of bodily sensations, gestures and cultural meanings learned in enduring social relationships. Thoits (1989) differentiated between feelings, which include the experience of physical drive states (e.g. hunger, pain and fatigue) as well as emotional states; affects, which refer to positive and negative evaluations (liking/disliking) of an object, behaviour, or idea and possess intensity and activity dimensions (Heise 1977); moods , which are usually more chronic and less intense than emotions, and less tightly tied to an eliciting situation; sentiments , as “socially constructed patterns of sensations, expressive gestures, and cultural meanings organized around a relationship to a social object, usually another person” (Gordon 1981); and emotions , as culturally delineated types of feelings or affects. Following Turner and Stets’ suggestion (2005), I will use here the term emotion as subsuming the phenomena denoted by all these different labels. For a thorough analysis of definitional issues and an extensive review of the sociology of affect and emotion, see also Lynn Smith-Lovin (1995).

  2. 2.

    For a recent, introductory and critical overview of the work sociologists of emotions have carried out so far, see also Bericat (2012, 2015). For an exhaustive review of interdisciplinary approaches to emotions and their relationship with social structures, see the article by Von Scheve and Von Luede (2005).

  3. 3.

    An interesting overview of research that focuses on the neglected experience of men as caregivers is offered by Betty Kramer and Edward Thompson (2005).

  4. 4.

    Notably, it allows us to explain the inconsistencies between people’s attitudes and behaviours. As Collins puts it in the following passage: “What IR theory adds to contemporary cultural theory in this regard is that what people think they believe at a given moment is dependent upon the kind of interaction ritual taking place in that situation: people may genuinely and sincerely feel the beliefs they express at the moment they express them, especially when the conversational situation calls out a higher degree of emotional emphasis; but this does not mean that they act on these beliefs, or that they have a sincere feeling about them in other everyday interactions where the ritual focus is different” (Collins 2004: 44).

  5. 5.

    “Every individual goes through many situations: indeed, a life time is, strictly speaking, a chain of interaction situations. […] An appropriate image of the social world is a bundle of chains of interactional experience, criss-crossing each other in space as they flow along in time” (Collins 1984: 387).

  6. 6.

    Wiley as well as other scholars talk about a similar concept by using different terms such as shadow others, shadow selves, hidden selves and absent others (see Wiley 1994; McMahon 1996; Doucet 2006; Archer 2003, 2007).

  7. 7.

    Getting insights into the emotional stratification produced by parental care was not an easy task and it required a qualitative multi-method approach, which I describe with details in the appendix of this book.

  8. 8.

    Collins (2004: 272, 291, 295).

  9. 9.

    The interview question was: Do you think other people started thinking of you in a different way since you became a parent?

  10. 10.

    For a recent contribution to critical heterosexual studies, see also Ingraham (2005).

  11. 11.

    Actually, they are “PACSed”. At the time of the interview, and before same-sex marriage became legal, in France, a Pacte Civil de Solidarité (civil pact of solidarity) commonly known as a PACS was a form of civil union between two adults (either same-sex or opposite-sex) for organizing their joint life. It brought rights and responsibilities, but less so than marriage.

  12. 12.

    See Rosanna Hertz (2006), Frank Furstenberg (2002, 2005).

  13. 13.

    Townsend (2002).

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    Alessandro Pratesi

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Pratesi, A. (2018). Macro-Structural Relevance of Emotions. In: Doing Care, Doing Citizenship . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63109-7_4

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