Emotion and Social Structures: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach

Emile Durkheim in his writings on social solidarity over a hundred years ago made the intriguing logical supposition that emotions are the glue that holds society together (Durkheim 1893/1897; cf. Collins 1990: 27). What Durkheim was possibly trying to elucidate with his claim is that emotions, from a large-scale perspective and contrary to wide held scientific and public beliefs, are regular, relatively stable, and to some extent predictable phenomena that have their origins in the (equally stable) fabrics of society rather than solely in the individual self with its constantly changing needs and desires. Until the late 1970s, this and other claims from early sociologists like Georg Simmel and Max Weber on the significance of affect and emotion have not had a discernable impact on modern social theory. Fortunately, this seems to have changed since the re-discovery of emotions in the various disciplines devoted to the study of social behavior. In the course of this re-discovery, research on emotion from a sociological perspective has attracted an increasing number of scholars to formulate more and more sophisticated theories that contribute to the understanding and explanation of emotion in social contexts. Some of the early disputes in the newly emerged sociology of emotion such as those between so called positivists and social constructionists (Kemper 1981) have ceased by now in favor of a more mature and less contentious debate. However, positivist and social constructionist arguments play a crucial role in understanding the history and, more importantly, the objectives of sociological theories of emotion: they differ from each other mainly in that they make concessions to biological predispositions to different degrees. Positivist accounts are primarily concerned with the social aspects of emotion elicitation and thus advocate a minimal set of biologically hard-wired physiological processes (Kemper 1978; Turner 2000). Constructionists, on the other hand, tend to disregard the role of biological mechanisms and view emotions as a purely social and cultural category (Shott 1979; Armon-Jones 1986). Within this continuum, social theorists have investigated a wide range of issues, for example phenomenological aspects (Denzin 1980), the construction of social action (Heise 1977), the regulation