Emotional Regimes Research Articles

Brazilian soccer: symbolic dimensions of its practice

This essay explores the symbolic dimensions of soccer in Brazilian society from the perspective of sports anthropology. It discusses how the founding of the game was handled, in terms of stylization and standardization of rules. This, as the essay argues, would effect amplified representations in emotional regimes and adhesion to the game, thus making it a singular sports modality for understanding societies such as Brazil.

Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 by Britta McEwen (review)

Reviewed by: Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 by Britta McEwen Michael Boehringer Britta McEwen, Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934. Austrian and Habsburg Studies 13. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 232 pp. In this monograph, based on her 2003 dissertation, Britta McEwen has written a sensitive and thorough examination of the way in which knowledge about sex and sexuality was constructed, negotiated, and distributed in Vienna. Her timeframe is well chosen, beginning with the rapid development of the sexual sciences in the late nineteenth century and ending in February 1934 when the reform efforts in the Social Democrat–governed “Red Vienna” came to a halt in the violent conflicts with the police and the army. McEwen argues convincingly that Vienna occupied a special status during the post–World War I years, not only as the only socialist-run capital in Europe but also as a social-progressive island within a conservative nation. As such, the city-state of Vienna made for a fascinating social laboratory for the construction of sexuality and its meanings in society. While separating her study methodologically from those that link sexuality and nationalism, McEwen does frame it within supra-national discourses on sexuality, Social Darwinism and eugenics, and social pedagogy to form her central thesis, namely that sexual knowledge underwent a fundamental shift from a “form of scientific inquiry practiced largely by medical specialists to a social reform issue engaged by and intended for a wide audience” (2). In order to substantiate her claims, McEwen analyzes a myriad of mostly published yet hitherto largely unexamined texts by public servants and sex reformers close to the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria and as well as those with allegiances to the Roman Catholic Church, such as sex manuals, [End Page 125] children’s sexual education texts, or municipal reports. She uses a number of analytical tools that can broadly be subsumed under the label of poststructuralist cultural studies: Foucauldian discourse analysis, cultural history of mentalités in the manner of Lucien Febvre or Carlo Ginzburg, and William Reddy’s concept of “emotional regimes,” the cultural process by which emotions are managed and shaped. Common to all these methodologies is their emphasis on the constructedness of knowledge, which McEwen employs for a process-oriented rather than a purely descriptive approach to her topic: “I have sought to understand how people in Vienna thought about sex, what they did with the knowledge, and how that knowledge changed over time” (5). McEwen’s text is made up of six largely self-contained chapters (plus introduction and conclusion), each of which approaches her central theme from a different angle: Chapter 1 focuses on Julius Tandler’s tenure as the minister of public health after World War I and his central role in the creation of Vienna’s health and hygiene system. Tandler promoted a specifically Viennese form of eugenics called “productive population politics” (44) to bring about the repair of national health and a national regeneration through state-prescribed sexual hygiene as well as support for families, unwed mothers, and illegitimate children. In the process, McEwen argues, Tandler created an official language of sexual knowledge that would find widespread use and initiated the shift away from private doctors to public servants in the delivery of sexual health services. Chapter 2 analyzes various approaches to sexual education during the interwar period. McEwen outlines the efforts of sexual reformers to replace religious doctrine with scientifically based knowledge about the body and sexuality and the resulting counter-discourse put forward by the Catholic Church. McEwen demonstrates that the respective positions were not monolithic but allowed for considerable overlap, especially around the themes of the naturalness of (heterosexual) desire, its sublimation through self-restraint and individual responsibility, marriage, and motherhood. These last two aspects also form the central focus of the third chapter. Here McEwen argues that the heterosexual couple was the principal object of the sexual reform movement, with women having a special role in protecting their reproductive capacities (and that of their partners) through the acquisition of anatomical knowledge and the prevention of disease and unwanted pregnancy. The literary model of the...

'Like a white crow': migrant women and their emotion work in Sweden

This interview study explores the emotion work carried out by migrant women in the process of their integration into present-day Swedish society. In considering these women’s accounts and experiences of their emotion work, the analytical focus in the article is on the ways in which emotional negotiation may become part of an integration process that provides an opportunity to both change and blend in. Drawing upon Reddy’s (2001) concept of emotional regimes and Hochschild’s (1983) notion of emotion work, the argument centres on the creation and key role of ‘alien habitus’, a concept addressing the formation and performance of the migrant self in the new context and describing an ability to feel part of the host society without losing one’s sense of a coherent inner self.

“Glorious uncertainty”: Business and Adultery in Charlotte Riddell’s Too Much Alone

In the 1860s and 1870s Charlotte Riddell was well-known as the “novelist of the City” of London. Too Much Alone (1860), her first narrative foray into the world of commerce and finance, is both a business novel and a novel of adultery. Focusing on how the text configures the emotional regimes of capitalism, this essay examines Riddell’s representation of irregular desires and capricious feelings in relation to what she sees as endemic in commercial society: not fraud, but insecurity and uncertainty, whether “glorious” or dreary. The experience of uncertainty, I argue, provides the point of intersection between the two narrative strands of business and adultery. Explicitly addressed to business people, the novel offers a lesson in sentimental education, a type of training in the ability to tolerate the uncertain, repackaged as an intense emotional experience.

Introduction: Devotion and Emotions in the Middle Ages

Introduction: Devotion and Emotions in the Middle Ages Tracy Adams, Guest Editor We might point to any number of statements as heralding the rapid rise of the history of emotions as a subfield of history over the past few decades, but an observation by Peter Gay in 1985 seems especially apt: the professional historian, whether consciously or not, “operates with a theory of human nature; he attributes motives, studies passions, analyzes irrationality, and constructs his work on the tacit conviction that human beings possess certain stable and discernible traits, certain predictable, or at least discoverable modes of coping with their experience” (6). In other words, the history of emotions has rendered self-conscious a type of theorizing that historians had always done without acknowledging it. Gay’s point was to emphasize that a sea change had taken place since 1961, when, at the annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, he had proposed that the period between Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes and his execution had aroused communal emotions “bearing the lineaments, and producing the guilt feelings, of parricide.” What had seemed to his audience an egregious transgression, the equivalent of speaking of witchcraft at a medical meeting, Gay observed, was accepted as normal practice by 1985 (12–13). Accepted as normal practice in 1985, or to borrow Barbara Rosenwein’s words, “as a focus rather than as a colorful aside” (Emotional Communities 5), the history of the emotions now thrives with centers devoted to the field spread throughout the world. Moreover, the study is no longer carried out only, or even primarily, by historians, but has become a truly interdisciplinary area of research. The sheer number of monographs, collections, and articles devoted to the subject by researchers from different disciplines bears witness to the now virtually unanimous assumption that such studies are not only legitimate but necessary: human action cannot be grasped fully as the product of rational decisions made by people acting according to conscious beliefs. [End Page 173] The essays in this collection aim to explore some of the work to which our medieval forebears put what we today think of as emotions: how they used emotions for making sense of human nature, keeping the peace, educating communities, marking social distinctions. The essays are diverse, representing several disciplines. However, in their reflections they address some common themes. One is the concepts through which medieval men and women thought about what we call “emotion.” The word “emotion” and its cognates take on their present meaning only in the eighteenth century, and thus it is necessary to make sense of different vocabularies in exploring how our early counterparts understood the phenomenon (Harré and Gillett 152–53). Another is the vitality of medieval interest in the relationship between emotion and devotion: the perceived need for regulation of devotion through various emotional regimes. Still another is the variety of ways in emotion was understood as a communal rather than private phenomenon. The essays all build on recent work on emotions in the Middle Ages, which, ever since Rosenwein made clear in the early years of this millennium the need to revise the common notion of medieval men and women as given to the naïve and violent expression of their passions, has spread in many directions. Several overviews of the scholarship devoted to the history of medieval emotions have laid out the major developments in this relatively new field.1 I will not recycle these useful introductions here. Rather, to situate the essays of this volume, I will describe some of the basic assumptions about emotions with which medieval theoreticians, both theologian-philosophers and lay people, were working and on which the authors here construct their analyses. Important to note is that medieval conceptions of emotion derived from a wide variety of sources, and that, depending on who they read, medieval theoreticians can be sorted roughly into two groups, one emphasizing the irrational aspect of emotion and the other the rational. The first, a tradition traceable to Plato, imagined emotions or passions, pathē, as wild perturbations that arose in the irrational part of the soul and needed to be mastered; the most frequently cited passage for this definition...

Just for fun? The emotional regime of experiential consumption

Experiential consumption emphasizes emotional and hedonic qualities in the marketplace stressing the importance of experiences for ‘the good life’ and positioning consumption as a legitimate way to generate interesting and relevant experiences. The concept of emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001) is used to emphasize the dialectics between structural changes in the modern marketplace and the modern way of perceiving and practising hedonic behaviour. The article considers the main ideas that have furthered modern hedonism and the practices that have transformed the abstract longing for sensitivity into concrete experiential appetites. The development of a regime of experiences is outlined, consisting of a set of techniques to bring about sensual pleasure, a discourse to verbalize the methods of pleasure seeking, and an ideology that turns pleasure into a legitimate existential goal in life for the sake of self-actualization.

Changing ‘emotional regimes’: their impact on beliefs and values in some older women

In common with a number of recent studies of religious change that have taken a gendered approach, this article takes older women as its focus and considers the role the emotions play in religious change, adopting Riis and Woodhead’s new conceptual framework of religious emotion. Emotions, they argue, are not merely private, personal and subjective inner states. Rather, emotions are constructed in the interplay between social agents and structures, including those found within religion. They are also found in the ever-changing relations with complexes of cultural symbols and material settings. This triangulated relationship seldom remains static because the connections – and disconnections – between self, society and symbols alter as emotional ordering is continuously produced and reproduced with adaptations to changing circumstances. They also argue, and as we shall see, the interaction of emotional regimes with power is an important part of the analysis.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Bodies "East" and "West"

Guest Editors' Introduction:Bodies "East" and "West" Jie Guo (bio), Yvonne Ivory (bio), and Jana Fedtke (bio) This special issue is the fruition of the University of South Carolina's 12th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, entitled "Bodies" and held in Columbia on February 25-27, 2010. With an emphasis on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, this conference hosted participants from a wide array of fields—art, anthropology, creative writing, film, history, linguistics, literature, medical history, music, philosophy, and religion—and the essays included here are only a small sample of the extremely diverse papers presented at this lively three-day conference. The topic of the body, of course, is by no means new. A fundamental concept in some of the most established fields, it has been pondered upon, debated about, and treated in various forms of representation for centuries in both "Eastern" and "Western" traditions—from Laozi to Aristotle, from Hokusai Katsushika to Leonardo da Vinci, from Zoroaster to Nietzsche, from Shigehisa Kuriyama to Elizabeth Grosz. Fittingly, the keynote speakers at our conference addressed the representation of the body in Eastern and Western medical discourse. Shigehisa Kuriyama examined the impact of modern technology on our perception of the body and so-called traditional discourses on it; while Peter McIsaac examined the practice of displaying human remains, and critiqued Gunther von Hagens' wildly popular Körperwelten exhibit as merely the latest iteration of a peculiarly German obsession with putting technologically enhanced bodies on display. That the body as a category of investigation still retains its vigor today has to do with several factors. As a concept that has a crucial role in numerous disciplines—anthropology, medicine, philosophy, religion, just to name a few—the body constitutes an ideal venue for border-crossing, a venue where various concepts, issues, and ideas converge and clash, where disciplines encounter, negotiate, and/or contend with each other. Given our emphasis on interdisciplinarity today, it is no wonder that the body, with its capacity to generate questions, discussions, and debates that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, remains one of the most energetically productive domains. The persistance of engagement with "the body" also has to do with the fact that it occupies a key position in some of the most influential theorists' work produced in the past few decades. Take, for example, Michel Foucault, for whom the regulation of the body demonstrates not only the workings of power, but also the ways the modern subject is formed, and thus constitutes a productive angle from which he can critique modernity.1 Or Judith Butler, whose groundbreaking book Gender Trouble, which sees the body not as a stable bearer of a fixed gender, but as a surface on which the signification of a so-called "internal core" is performatively enacted, a surface where "a stylized configuration, [End Page iii] indeed, a gendered corporealization of time" takes place (179),2 has not only had a transformative impact on the field of Women's and Gender Studies but also renewed numerous disciplines' interest in "old" issues such as performance, theatricality, materiality of the body, and identity. Or consider the rise of interest in the history of the senses, a field which in many ways was pioneered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While multiple aspects of visual culture have been explored by scholars in recent decades, the history and representation of the other senses are only now receiving serious attention. The work of Richard Leppert, James Johnson, Nora Alter, and Lutz Koepnick has put acoustic culture on the map, and others are beginning to approach culture and literature from gustatory, tactile, and olfactory angles. Meanwhile, the history of the senses is itself entwined with the history of emotions and emotional regimes—another aspect of corporeality. Fear, love, shock, disgust, joy, terror, shame, anger, and other affects are triggered by and refracted through the senses, and represent just one of new directions that research on the body has taken of late. These are not the only reasons why we pay so much attention to the body, though. We are not interested in the body merely because it has been the locus of debate in various traditions, or because influential people have written about those traditions...

Managing unlawful feelings: the emotional regime of the Swedish migration board

How do organisations develop emotional regimes that make perfect sense to members but appear paradoxical and even morally outrageous to non-members? Exploring the case of a department for the investigation of asylum applications at the Swedish Migration Board (MB), I argue that through repeated and various types of interaction rituals, an emotional regime is enacted and sustained that provides employees with a sense of authenticity, meaning and organisational loyalty. At the department procedural correctness and the professional epitomise the emotional regime and the preferred organisational identity, including ways of acting on and managing emotions. The organisation becomes an emotionally self-enclosed system.

Rationalisierungen des Gefuhls. Zum Verhaltnis von Wissenschaft und Emotionen 1880-1930

The history of emotions is a growing field. Its most famous advocates, William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein, have called on historians to examine different emotional norms and communities, as well as the ways in which past actors attained emotional mastery, switched styles of emotional management, or sought refuge from emotional regimes. The volume under review is much more modest in its objectives: Rationalisierungen des Gefühls is primarily concerned with emotions in the humanities and social sciences. The editors have three aims. They wish to trace past modes of thought about emotions, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they wish to reconstruct the role emotions played in the lives and practices of Wissenschaftler; and, most ambitiously, they wish to study the relationship between scientific interest in the emotions and the ‘emotional culture’ of the surrounding society. In the end, the book mainly addresses the first two objectives, and of the two, only the first is handled with great sophistication.

The Emotional Landscape of Action Learning MBA Teams

This paper is based on empirical studies carried out in the UK and in New Zealand on over 130 MBAs in action learning teams of between 4 and six people on average. The paper’s topic concerns the review and interpretive analysis of a form of action learning in the tacit domain. The study particularly focused on mapping MBA teams’ learning and emotional regimes that they developed. These landscapes were framed within a commitment index based on axes of trust and anxiety. A typology of team’s emotional regimes and an embodied multi-spiral model of individual and collective learning were observed. The emotional regimes and learning in the teams were exhibited in various ways during their engagement in live consulting projects in years 1997-1999, 2000 and 2004. Their semester-long projects ranged across a variety of organisational types from start-up SMEs to major corporations and across functional areas from HR/OB to marketing, strategy, production and quality systems. The industry sectors covered include both public and private sector and the MBAs were both full- and part-time students. The methods used in data gathering and analysis included a triangulation of participant reflections in individual diaries and meeting logs as well as textual analyses of the latter, allied to observer and host organisation managers’ notes plus sample ‘exit’ interviews. A complexity-based frame of analysis within an enactive constructivist paradigm was employed to analyse data. I discuss some questions concerning potential or actual critiques of action learning forms of inquiry as both a management methodology and an academic learning/teaching tool. I also make some suggestions for practical approaches that might be employed to constructively utilise some of these learning maps of this self-organised MBA action learning project in other organisational and/or educational contexts. Thus, the paper begins with a brief review of the importance of teams and some definitions, followed by definition of tacit knowledge and emotions. This leads into some description of the research and methods employed in my work. The research results are then described. Next the emergent model of teams’ emotional regimes and learning is considered. I then conclude with reference to some potential organisational applications and future research development.

Emotionally Sustainable Business and Communities of Commitment

Purpose – This paper aims to review some trends in global corporate citizenship branding stories and consumer values. The focus is on the triple bottom line and teamwork in organisations.Design/methodology/approach – Some implications for the individual employee's occupational citizenship and the development of emotional regimes in teams are considered. A suggested alternative triple bottom line is proposed. The other elements of the “triple bottom line” are not neglected but nested within the typical interpretation of three Ps as an emergent alternative triple bottom line.Findings – This alternative triple bottom line involves a set of emotional and identity issues spiralling around the nature of the emotional relationship that various stakeholders have with any particular organisation's brand story. It is suggested that there is a convergence of values around key issues of consumer ethics, corporate citizenship and sustainability relating to personal as well as product image.Practical implications – Thi...

A Complexity Based Typology of Emotional Regimes in Teams

This paper summarises some of the findings from a two year study of MBA project teams at a UK university. Key findings are firstly, that the teams occupied four main emotional regimes. A small number fell into another, hybrid regime. Secondly, the analytical matrix developed viewed them in terms of key thematic elements. Thirdly, the interaction generated meta-patterns in the enactment of each team’s, self-transcending story. Fourthly, the structuration processes were seen as a fractal variety and characteristically multiple, entwining, spiral type.

Emoties in het kwadraat

Willem Frijhoff, Emotions squaredOne can only approve of Catrien Santing’s and Marjan Schwegman’s plea to pay more attention to emotions in the public sphere as a political factor. Their argument concurs with the growing international trend for research into emotionology, emotional culture and emotional regimes. Although I support their argument, I wish to contend that it should involve two more steps. Firstly, emotions cannot properly be understood as agents of change without an analysis of the interference between the agent’s psyche and their public expression. Secondly, as psyche-bound phenomena, emotions in history easily interfere with the historian’s own emotions. In fact, most historical research involves an emotional commitment from the historian. He/she must discern how far his own emotions may be intertwined with his analysis of historical emotions, and use his historical metier to achieve a conscious and always critical mixture of involvement and distance. This article is part of the forum 'Debat over emoties'.

Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs: the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching

This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression—what the anthropologist William Reddy (1997, 2001) calls emotives. This article makes the above case through the description of findings from a case study of an elementary school teacher (Catherine) who participated in a three‐year ethnographic project investigating the role of emotions in her teaching. Emotional suffering and emotional freedom are examined; such a theorization gives political meaning back to research on teacher emotions and allows us to discern the successes and failures of particular emotional regimes within a school culture.