Emotions as Commodities

Emotions as Commodities PDF

Author: Eva Illouz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1351810596

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Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises the question: how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional? Emotions as Commodities offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption – emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherical or mood-producing commodities, relation-marking commodities and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self. Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through psychotherapy, Emotions as Commodities will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes

Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes PDF

Author: Birgitt Röttger-Rössler

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-06-12

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0387095462

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Emotions have emerged as a topic of interest across the disciplines, yet studies and findings on emotions tend to fall into two camps: body versus brain, nature versus nurture. Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes offers a unique collaboration across the biological/social divide—from psychology and neuroscience to cultural anthropology and sociology—as 15 noted researchers develop a common language, theoretical basis, and methodology for examining this most sociocognitive aspect of our lives. Starting with our evolutionary past and continuing into our modern world of social classes and norms, these multidisciplinary perspectives reveal the complex interplay of biological, social, cultural, and personal factors at work in emotions, with particular emphasis on the nuances involved in pride and shame. A sampling of the topics: (1) The roles of the brain in emotional processing. (2) Emotional development milestones in childhood. (3) Social feeling rules and the experience of loss. (4) Emotions as commodities? The management of feelings and the self-help industry. (5) Honor and dishonor: societal and gender manifestations of pride and shame. (6) Emotion regulation and youth culture. (7) Pride and shame in the classroom. A volume of such wide and integrative scope as Emotions as Bio-cultural Processes should attract a large cohort of readers on both sides of the debate, among them emotion researchers, social and developmental psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, and others who analyze the links between humans that on the one hand differentiate us as individuals but on the other hand tie us to our socio-cultural worlds.

Manufacturing Happy Citizens

Manufacturing Happy Citizens PDF

Author: Edgar Cabanas

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781509537884

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The imperative of happiness dictates the conduct and direction of our lives. There is no escape from the tyranny of positivity. But is happiness the supreme good that all of us should pursue? So says a new breed of so-called happiness experts, with positive psychologists, happiness economists and self-development gurus at the forefront. With the support of influential institutions and multinational corporations, these self-proclaimed experts now tell us what governmental policies to apply, what educational interventions to make and what changes we must undertake in order to lead more successful, more meaningful and healthier lives. With a healthy scepticism, this book documents the powerful social impact of the science and industry of happiness, arguing that the neoliberal alliance between psychologists, economists and self-development gurus has given rise to a new and oppressive form of government and control in which happiness has been woven into the very fabric of power.

The Emotional Logic of Capitalism

The Emotional Logic of Capitalism PDF

Author: Martijn Konings

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-05-27

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0804794502

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The capitalist market, progressives bemoan, is a cold monster: it disrupts social bonds, erodes emotional attachments, and imposes an abstract utilitarian rationality. But what if such hallowed critiques are completely misleading? This book argues that the production of new sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Distinctively secular patterns of attraction and attachment give modern institutions a binding force that was not available to more traditional forms of rule. Elaborating his alternative approach through an engagement with the semiotics of money and the genealogy of economy, Martijn Konings uncovers capitalism's emotional and theological content in order to understand the paradoxical sources of cohesion and legitimacy that it commands. In developing this perspective, he draws on pragmatist thought to rework and revitalize the Marxist critique of capitalism.

Structures of Feeling

Structures of Feeling PDF

Author: Devika Sharma

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-03-05

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 3110391325

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Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Concomitantly, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences. This volume explores the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies at large. The volume is divided into four sections. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions which explore some of the ways in which new media works to produce and intensify affectivity. The essays making up the second part, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate and in other ways get hold of things in our recent and not so recent past – or fail to do so. The essays engage the affective production of presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century, and literary auto-fiction. The third part, Affective Thinking, examines various concepts, theories, and forms of thinking not so much to show how the thinking in question may inform the field of affect studies but rather in order to draw attention to the way in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to matters of affect. New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are the common themes of the essays in the final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.

The Managed Heart

The Managed Heart PDF

Author: Arlie Russell Hochschild

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-03-31

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0520951859

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In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant’s job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector’s job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company’s commercial purpose. Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated its cost to those who do it for a living. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us. On the basis of this book, Hochschild was featured in Key Sociological Thinkers, edited by Rob Stones. This book was also the winner of the Charles Cooley Award in 1983, awarded by the American Sociological Association and received an honorable mention for the C. Wright Mills Award.

The Body

The Body PDF

Author: Chris Shilling

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0198739036

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In this introduction, Chris Shilling considers the social significance of the human body, and the importance of the body to individual and collective identities. He examines how bodies not only shape but are shaped by the social, cultural, and material contexts in which humans live.

The Geopolitics of Emotion

The Geopolitics of Emotion PDF

Author: Dominique Moisi

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0385525362

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In the first book to investigate the far-reaching emotional impact of globalization, Dominique Moïsi shows how the geopolitics of today is characterized by a “clash of emotions.” The West, he argues, is dominated and divided by fear. For Muslims and Arabs, a culture of humiliation is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. Asia, on the other hand, has been able to concentrate on building a better future, so it is creating a new culture of hope. Moïsi, a leading authority on international affairs, explains that in order to understand our changing world, we need to confront emotion. And as he makes his case, he deciphers the driving emotions behind our cultural differences, delineating a provocative and important new perspective on globalization.

Emotional Value

Emotional Value PDF

Author: Janelle Barlow

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2000-04-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1609943414

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Today's consumers demand not only services and products that are of the highest quality, but also positive, memorable experiences. This essential guide shows how organizations can leapfrog their competitors by learning how to add emotional value -the economic value of customers' feelings when they positively experience products and services -to their customers' experiences. Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul, with more than forty years combined experience in the service industry, detail five practices for adding emotional value to customer and staff experiences.

Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader

Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader PDF

Author: Peter L. Brandt

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-02-02

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0470521457

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Trading is generally far more difficult in practice than in theory. The reality is that no trade set up or individual trader or system can identify profitable trades in advance with complete certainty. In A Year of Trading, long-time trader Peter Brandt reveals the anxieties and uncertainties of trading in a diary of his 2009 trades. He explains his thought process as he searches for trading opportunities and executes them. Each trade includes charts, an analysis of the trade, and a play-by-play account of how the trade unfolds.