Bridging power resources and social movements: The role of emotional power in collective action

Abstract

While IR scholars have gained a better understanding of power and collective action from using social movement theory, industrial relations research has remained largely unaffected by their emotional turn. We argue that power resource theory, in particular, could significantly gain explanatory power from integrating the concepts of emotional power (i.e., a strong position within emotional relations and a resource) and emotional habitus (i.e., embodied dispositions towards collective action) into their domain. We demonstrate the plausibility of our approach by conducting a secondary analysis in the field of care work and contribute to solving the puzzle why care workers now increasingly engage in collective action and protests for better pay and working conditions. Alongside the recoding of narrative power resources (e.g., “take care of the care giver”), the development of new emotional positions and dispositions has leveraged and motivated collective action.

Introduction

Since John Kelly's seminal work Rethinking Industrial Relations. Mobilization, Collectivism, and Long Waves (1998) there have been growing calls and efforts to utilise social movement theory (SMT) for analytically refining and revitalising trade union and industrial relations theory (Behrens and Pekarek, 2021; Gahan and Pekarek, 2013; Tapia et al., 2015). SMT has particularly contributed to a stronger theoretical foundation and better understanding of questions like why and how workers and trade unions interact with their various counterparts (e.g., employers, employer associations, the state, and other unions). Contrary to standard economic theory's emphasis on individual interest maximisation, SMT allows to identify the main social, cognitive and emotional processes that are involved in the transformation of individuals and organisations into collective actors. IR scholars have particularly highlighted the valuable contribution of SMT to our understanding of the processes of mobilisation via collective action frames (Benford and Snow, 2000; Tarrow, 2005). In this regard, Kelly (1998: 27f.) understands collective action as the outcome of group related processes involving, among other factors, a sense of grievance or injustice that can be attributed directly to an agency (e.g., the employer) as well as leaders who are able to frame the issues compellingly. In a similar vein, Gahan and Pekarek (2013), in their plea for a more comprehensive and systematic engagement with SMT in industrial relations research, emphasise the contested nature of framing processes in strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2011).

While both, classical and contemporary variants of power resource theory (PRT) argue that the mobilisation of collective action requires linking material (union) demands with meaningful ideas, values and ideologies, the latter also explicitly draws on SMT's cultural-cognitive framework conception. Current variants of PRT originate, predominantly, in the Anglo-American context and argue that unions, despite significant membership declines and considerable losses in influence in wage bargaining and political arenas, remain capable of strategic self-renewal (Frege and Kelly, 2004; Silver, 2003; Voss and Sherman, 2000). Besides structural and associational power (Silver, 2003; Wright, 2000) more recent approaches highlight the significance of cultural power resources, particularly institutional power (e.g., labour rights) and narrative power via the establishment of effective cognitive frames (Arnholtz and Refslund, 2024; Levesque and Murray, 2013; Schmalz et al., 2019). In this regard, McAdam's (1988) notion of cognitive liberation provides an apt description of the processes by which a belief in the legitimacy of the status quo is being transformed into a sense of injustice or grievance and hence, a motivation for collective action (Kelly, 1998: 27, 29). While Kelly (1998) emphasises the microsocial processes that lead to feelings of discontent, more recent PRT shares a basic understanding of framing processes as primarily cognitive, thought-based constructions of meaning and significance. Their conception also resonates with what has been called the cognitive turn in cultural and social movement studies (c.f. Swidler, 1986, 1995).

PRT has largely neglected the emotional grounding of cultural-cognitive processes and action patterns, and their relevance for power relations and dispositions for collective action. We argue that PRT could significantly gain explanatory power from systematically integrating emotions into their domain. Meanwhile, the emotional turn in SMT has inspired a plethora of theoretical and empirical studies that view emotions as power resources as well as enabling or constraining psychological conditions for collective action (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005; Gould, 2009; Jasper, 2011, 2020; Moon, 2013; Whittier, 2017). Emotions are no longer perceived as “moments of madness” (Zolberg, 1972) in political disputes and in opposition to rational action orientation but as a ubiquitous phenomenon in social inequality relations and protest movements (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005). This development in SMT stands in stark contrast to research within IR and PRT. A search for “emotion” and “industrial relations” or “emotion” and “employment relations” in the titles, abstracts, and indexes of articles in the Web of Science / Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from 1900 to the present however, yields only 17 and 6 results, respectively; broadening the search to include “emotion*” yields 63 and 25 results, respectively. Adding “power” as a further keyword to the last two queries reduces the results to four (emotion* AND “industrial relations” AND power) and two (emotion* AND “employment relations” AND power). Substituting “industrial relations” or “employment relations” with “trade unions” (emotion* AND “trade unions” AND power) also yields a single-digit number of results, namely three (retrieved on February 28, 2025).

In this article, we propose to integrate emotions into PRT and to reformulate them based on a relational social theoretical perspective inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's field-capital-habitus framework. In particular, we suggest introducing the concept of “emotional power” into PRT as both, an analytical category in its own right comparable to other types of power resources, and a conception that modifies and expands our understanding of power, especially cultural (e.g., narrative, ideational, ideological) power, respectively. Besides the category of emotional power (i.e., a strong position within collective-emotional relations and a resource) we therefore employ the conception of emotional habitus (i.e., embodied dispositions towards collective action) to emphasise the internalisation of social hierarchies and symbolic violence. The latter refers to the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of socially recognized relations of domination and exploitation (Bourdieu, 1977) which can be observed, for instance, in the legitimacy and acceptance of comparatively low pay and poor working conditions in the field of care work. Moreover, symbolic violence also leads to emotional dispositions that often inhibit rather than facilitate collective action. Although these relations of symbolic violence and hence, emotional power are often incorporated and repressed into the unconscious (habitus), they are – under particular circumstances – potentially mobilisable as a resource and disposition for collective action.

This paper builds on a generative interpretation of Bourdieu's social theory (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005) in challenging and extending PRT. In contrast to some contemporary strands within PRT which favour an agentic perspective on power, we understand power as capacity embedded in social relations and hence, a potential or inhibition for collective action. The paper specifically addresses the following questions: How can emotional power and emotional habitus are theoretically integrated into PRT? How can emotional power resources be mobilised for collective action? And what is their relation to other power resources within PRT, e.g., structural, associational, institutional and narrative power?

The structure of the article is as follows. First, we will present and evaluate established PRT, explain their understanding of power and ask where the proposed concept of emotional power might potentially extend, revise, and challenge PRT. Building on this, we will develop a proposal to strengthen a relational theoretical perspective on power and to integrate emotional power and emotional habitus into a broader and reformulated PRT. In what follows, we discuss the plausibility of our expanded PRT based on a secondary analysis of literature on emotions and collective action in the field of care work. Finally, we will address the potentials and limitations of the proposed PRT and draw some conclusions.

PRT and their understanding of power

Classical, class theory inspired variants of PRT emphasise the structural power asymmetry between capital and labour to the detriment of the employee side within capitalist societies (Esping-Andersen, 1985; Korpi, 1985; cf. Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980). They also argue though that employees possess structural and organisational power potentials that they can assert in their mobilisations against the employer side, under certain circumstances. In his analysis, the Swedish sociologists Walter Korpi (1978, 1985), in particular, focuses on studying “how labour mobilised, utilised, and institutionalised its power resources to offset the structural dominance of capital and create societal changes during the middle of the twentieth century” (Arnholtz and Refslund, 2024: 6). These authors perceive the outcomes of class-related conflicts and power struggles as strong welfare state development and hence a temporary victory of politics against markets (Esping-Andersen, 1985). As the tide turned again and the power of unions declined (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013), changes in the relations of power among actors have not only affected IR actors’ strategies of conflict and cooperation at the workplace, in wage bargaining and political arenas.

PRT with their focus on trade union power resources also lost some of their previous appeal and employer-centred approaches such as, for instance, the varieties of capitalism approach (VofC) have become more dominant within the theoretical toolbox in explaining welfare states and social policies (Hall and Soskice, 2001; Martin and Swank, 2012). Placing more emphasis on cooperation between labour and capital, especially in the coordinated market economy type, VofC has redirected the focus from the logics of conflicts and power relations away to logics of inter-class cooperation and their consequences for labour, such as inside-outsider divisions among the workforce (e.g., Hassel, 2014; Hassel and Palier, 2021). Placing firms at the centre of analysis however, does not necessarily mean that power-resources of labour and class conflicts do no longer have an effect on employers and their strategies and goals (Thelen, 2012: 155). Moreover, Korpi's (1978) relational approach and interest in power configurations and the distribution of power does not principally preclude actors, such as employers, from exercising power vis-á-vis other actors, such as unions or the state.

Yet, contemporary PRT has refocussed their attention away from explanations of broader societal changes to more concrete power struggles between and among IR actors at the workplace and beyond. Refslund and Arnholtz (2022) also observe an analytical shift of PRT to move more towards the study of contemporary labour politics and labour market sociology. Even if the empirical focus of current PRT has therefore somewhat narrowed, it still comprises a broad range of topics including closely related policy areas like occupational pensions (e.g., Keune, 2018) or the power positions of workers within global supply chains and production networks (Flecker, 2024).

A common denominator of these studies is the premise that even though organised labour has lost much of its previous power, unions remain capable of strategic self-renewal. Moreover, unions can mobilise and refine a variety of different power resources in order to meet contemporary challenges and to fight for better wages and working conditions. In this regards, current PRT distinguish between various forms of power resources at the core of which is Wright's (2000) distinction. Wright proposes two categories of power resources, associational and structural, which Silver (2003) and others have further elaborated and extended. Structural power refers to labour's (temporary) strong economic position vis-á-vis employers within capitalist production systems. There are two sub-forms of structural power, i.e., (1) the bargaining position in labour markets is strengthened by workers’ possession of in-demand but scarce skills and abilities (“marketplace bargaining power”), while (2) an enhanced workplace bargaining position (“workplace bargaining power”) arises from the strategic location of a specific group of employees within a key industry (Silver, 2003: 11). In addition, associative power potentials can emerge independently of or in combination with structural power resources when a group of employees successfully organises collectively and, for instance, establishes a permanent structure for representing labour interests in the form of unions or political parties. Associational power functions on different levels: the workplace, the sector and the societal levels (Wright, 2000) and – as is the case of all power resources – it depends on whether workers and / or union members are able and willing to use their associational potential to improve their position.

Early on, however, PRT also recognised the importance of internal cohesion and solidarity among workers for successful mobilisation and hence, the connection of material union demands with meaningful and shared narratives, ideas, values, and ideologies. Marxist approaches of classical PRT connect these cultural elements with their conception of working-class consciousness. Class-consciousness however, does not develop automatically from workers’ position vis-á-vis employers within the capitalist production system but must be established (Fantasia, 1988; Hyman, 1996; Offe and Wiesenthal, 1980). Contemporary PRT has therefore drawn among other sources from SMT to better understand these cultural processes of mobilisation by employing the concept of collective action frames (Benford and Snow, 2000; Tarrow, 2005). Levesque and Murray (2013: 777f.), for instance, refer to cultural-cognitive frameworks (in short: frames) as narrative power resources because they serve to aggregate identities and interests, explain new situations and contexts, and translate them into common motivations for collective action. In this context, Schmalz and Dörre (2014: 231) use the broader term of societal discourse power and argue that it is particularly effective for trade unions when their narratives align with prevailing moral standards, i.e., norms and values that are deeply rooted in societal consciousness. Moreover, employers also make use of dominant societal narratives, as Kinderman (2017) shows in his case of German and Swedish employers who set up think tanks and used discourse as a power resource to pursue an aggressive liberalising agenda.

With the entrenchment or even institutionalisation of (historical and current) cultural power relations in favour of employees (e.g., collective labour and social security law), another form of power emerges alongside the primary power derived from the nature of structural dependency relationships. In the literature, this form of power is referred to as secondary power of employees, which “is based on rules and institutions that have already been collectively fought for or established by the state” (Jürgens, 1984: 61). Brinkmann et al. (2007: 13) identify this third form of power—alongside structural, associative, and narrative power—as institutional power. They attribute to institutional power the characteristic that “[it] enshrines social basic compromises across economic cycles and short-term changes in societal power relationships, and partially codifies them legislatively” (ibid.). Syrovatka (2024), for instance, demonstrates in his analysis of power resources in German metal industry that both trade unions and employers’ associations rely on institutional power resources, such as the maintenance of the collective bargaining system.

To sum up, classical and contemporary PRT appreciate the role of both, cultural-cognitive elements (e.g., cognitive frames, class consciousness or a common set of beliefs that workers hold regarding their social class and common interests) and emotional elements (e.g., feelings of solidarity, a common sense of injustice, trust in each other) when it comes to motivate and mobilise collective action. In their conceptions of power however, the emotional underpinnings of power, especially cultural power, as well as collective emotions as enabling or inhibiting forces for collective action, are widely ignored. Why is this the case? And what kinds of analytical and explanatory problems might arise from ignoring emotional power relations and their interlinkage with emotional dispositions (habitus) as potential leverage for collective action? Before we elaborate on these questions, we challenge the narrow action-oriented perspective within many current strands of PRT and instead suggest reinforcing a relational perspective on power and on how power is inscribed in embodied dispositions for collective action. In the section following this, we aim to embed emotional power into the contemporary typology of PRT, first, as analytical form of power in its own right besides other types of power resources (e.g., structural, associative, institutional, narrative, etc.) and second, to enrich and extend specifically the cultural (i.e., ideational, narrative, ideological, institutional) dimension of power relations.

Power over versus power to, or both?

Besides their more elaborated debate on the forms of power resources (see, for instance, Arnholtz and Refslund 2024), current PRT differs from classical PRT in terms of their understanding of power. Classical, especially Marxist-inspired PRT takes for granted a relational conception of power and perceive capitalists as having “power over” workers. In contrast, many current variants of PRT either implicitly or explicitly draw on an action-theoretical definition of power or—what Arnholtz and Refslund (2024: 9) refer to as—a “power through agency perspective”. The widely cited, so-called Jena approach, for instance, as represented among others by the German authors Stefan Schmalz and Klaus Dörre, has recently been criticised for neglecting (class) relations between capital and labour in favour of an action theory approach (Gallas, 2019; Nowak, 2019). Following Max Weber (1980: 28), Schmalz and Dörre understand power as “any chance within a social relationship to impose one's own will even against resistance” (Schmalz and Dörre, 2014: 221). In following Levesque and Murray (2010: 335f.), they emphasise that working-class power is primarily understood as the power to do something (power to) rather than the power to determine the rules of the game (power over) (ibid.). This understanding suggests that there are fundamentally different forms of power, with “power to” being understood as a dispositional category in the sense of an action-related empowerment of employees and unions to enforce their interests, while “power over” can be comprehended as a relational category in terms of a power relationship (cf. also Pansardi, 2012: 73f.).

Recent critiques of current PRT indicate that focusing solely on action-based definitions of power is limiting, as they overlook how “power to” is embedded within relational dependencies and configurations of power. Besides structural and associational power, this is especially true for cultural power or what Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) convincingly elaborated as the relation between ideas and power in their analysis of how different kinds of power – be it compulsory, structural, institutional or ideational – are connected with each other. They also draw on Bourdieu (1998) who takes “a similar approach to the structuring power of ideas when he argues that the doxa or vision of the world of elites who dominate the state creates the ‘habitus’ that conditions people to see the world in the way they (the dominant) choose” (Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016: 331). A relational perspective suggests that power is not merely the possession of resources within social interactions but an outcome and precondition of actors’ relative power positions vis-á-vis each other and of their capacities to affect these distributions of power. In this regard, Arnholtz and Refslund (2024) draw inspiration from both, the “power through agency perspective” and a relational perspective that they call “power through structure perspective”. They define power resources as resources “actors can mobilise to amplify their capacity to promote, accommodate, or resist societal change in accordance with their interests” (ibid., p. 10). In their seminal paper on how the organisation of ideas in employment relations affects the trajectories of labour market policies, Morgan and Hauptmeier (2021) follow a similar route in emphasizing the capacity of structured networks of actors, institutions, and communication channels that create, disseminate, and influence policy and knowledge within the employment sphere. Hence, they write, “ideas do matter and have an ‘influence of their own’ even though ‘their uptake and influence on action is affected by other conditions’ such as power relations and institutional constraints” (ibid., p. 777). In a critical response to the Jena approach (see above), also Gallas (2019) argues from a relational standpoint: „If the relational route is taken, any collective activity of workers must be assessed in terms of how it reflects, and impacts on, the underlying class relations of forces. This includes examining what kind of effects the goals of workers’ movements and organisations have on the relations of forces if they are achieved” (Gallas, 2019: 249). Similarly, Nowak (2019) critiques the Jena approach for allegedly having a social-democratic bias, which Schmalz et al. (2019) rightly refute, pointing out that this approach's goal is not to explain capitalism's structural logic but to empower workers to confront capital effectively. Thus, Schmalz et al. (2019) concede their „rather modest agenda“ and maintain that their PRT (i.e., the Jena approach) „is not a concept designed to grasp the structural logic of capitalism, but rather a tool to explain how workers empower themselves in order to confront capital and the capitalist state in concrete cases” (Schmalz et al., 2019: 88).

Given this debate, we advocate (1) for a more comprehensive relational perspective on power resources and (2) suggest to distinguish between power resources as derived from a group's strong (structural, associational, narrative, institutional and emotional) position within a social field on the one hand and incorporated dispositions or motivations towards collective action (habitus) on the other hand, both of which are deeply interconnected and comprise a cognitive as well as an emotional dimension. In this regard, we directly challenge and reformulate contemporary PRT by utilizing and extending Bourdieu's field-capital-habitus framework.

In the following, we propose a possible way of how to integrate emotional power, defined as (1) strong emotional position within relational social fields, (2) a resource, and (3) dispositions (emotional habitus) towards collective action that are themselves structured (though not determined) along power relations, into the domain of a reformulated relational PRT.

Relational PRT and emotional power

The question of how power relations inscribe themselves collectively into the psyche of employees and other labour relations actors, and what role collective emotions and dispositions play as – analytically – independent power resource and motivation in labour conflicts, has not yet been addressed within PRT. We argue that this neglect of the collective-emotional dimension of power systematically dismisses a central explanation of what leverages as well as motivates or inhibits collective action. There exist promising approaches regarding the subversive role of humour (Schaupp, 2021; Taylor and Bain, 2003), the significance of care ethics (Baines, 2011; Becker et al., 2018; Cunningham et al., 2017), and the microsocial and emotional aspects of group identity and cohesion (Kelly, 1998; see also Pernicka, 2005 on a Weberian conception of emotional affectivity and collective action). Yet, IR literature and PRT, in particular, exhibits a significant gap in terms of systematically analysing the role of emotional power and habitus in collective action.

Drawing especially on Emirbayer's and Goldberg's (2005) generative reading of Bourdieu's field-capital-habitus conception, we base our argument on the fundamental premise that emotions must be understood as a relational category. It is not only about expressing angry protests (emotion as an attribute) or fear as an inhibiting emotion of collective action (emotion as a noun). Rather, we argue that emotional configurations—i.e., emotional relations between individuals and groups—have a lasting influence as empowering or inhibiting conditions for collective action. Emotional relations and habitus are often taken for granted and deeply embedded and interwoven into structural, associational and cultural power relations. Yet, emotional power relations and embodied dispositions exert an effect of their own on the possibilities and constraints of (successful or failed) collective action processes. Emotional power is defined as a strong position within emotional relations of power (or capital, a term that is used interchangeably by Bourdieu) in particular social fields and hence, a potential resource for collective action. Emotional power relations are also expressions of symbolic domination because the latter transforms the “dispositions that lead the dominated to take the point of view of the dominant on the dominant and on themselves” (Bourdieu, 2001: 41–42) and hence establishes collective psychological matrices (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005: 484). These psychological matrices along with structural, associational, cultural and symbolic power relations shape the worldviews and practices of employment relations actors and hence, their ability and willingness to act collectively. In the field of paid care work, for instance, emotional power relations between employers and workers still largely play out to the detriment of the later. This is the case because emotional power relations shape what Gould (2009), in drawing on Bourdieu, has called emotional habitus. By emotional habitus, she means “the socially constituted, prevailing ways of feeling and emoting, as well as the embodied, axiomatic understandings and norms about feelings and their expression” (ibid., p. 10). In care work, it is primarily the patriarchal societal structures that create a specific habitus through (occupational) socialisation, resulting in class-specific, occupational, and gendered emotional structures.

Darcy and Lauzon (1983: 175, cited in Briskin, 2012: 290) accurately describe the difficulty of overcoming a socially and professionally subordinate emotional position such as in the field of care work and hence, negative emotional power in labour struggles: “Women are trained to feel responsible for the people they care for, whether at home or on the job. Consequently, they can easily be made to feel guilty if they refuse to take care. […] And when they do strike, the media may depict them as ‘heartless and unfeeling’.” The culturally gendered understanding of care work, embedded in care ethics, and the emotional labour of care workers for the benefit of patients and clients (Baines, 2011) are positioned against workers in order to maintain the dominant power structure. Baines (2011) has further developed the concept of emotional labour by taking up Arlie Hochschild's (1983) groundbreaking work The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Hochschild views employees’ emotions as a management resource to enhance and expedite service delivery (e.g., the ever-smiling flight attendant), whereas Baines highlights the resistant potentials of emotional labour, particularly in maintaining a care ethics that persists despite the efficiency-driven pressures of New Public Management strategies. By going beyond Hochschild's understanding of emotional labour as describing workers to display or mask their feelings within various service sector labour processes for remuneration, and extending Bolton's (2000, 2005) emotion work as a “gift” in professional care work, Baines (2011) suggests a solidarity-gift model. The latter goes against the grain of narrow professionalism (prescriptive workplace emotion) and a society that often vilifies poor and excluded people, and reflects the participatory, equity-driven values as well as hard emotional labour on the part of workers (ibid., p. 151).

Mobilisations by care workers seeking higher wages and better working conditions alongside societal justice and solidarity however, do not only face verbal de-legitimisation (i.e., negative narrative power). Care workers also face employers’ strategies of discipline and control played out on the basis of largely invisible emotional relations of subordination. Care workers’ weak position within emotional relations (i.e., low levels of emotional power within configurations of emotional power) is also inscribed in their bodies and psyches and thus, can inhibit mobilisation by inducing feelings of fear, shame and guilt. Potential emotional resources, such as anger over degrading working conditions in the care sector and resentment towards those responsible (management, state), are often morally devalued in public discourse (Kurt, 2023). The use of emotional resources like contempt and blame-shifting by management and state actors aims to stabilise their superior emotional power position and discipline care workers.

Why are emotional power structures and hence, emotional dispositions towards collective action sometimes so deeply entrenched and difficult to change? Bourdieu's already mentioned conception of habitus can help better understand this phenomenon. Bourdieu understands habitus as a structured structure of perception, evaluation, and action, and as a structuring structure in the sense of a generative principle of practices. Habitus can be altered through learning experiences; however this is not a straightforward process ¹ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996: 173). The resistance to change, or so-called inertia, of habitus can be traced back to at least three possible explanations. First, the habitus is so deeply (and largely unconsciously) rooted within human bodies and practice that it requires no justification (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996: 208). Second, the habitus pre-structures the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours learned often over generations and via established practice. Third, the habitus reflects power relations in the social, symbolic, and emotional realms, as well as within the respective fields of practice. When, as in the aforementioned example of collective action in care work, shame and humiliation or the evocation of guilt become a disciplining instrument and an emotional yet unrecognized—because socially sanctioned—phenomenon of subordination, Bourdieu refers to this, as has already mentioned above, as symbolic violence. In his later work, Masculine Domination, Bourdieu (2001) compellingly elucidates the nature of symbolic—subtle—violence in regards to gender relations, contrasting it with overt, physical violence. Bourdieu however, does not depict submissiveness as irrational, nor does he “blame the victim”. The dispositions that incline them toward this complicity are themselves the effect, embodied, of domination (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005: 492). Similarly, Burawoy's (1979) seminal book Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism can be understood in the context of the subtle discipline and control of industrial workers under monopoly capitalism. However, as Schaupp (2021: 16) notes with reference to Burawoy (1979), humour can help these workers create organisational subcultures that transcend external dividing lines, such as those based on origin.

While Bourdieu differentiates between two dimensions of social order—social and symbolic space, as well as social positions and positioning, correspondingly—Emirbayer and Goldberg (2005: 505), building on a generative interpretation of Bourdieu's social theory, propose an analytically distinct third social-spatial dimension, namely the realm of collective emotional positioning ² . Bourdieu's concept of social space is complex and differs from classical representations of hierarchical social orders (typically illustrated in the form of a pyramid). Schultheis (2015) describes the concept of “space” as initially heuristically significant for Bourdieu's perspective on the social world: it compels thinking in terms of relations and structures and is particularly suited to prevent substantialist or essentialist spontaneous theories. “For Bourdieu, sociology primarily concerns the relationship of forces and tensions between individual and collective actors within a space that has been shaped and unfolded by these very forces. Societal reality thus manifests primarily in the form of mutually conditioning as well as mutually exclusive elements, which, through their interactions, bring this space into prominence” (ibid., p. 15; transl. from German by the author of this paper). “For Bourdieu's view of individual actors, consistent relational thinking leads to the consequence that they are always seen as socially positioned—an epistemological assumption incompatible with the premises of methodological individualism, which becomes decisive in Bourdieu's theory of habitus. Each individual occupies a specific location in social space at a given point in their biographical trajectory and perceives the social world from this vantage point” (ibid., p. 16; transl. from German by the author of this paper).

The narrative positioning of many care workers following the COVID-19 pandemic, encapsulated in the statement “Applause is not enough”, for instance, also serves as an emotional stance that challenges the dominant perspective which views care work as an extension of activities that women are perceived to “naturally” perform, often leading to low or no wages. The “naturalness” of the symbolic and emotional subordination and devaluation of care work is radically questioned. This might lead to a possible transformation of cognitive understandings and emotional attachments. The feelings of guilt associated with abandoning patients because work is collectively halted could be translated into a confident demand asserting that the long-term care of patients or clients can only be ensured if the fundamental material and psychological needs of care workers are adequately addressed first.

In addition, emotional attachments ³ and investments (or disinvestments) are not only necessary preconditions for exercising structural and associational power. We argue that emotional power is a distinct potential source of power. Bourdieu (1990: 66) refers to the (emotional) commitment to the field also as “illusio in the sense of investment in the game and the outcome, interest in the game, commitment to the presuppositions – doxa – of the game”. Actors can possess emotional power without having significant economic resources or a privileged social or cultural position. Power, therefore, is also a matter of one's position within movements and investments in (psychic) energy; it depends on positioning within a network of emotional bonds, identifications, or trust, and it is only partially conscious to the bearers. The cognitive awareness of unequal class, gender, and emotional relations, as previously described, is insufficient to overcome the deeply ingrained emotional dispositions. Overcoming a low position within the collective-emotional structure and thereby symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu, requires nothing less than a symbolic (and material) revolution (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005: 493). Such a symbolic (including emotional) revolution, as Emirbayer and Goldberg (ibid.) assert, can only be accomplished “through a withdrawal of psychical investments [which] can pose a serious threat to a collective-psychological power structure.” In addition, they argue in a plea to the research community: “We need to inquire into the mechanisms that lead to the withdrawal of psychical investments” (ibid., p. 493). Hence, the question remains, under what conditions and how can collective emotional power and habitus be employed against employers and become a coercive force independently of other power resources.

In addition, and in order to get a better understanding of the power resources and motivations for collective action, it is necessary to consider the respective power relations (structural, associational, institutional, narrative and emotional) and their empirically varying interconnections, as well as the perceptions and interpretations of the actors involved. While it is important to assume a fundamentally asymmetric power relationship between employees and employers in capitalist societies—wherein union power resources are primarily understood as counter-power of employees (as emphasised by Marxist PRT)—a relational approach suggests that power positions and stances do not possess a static or substantial character but rather vary according to field structure and dynamics. The following overview presents our proposal for a reformulated and extended PRT that includes besides cognitive dispositions also emotional dispositions both of which make up what Bourdieu referred to as habitus (see Figure 1). As outlined in detail above the conception of habitus is regarded as consisting of “dispositions, schemas, forms of know-how and competences, all of which function below the threshold of consciousness, shaping it in particular ways” (Crossley, 2001: 93).

Figure 1.

Relational PRT, emotional power and habitus.

The long-standing neglect of the emotional dimension of collective action within industrial relations and trade union research warrants explanation. One reason may be the dominance of economic, business, legal, and sociological researchers in the interdisciplinary industrial relations community, which tends to pay less attention to (social) psychological phenomena. Another important reason may lie in the cognitive turn in cultural sociological discourse since the 1990s that, despite the later emotional turn in SMT, largely prevails. Sociologist and social movement researcher, Ann Swidler (1986, 1995) aptly emphasises the central importance of cultural resources beyond psychological inclinations: “At least since E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), of course, sociologists have examined how established cultural resources are reappropriated in new contexts. The argument proposed here goes beyond this, however. The significance of specific cultural symbols can be understood only in relation to the strategies of action they sustain. Culture does not influence how groups organize action via enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization. Instead, publicly available meanings facilitate certain patterns of action, making them readily available, while discouraging others. It is thus not the rearrangement of some free-floating heritage of ideas, myths, or symbols that is significant for sociological analysis. Rather, it is the reappropriation of larger, culturally organised capacities for action that gives culture its enduring effect” (Swidler, 1986: 283). Cultural power, according to Swidler (1995: 34), is particularly effective when it can influence the way others think about their own (collective) actions, largely irrespective of whether individuals believe these interpretations or have internalised them as values. The significance of culture is explicitly not viewed as internalised values and belief systems; rather, it is understood primarily in the form of cognitive codes and interpretative frameworks, whose reformulation can generate specific power resources. Even though the emotional dimension of collective action is regarded as a part of culture (as opposed to an independent analytical category) it is dismissed here as an explanatory variable for collective action.

Emotional power and collective action in the field of care work

In this section, we discuss the plausibility of the reformulated PRT expanded to include emotional power and habitus, based on a secondary analysis of selected pieces of the huge international literature on care work (among others, Artus et al., 2017; Baines, 2011; Becker et al., 2018; Briskin, 2012; Pulignano et al., 2024, 2025; Trappmann et al., 2022). The integration of emotional power resources and dispositions into the discussion of facilitating or inhibiting conditions for collective action transcends a mere addition of another power resource. Rather, the interconnections and interactions of power relations as potential resources and motivations for collective action must be understood as a dynamic process. The field of care work is particularly suitable for examining the significance of emotional power resources and habitus for collective action, even though, we argue, emotional power relations play a role in other sectors as well.

The field of care work exhibits a seemingly contradictory relationship that recurs in the literature and observations of protests within the care sector (e.g., in hospitals, child and elderly care), a sentiment aptly expressed by a British trade union activist. During a rally in the context of the “Care and Support Workers Organise (CASWO)” campaign in Britain, the labour activist states in an interview, “The thing for care workers is that it is almost ingrained into our psyches that we cannot strike” (Bradley, 2023). The care sector, predominantly comprised of female workers, is an area where, in comparison to male-dominated industrial work, strikes either infrequently occurred (Artus et al., 2017; Baines, 2011; Becker et al., 2018) or have been characterised by particularly militant tactics (Briskin, 2012) and innovative union approaches, including the “organising approach” ⁴ that especially German trade unions began adopting in hospitals and elderly care homes (Pernicka et al., 2016). At the same time however, there has been a globally increased—visible in the streets and workplaces—readiness among predominantly female workers to organise collectively, advocate publicly for better pay and working conditions, and demand a comprehensive systemic change (Artus et al., 2017; Dribbusch et al., 2023; Kaminska and Kahancová, 2011; Trappmann et al., 2022). Why is this the case?

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines care work “as consisting of activities and relations involved in meeting the physical, psychological, and emotional needs of adults and children, old and young, frail and able-bodied” (ILO, 2018: 6). The wave of protests and strikes in the care sector can be interpreted as a response to a series of well-known challenges to “good care work,” which the ILO extensively describes in its report Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (ILO, 2018). The key challenges include demographic developments, pandemic and health risks associated with industrial Western lifestyles, state austerity policies, changing family structures, and a globally increasing labour force participation of women, who constitute the majority of paid and unpaid care workers. “Gender stereotypes” are cited as a significant reason for the fact that 66 percent of all care workers globally are women, and that 19.3 percent of employed women work in the care sector (health, social, and educational professions) (ILO, 2018: 8). In this regard, Pulignano et al. (2025) point to the “ideal worker” norm in the care sector that is tightly interrelated with the assumption that care work is something women do “naturally”—as if they have some “natural” capacities to look after others. “These capacities are framed by the identity women develop early in their lives as a result of their socially constructed gender roles involving taking care of their young and elderly family members (i.e., ‘care for care’)” (ibid., p. 123). The gender-specific composition alongside the neo-liberalisation and marketisation of the care sector (Martain, 2023) might also contribute to a better understanding of the unique patterns of collective action in the field of care work. However, these explanations are insufficient to account for the observable increase in protest and strike activities in the sector over the last two decades and especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The unique combination of patriarchal devaluation of female-coded activities, a growing proletarianisation of care work due to restructuring, as well as the high emotional commitment and dedication of care workers, along with an increasing professionalisation of care tasks, has produced a distinctive pattern of overlapping solidarities, according to Briskin (2012) in her literature review study. These solidarities include, for example, professional solidarities, gender alliances, union and non-union initiatives, as well as workplace coalitions against austerity measures. Together, they have also led to militant, highly politicised forms of collective action beyond statistically recorded and union-organised strikes, such as collective sick leaves or mass resignations. Briskin (2012: 291) argues that the high emotional engagement and commitment of care workers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are more likely to encourage strike behaviour rather than deter employees: “For many nurses, the decision to strike meant they had to overcome their socialisation both as nurses and women. It only came as the result of extreme frustration and anger” (Bessant 1992: 166, cited in Briskin, 2012: 291).

The overcoming of socialisation as care workers and as women, combined with the high socioeconomic and emotional pressures manifested as frustration and anger, appears to be a central prerequisite and mechanism for emotional transformation processes toward politicisation and collective action. The dispositions of care workers and their willingness to confront conflicts and engage collectively seemingly require them to successfully challenge the unspoken, pre-reflexive so-called “doxic” assumptions and practices, transform their emotional attachments, and defend themselves against attempts at emotional discipline (care workers being labelled as heartless and unfeeling, cf. above). This is even more remarkable, as Pulignano et al. (2025) found in their comparative study of residential care work in Germany and the United Kingdom after the COVID-19 pandemic, care workers are aware “that any acts of rebellion would likely cause more harm to the residents than their employers” (ibid., p. 158). Furthermore, the growing professional pride and confidence in their own skills and knowledge, as argued by Becker et al. (2018: 361) in their study of German care workers, collide with the market- and competition-driven devaluation of care work. They however also carry the potential to be transformed into “subjective” power resources that could also be mobilised by unions, according to the authors. As subjective and emotional transformations, i.e., the overcoming of incorporated patterns of perception, appreciation and feeling, are tightly interrelated with and challenge the symbolic order of things however, they demand tremendous and permanent efforts and cannot be achieved over night. One of the most promising trade union strategies aiming at such a transformation or “symbolic revolution”, as Bourdieu put it (see above), refers to the previously mentioned “organising approach” and “house-by-house-organising” (Dribbusch et al., 2023; see also “Bred and Roses”, a 2000 film directed by Ken Loach). The most visible success of this long-standing approach in the field of care work in Germany is the achievement of so called “workload-relief campaigns” (Entlastungskampagnen), i.e., legally binding agreements that ensure minimum staffing levels or compensatory measures when staffing is insufficient. What becomes most visible in these campaigns is that organising is not just about a cognitive (re)framing of legitimate grievances. It is about a deep collective reconfiguration of emotional structures and habitus which might be utilised as power resources to potentially overcome symbolic violence. By their focus on dignity, respect, and professional pride, care workers and trade unions have persevered despite severe counter-attacks by employers. They have achieved to mitigate fear and shame and hence, to challenge existing emotional and symbolic relations of domination and exploitation.

The increasing occurrences of protests and strikes in the care sector since the Covid-19 pandemic also highlight another important mechanism favouring collective action, namely the interplay of socioeconomic, political (austerity measures, staff shortages), and emotional (significantly increased emotional pressure, burnout) dynamics, which have manifested in protest actions that are now also supported by unions. In the United States, for example, where union organisation rates are very low and union-organised strike activities are rare, more than one-third of the total 23 major strikes (involving over 1000 employees) in 2022 occurred in the education sector (9) and in health and social services (8) (American Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). Strikes have increasingly shifted from industrial sectors to the service sector, particularly in the developed democracies of the Global North. In Germany, Artus and Pflüger (2015) note that since the mid-2000s, public perceptions of strikes have increasingly been shaped by women, as the areas where women constitute the majority of employees largely belong to the public welfare sector (especially the care sector) (Dribbusch et al., 2023). For instance, the first nationwide strike in German day-care facilities occurred in 2009. Additionally, in Austria, there has been an observed increase in the mobilisation of workers in the care sector, especially in nursing and elementary education, by unions in recent years (Adam, 2022).

Our review of literature in the field of care work demonstrates that for a deeper understanding of the power resources and drivers of collective action, it is necessary to consider the interplay between (1) structural, associative, institutional, narrative and emotional power resources on the one hand and (2) cultural-cognitive and emotional dispositions on the other hand in shaping collective action. The relatively high structural power within the field of care work caused by a persistent staff shortage, an increasing organisational power (evidenced by union mobilisation and solidarity) and the cultural-cognitive re-framing of care work (expressed in slogans such as “Applause is not enough” and “Take care of the caregiver”) have yet to yield sustainable improvements in compensation and working conditions. Why is this the case? We argue that the relatively weak power position of care workers can only be explained by the still-dominant emotional power and stances of the employer side, coupled with corresponding structural, institutional, emotional and symbolic power relations in broader society. While the emotional dispositions of care workers and thus their willingness and ability to engage in collective action have changed, the extent of their emotional power, manifested in the form of professional pride among care workers and hence in their emotional disinvestment in selfless care work, seems to be still insufficient to transform the structures, institutions and practices of underfunding that have been established over decades. The interrelationship between emotional dis/investment and professional pride though is a very complex and sometimes even contradicting one because professional pride and emotional commitment to clients and patients is primarily fuelled by deeply internalised normative expectations. “Workers strive to meet the ideal of being ‘caring carers’ by doing their work properly” (Pulignano et al., 2025: 137). This deeply ingrained psychic structure also contributes to their belief in what Pulignano et al. (2025) called the “ideal carer norm” which also mean “to sacrifice for the sake of others”. During the Covid-19 pandemic and contrary to their own security and health, care workers refrained from disinvesting their emotional commitment and keeping distance from their clients. Rather they “adapted their emotional management approach to cope with the trauma resulting from disrupted routines and the loss of typical sources of support, for example, the assistance previously provided by visiting relatives. They relied on their genuine empathy for residents and their skilful understanding and experiences of what emotions are appropriate in conjunction with the understandings held by their co-workers during this challenging period” (Pulignano et al., 2024: 71).

To think relationally in respect to emotional power potentialities means to seek out the emotions not solely inside the heads and hearts of individuals–e.g., workers, unionists, employers, state actors–but also between individuals, “as complexes of psychical investment, engagement, or cathexis” (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005: 507). Care workers have responded to their symbolically and emotionally devalued position by reconfiguring their emotional ties and investments and thus by strengthening their emotional power position. By a re-evaluation of dependency relationships and responsibilities, care workers seek to overcome feelings of guilt and shame and transform them into feelings of professional pride and confidence. These reconfigured emotional ties and investments have thus become a power resource for collective action. As trans-personal structures and internalised dispositions that limit and enable collective action, emotional bonds and dependencies are thus a potential source of power in its own right (Emirbayer and Goldberg, 2005: 492) or of powerlessness in the sense of negative emotional power.

Conclusion

In this paper and based on SMT and Bourdieu's social theory, we have proposed to strengthen the relational perspective on power within PRT and to integrate emotional power and emotional habitus into their domain. The integration of emotional power into existing PRT transcends a mere addition of another power resource, alongside the established forms of structural, associative, institutional, and narrative power, and presents a complex challenge to theory development. In what follows, we discuss and briefly summarise these challenges and our responses to them. We conclude with the limitations and desiderata of our reformulated PRT.

Relational concept of power. The recently proposed action-theoretical formulation of the concept of power in some contemporary variants of PRT, which posits that working-class power is primarily understood as the power to take action (power to) rather than as the power to determine the rules of the game (power over), is problematic. This conceptualisation distinguishes between two fundamentally different forms of power: “power to” as a dispositional category and “power over” as a relational category in the sense of a power relationship. In accordance with some other critical authors (Arnholtz and Refslund, 2024; Gallas, 2019; Nowak, 2019), we argue that “power to” is also embedded within relational dependency and configurations of power and propose that power should be (again) understood as a relational category. Power is viewed less as the substance or possession of a resource that someone seizes or holds to assert an interest, and more as an effect of the relative positions that actors occupy in relation to one another within one or more social fields.

A neglect of the emotional dimension of collective action. Both classical and contemporary PRT agree that the mobilisation of associative power and solidarity in labour conflicts requires linking material union demands with meaningful collective narratives, values, and ideologies. These cultural elements are referred to in recent approaches as narrative resources, as they serve as interpretive and cognitive frameworks that help aggregate identities and interests, explain new situations and contexts, and translate them into common motivations for collective action. While there are no explicit references to the cognitive turn in cultural studies, the cultural elements of power discussed in newer PRT predominantly focus on cognitive, hence thought-based, reconstructions of meaning and significance. Existing PRT systematically overlooks the emotional grounding of thought and action patterns and their relevance for power relations, dispositions and practices of collective action.

Emotional power. The question of how labour-related power relations inscribe themselves collectively into the psyche of employees and what significance collective emotions can hold as an independent power resource in labour conflicts has not yet been addressed by PRT. This neglect of the collective-emotional dimension of power overlooks a central explanation for work-related collective action. We have argued that emotional configurations—i.e., emotional relations and attachments between individuals and groups—exert a lasting influence as empowering or inhibiting conditions for collective action. Emotional power serves as an independent source of power within collective-emotional relations, understood as a position within a network of emotional investments, attachments, identifications, and trust.

Motivation for collective action. Although solidarity in action is associated with an emotional component, established PRT primarily assumes that the motivation for collective action is largely influenced by cognitive-narrative frames. In our relational PRT, we propose that the relational economic, social, cultural and emotional position that actors occupy within a field also affects collective action through internal psychological processes. General and professional socialisation processes shape the habitus, which consists of schemes of perception, thought, feeling, and behaviour that are learned over generations and largely operate unconsciously in the practice of social life. Motivation for collective action, particularly in situations of symbolic violence, therefore arises not merely through cognitive learning processes and the availability of external power resources but also through the intention to realise profound emotional transformation processes.

In our reformulated PRT, we posit that an understanding of the resources and motivations for collective action must consider the respective power relations and thus resources (structural, associative, cultural-cognitive, institutional, emotional) and their empirically varying interconnections, as well as the dispositions (habitus) of the actors involved. We have demonstrated through the example of care work that the increase in protest and strike activities in this sector cannot be understood without also considering emotional power relations and (changes in) emotional attachments and investments. In this context, it has become clear that care workers, unlike employees in other sectors, must break double assumptions of “normalcy”. Societal expectations regarding activities predominantly performed by women not only undermine the legitimate power resources and demands for better working conditions and higher wages found in other areas but also generate deeply internalised dispositions that might produce feelings of shame and guilt. These feelings can sometimes be instrumentalised against the strikers themselves (care workers who advocate for their own interests and needs are seen as “heartless and unfeeling”). Overcoming this dual inhibition to collective action requires the use of unconventional, and sometimes militant, means and solidarities that extend beyond the fields of care work.

The significance of emotional power resources is also evident in areas where they appear to be operating subtly, seamlessly integrating with economic, social, and institutional power resources to sustain a dominant position. During a (hypothetical) phase of economic prosperity characterised by a labour shortage (structural power) in a European welfare state, the union-organised male industrial worker demonstrates through strikes (associative power) in the area of collective bargaining (institutional power) that their feelings of solidarity are intertwined with deep worker and professional pride (emotional power). This combination seemingly leads uncontroversially and “naturally” to higher wages and better working conditions (Pernicka, 2023).

Since our analysis does not rely on primary data collection but on secondary literature, the interpretations and conclusions presented are provisional in nature. A reconstruction of the collective internal—often unconscious—motives for or against collective action is methodologically demanding and cannot be adequately addressed in this paper. Similarly, the goal of capturing the dynamic interactions and interconnections of various power positions and stances remains, at best, rudimentary at this point. In addition, we did not carry out a full- fletched analysis of the field of care work in the Bourdieusian sense by identifying all relevant forms of field-specific capital, habitus and practices including institutional frameworks that widely differ in international comparison. However, by focussing on the relations of power (or capital, a term often used interchangeably in Bourdieusian accounts) and dispositions that facilitate or impede collective action in care work we could hopefully demonstrate the usefulness of our theoretical approach.

Thus, we believe that by proposing to reformulate PRT from a relational, social theoretical perspective and to integrate emotional power and emotional habitus as analytically independent power resources and dispositions, respectively, we have taken a first step toward a more comprehensive understanding of the significance of emotions in labour-related conflicts.