Abstract
This chapter has three parts. It first identifies what the sociology of emotions offers to understanding economies and how that understanding might be extended. It then considers prominent figures in both sociology and economics—Smith, Spencer, Durkheim, Veblen, Weber and Marshall as well as Keynes and various contemporaries—and their treatment of emotional factors. There are key points here which are often overlooked: the role of macro-processes in generating emotional states; the place of emotion-generating uncertainty in economic life; and closely related, the state of disequilibrium and change as “normal” in economies. The chapter concludes by extending this discussion to the place of emotions in four areas of finance: the role “emotion rules” play in financial markets; money itself; periods of inflation and deflation; and trust and confidence in the economy. To guide the discussion, the chapter adopts as basic distinctions on the one hand, macro and micro approaches and on the other, orthodox and heterodox positions.
The authors gratefully acknowledge comments in preparing this chapter from Harry Blatterer, Joseph de Rivera, Neil Hart, Helmut Kuzmics, Christian von Scheve, and Sam Whimster. A version of this chapter was presented at the biennial meeting of the European Sociological Association in Torino, Italy on 28 September 2013.
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Notes
- 1.
Bourdieu makes a more general criticism. However sociologically improved, he argues, “interactionist visions” cannot “take account of effects that occur outside of any interaction” (2005, p. 195). His concept of ‘fields’ shares ground with Norbert Elias’s work, and also with later sociologists who use structure in the sociology of emotion.
- 2.
- 3.
Barbalet describes these actions as “serial” or “parallel”, involving separate responses of distinct businesses (1998, p. 96).
- 4.
Christian von Scheve also suggested this example in correspondence.
- 5.
However, Granovetter (1985, p. 482) is slightly incorrect: the switch or Great Transformation is not to disembeddedness but to the domination of market norms over the entirety of social life; for example, ‘supply and demand’ forces are social relations and not ‘disembedded’ (see Ingham 1996; Pixley 2010a; also Krippner and Alvarez 2005, p. 28).
- 6.
Bourdieu argues that Weber’s capitalist is more calculating than the orthodox agent who instead “makes their choices on the basis of information furnished by prices” (2005, p. 207). To Weber, the capitalist calculates the current social balance of power (Ingham 2004).
- 7.
- 8.
Alan Blinder alerted Pixley (2004, p. 85) to this FOMC quote ‘behind closed doors’, adding that others asserted authority like this in Treasury, and few committee members could retort that ‘I’ve been on Wall Street for 50 days’. Greenspan’s favourite phrase during his tenure was to say ‘history tells us’, but surely history recounts constant uncertainty under a ‘fog of war’.
- 9.
From Daniel Defoe to Isaac Newton, Emile Zola or Samuel Butler, Mark Twain to Michael Lewis, the literature on money’s emotional power deserves further research.
- 10.
Pixley saw RBS staff dressed like airline stewards at Dusseldorf, Cologne-Bonn and Frankfurt airports many times in 2007–2008. On Lehman, see Pixley (2012, p. 185).
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Pixley, J., McCarthy, P., Wilson, S. (2014). The Economy and Emotions. In: Stets, J., Turner, J. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9130-4_15
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