Download or read book Emotions as Commodities written by Eva Illouz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Manufacturing Happy Citizens written by Edgar Cabanas and published by Polity. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Structures of Feeling written by Devika Sharma and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Epistemology and Emotions written by Georg Brun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undoubtedly, emotions sometimes thwart our epistemic endeavours. But do they also contribute to epistemic success? The thesis that emotions 'skew the epistemic landscape', as Peter Goldie puts it in this volume, has long been discussed in epistemology. Recently, however, philosophers have called for a systematic reassessment of the epistemic relevance of emotions. The resulting debate at the interface between epistemology, theory of emotions and cognitive science examines emotions in a wide range of functions. These include motivating inquiry, establishing relevance, as well as providing access to facts, beliefs and non-propositional aspects of knowledge. This volume is the first collection focusing on the claim that we cannot but account for emotions if we are to understand the processes and evaluations related to empirical knowledge. All essays are specifically written for this collection by leading researchers in this relatively new and developing field, bringing together work from backgrounds such as pragmatism and scepticism, cognitive theories of emotions and cognitive science, Cartesian epistemology and virtue epistemology.

Download or read book Cold Intimacies written by Eva Illouz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly assumed that capitalism has created an a-emotional world dominated by bureaucratic rationality; that economic behavior conflicts with intimate, authentic relationships; that the public and private spheres are irremediably opposed to each other; and that true love is opposed to calculation and self-interest. Eva Illouz rejects these conventional ideas and argues that the culture of capitalism has fostered an intensely emotional culture in the workplace, in the family, and in our own relationship to ourselves. She argues that economic relations have become deeply emotional, while close, intimate relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. This dual process by which emotional and economic relationships come to define and shape each other is called emotional capitalism. Illouz finds evidence of this process of emotional capitalism in various social sites: self-help literature, women's magazines, talk shows, support groups, and the Internet dating sites. How did this happen? What are the social consequences of the current preoccupation with emotions? How did the public sphere become saturated with the exposure of private life? Why does suffering occupy a central place in contemporary identity? How has emotional capitalism transformed our romantic choices and experiences? Building on and revising the intellectual legacy of critical theory, this book addresses these questions and offers a new interpretation of the reasons why the public and the private, the economic and the emotional spheres have become inextricably intertwined.

Download or read book The Emotional Logic of Capitalism written by Martijn Konings and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Why Love Hurts written by Eva Illouz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Download or read book The Body written by Chris Shilling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Very Short 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.

Download or read book The Managed Heart written by Arlie Russell Hochschild and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-03-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Emotional Value written by Janelle Barlow and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Emotions as Bio cultural Processes written by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Capitalism and Desire written by Todd McGowan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Download or read book Cultural Politics of Emotion written by Sara Ahmed and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.

Download or read book Saving the Modern Soul written by Eva Illouz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Saving the Modern Soul' explores the impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives & on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz examines how self-help culture has transformed emotional life & how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences.

Download or read book The Experience Economy written by B. Joseph Pine and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text seeks to raise the curtain on competitive pricing strategies and asserts that businesses often miss their best opportunity for providing consumers with what they want - an experience. It presents a strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences provided by their products.

Download or read book Emotions as Bio cultural Processes written by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Emotional Economy of Holidaymaking written by Yaara Benger Alaluf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often taken for granted that holiday resorts sell intangible commodities such as freedom, enjoyment, pleasure, and relaxation. But how did the desire for a 'happy holiday' emerge, how was 'the right to rest' legitimized, and how are emotions produced by commercial enterprises? To answer these questions, The Emotional Economy of Holidaymaking explores the rise of popular holidaymaking in late-nineteenth-century Britain, which is generally considered to be the birthplace of mass tourism. Drawing on a wide range of texts, including medical literature, parliamentary debates, advertisements, travel guides, popular stories, and personal accounts, the book unravels the role emotions played in British spa and seaside holiday cultures. Introducing the concept of an 'emotional economy', Yaara Benger Alaluf traces the overlapping impact that psychological and economic thought had on moral ideals and performative practices of work and leisure. Through a vivid account of changing attitudes toward health, pleasure, social class, and gender in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, she explains why the democratization of holidaymaking went hand in hand with its emotionalization. Combining the history of emotions with the sociology of commodification, the book offers an innovative approach to the study of the leisure and entertainment industries and a better understanding of how medicalized conceptions of emotions influenced people's dispositions, desires, consumption habits, and civil rights. Looking ahead to the central place of tourism in twenty-first century societies and its relation to stress and burnout, The Emotional Economy of Holidaymaking calls on future research of past and present leisure cultures to take emotions seriously and to rethink notions of rationality, authenticity, and agency.