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Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, we explore the political salience of emotions in times of large-scale social change, emphasizing the role of personal narratives in understanding and framing these transformations. We introduce the concept of ‘deep transformations’ to analyse radical shifts in various aspects of life and their emotional and cultural implications. Focusing on cases from the post-socialist world and one contribution from post-2008 Spain, the issue provides novel insights into the interplay between emotions, signification, and social change. We present our contributions as addressing three distinct levels, each underscoring the importance for integrating the sociology of emotions with cultural sociology more closely: remembering change, adapting to change, and imagining change.

Keywords

deep story financial crisis narrative post-socialism sociology of emotions temporality

Introduction

Our time is an era marked by the profound destabilization of liberal capitalist democracies and a crisis of political trust. Hence inquiries into both public and private emotions, as well as their interplay, are now often at the forefront of research on populism and political polarization (Gidron et al., 2019; Hochschild, 2016; Reiljan, 2020; Salmela and von Scheve, 2018; Wodak, 2015). They show that the backlash against the forces of modernity – such as science, increasing global interconnectedness, diversity, and postmaterialist values – is driven by an affective reflex, a style of contentious politics that is rooted in the rejection of a sense that things ‘have gone too far’ (Alexander, 2019; Alter and Zürn, 2020; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). They also reveal that emotions don't merely shape differing political opinions; they also strain the very bonds between people (Ķešāne, 2023, Lawler et al., 2009; Scheff, 1994). Society is increasingly divided along these political-emotional allegiances and affective meanings that are created and circulated in public through everyday experiences (Durnová, 2019; Revers, 2023).

In this Special Issue, in turn, we focus on emotions that become politically salient due to the transformations that societies and people undergo. The political salience of these emotions arises in response to complex relationships between subjective experiences and systemic change. Profound change brings not only shifting conditions of existence but also involves the destabilization of references, imaginaries and narratives over time (Atkinson, 2013). In terms of emotions, social change can result in an ‘insecure state’ (Berezin, 2002) or ‘climate of instability’ (de Rivera et al., 2007) causing many to feel stress and anxiety (Maor, 2023). In this Special Issue, we therefore connect emotions and the cultural analysis of social transformations by looking at personal narratives of change. Narratives are a powerful mechanism to interpret and frame transformations as well as to retell and re-imagine lives in ways that allow individuals to feel good about themselves (Hochschild, 2016). Hence, narratives not only expose the meanings and values people carry but also how they feel about them and how they act towards what they feel.

To understand the link between social change, its experience, meaning-making and emotions, we introduce the notion of ‘deep transformations’. In a broad sense, ‘deep transformations’ refer to radical and overarching shifts in political, social, cultural, as well as personal aspects of life. They include the shift itself as well as meanings and emotions related to it. Deep transformations are also linked to Hochschild’s ‘deep story’, or the ‘story feelings tell’ (2016: 135), which can be understood as a narrative organizing our experiences and centred on emotion (see more: Sawicka in this Special Issue). Furthermore, the notion of deep transformations includes the fact that emotions are ‘deeply ingrained’ (Reddy, 2001: 55) in our psyches (Elias, 2000 [1939]), bodies (Bourdieu, 2004; Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]) and socio-cultural structures (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Mauss, 1966; Williams, 1977). Thus, they are interactive outcomes of automatic and spontaneous bodily sensations, cognitive processes, and norms focused on emotions, called ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979). In other words, in times of profound change, deeply held convictions, beliefs, feelings, desires and commitments are at stake and might be challenged, fought for, or adjusted. All of this is part of an affective and meaning-related process we refer to as deep transformations.

We highlight three main contributions of this Special Issue to the field of cultural sociology. First, we introduce a novel perspective by focusing on social change through the perspectives of both meaning and emotion. While cultural sociology recognizes the relevance of affectivity and emotionality during liminal, critical and transitional periods, it often lacks a detailed understanding of how affect and specific emotions underlie these processes (for a more extensive argument see e.g. Verbalyte, 2016). What is needed is an approach that sees emotions as active mediators between the self and a changing society, considering them as ‘adapt[ing] with society and culture in a collaborative process of reinvention’ (Barclay, 2017: 6) and ‘not only a response to events [but] also capable of shaping the meaning that inheres in events’ (Barclay,2017: 3). Therefore, this Special Issue uses conceptual tools of the sociological study of emotions to deepen the cultural analysis of social change.

Second, throughout the issue, we analyse how the narratives of social change offer access to meaning structures and accompanying emotions. To aim for a more specific focus on the affective modes or forms through which social change may be interpreted in everyday life, we propose to foreground narratives, analyse emotion and meaning-making in accounts and stories of social change. The relevant emotions might include specific emotions or combinations of emotions, which are based on certain emotional connotations and which might be imbued with political meaning. These modes, forms and practices may also be linked to larger narratives as part of broader emotional arrangements. The analysis of narratives of social change is designed to trace its effects and meanings on the micro and macro levels. Following an interpretive methodology, the contributions address sociocultural and emotional experiences and how they unfold in various contexts of social change and over different social categories.

Third, the majority of our contributions discuss cases from the post-socialist world. The dissolution of state socialism after 1989 led to a simultaneous realignment of political, economic, cultural and social life in 27 countries (Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021). Some processes, such as privatization, liberalization and deregulation impacted the entire region, whereas other changes were more specific to individual cases. Hence, these cases constitute ‘laboratories’ for the historical, cultural and comparative analysis of large-scale change and are therefore also particularly intriguing for cultural sociologists. It is illuminating to explore how historically formed meaning structures and structures of feeling are selectively applied to interpret social change in these contexts. This is of particular relevance as the insights offered by post-socialist cases have often been treated either as a contribution to institutionalist perspectives of policy change or as area studies and have therefore not been systematically considered for cultural sociological theory-building (with a few exceptions, for example Bernhard and Kubik, 2014). In this Special Issue, we therefore combine insights from post-1989 Central Eastern Europe (namely Poland, see Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska in this Special Issue) and the Baltics (Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte; Ķešāne in this Special Issue) as well as post-1989 Germany (Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte in this Special Issue) with the related case of post-2008 austerity Spain (Margies in this Special Issue) to interrogate parallels in the affective dynamics around deep transformations.

The Special Issue then brings together a diverse range of perspectives and voices from individuals belonging to different social groups. We explore the viewpoint of the post-socialist middle class, including professions such as engineers or pharmacists, schoolteachers, nurses, musicians, librarians, but also construction workers, small business owners, and farmers; individuals who migrated in search of better economic prospects – a defining experience of the post-1989 period in Central Eastern Europe – and those who chose to stay. We also document and analyse the experiences and aspirations of various age groups: middle-aged and more senior citizens in East Germany and Lithuania and young people in Spain.

Methodologically, we combine theoretical and empirical contributions to examine deep transformations. Sawicka critically examines the theoretical foundations of Hochschild’s ‘deep story’ concept and aims at reconstructing it as an analytical rather than descriptive-rhetorical category which can be used to account for collective emotional dynamics during social change. Most empirical studies in this issue use interviews as a way to uncover meanings and emotions in narratives of change. Ķešāne’s contribution on post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia and Margies’ article on post-2008 Spain are based on in-depth interviews, demonstrating how emotions can be traced in these types of data. Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte use a biographical and semi-structured interview approach in their comparative study on pride in post-Soviet Lithuania and Eastern Germany while Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska study memoirs written by Polish farmers to examine their accounts of change. These memoirs are cultural artefacts, and like the various interview forms, they are objectified representations of the connection between emotions, social change, and cultural meaning.

In what follows, we provide a concise overview of the literature that presents a cultural analysis of social change, as well as studies that examine social change from the perspective of emotion. Then, we discuss these insights in relation to the concept of ‘deep transformations’. From this, we distinguish three modes of representing and engaging with social change – remembering change, adjusting to change, and imagining change – and demonstrate how the contributions to this Special Issue each provide a distinct perspective on this integrative concept.

Cultural Sociology and Social Change

Periods of social change are liminal situations (Alexander and Smith, 1993), times of passage (Elias, 2000 [1939]), when what is of value for society becomes more manifest and possibly reconsidered. Such liminal moments are historically important as their unfolding fundamentally defines the future in terms of the relation between state and society, (in)justice, morality, solidarity and so on (Mische, 2014; Wagner-Pacifici, 2017). On the one hand, cultural sociological analyses of narratives can offer crucial insights into social change, its relevance for societal development and reveal dominant and competing visions of society. On the other hand, cultural sociology focuses on ‘collective emotions and ideas’ since they frame subjective experiences (Alexander, 2003: 5).

The cultural analysis of social change can be traced to several traditions. The cultural and historical sociology of events (Berezin, 2012; Mast, 2006; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) represents one such line of thought. In her model of political semiosis, Wagner-Pacifici (2017) foregrounds events and processes as an analytical framework for sociological analysis, but also asks how popular interpretations and representations of events – essentially, the hermeneutics of the event – shape political ideas and action. Similarly, Reed (2011) has proposed a theoretical framework for cultural sociology that prioritizes meaning-making within the context of historically formed ‘landscapes of meaning’.

Approaches that centre around the Durkheimian tradition analyse how social change relates to deeply held cultural structures or symbolic codes (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Alexander and Smith, 1993; Farrell, 2015; Lee, 2018; Smith, 2005). Within this tradition, societies cohere and solidarize around cultural structures, such as various symbolic codes that are deeply meaningful to them yet often taken for granted. Social change, including conflicts it may bring, exposes these cultural structures or transforms them. For example, Farrell (2015) analyses how the rationalities of parties involved in environmental conflicts at Yellowstone National Park are differently culturally structured. Smith (2005) explores how cultural structures in narratives account for military logic, policies and strategies, while Lee (2018) offers an insightful analysis of how symbolic codes guiding the civil sphere in South Korea shifted as society went from authoritarian to democratic rule. These studies recognize that the deeply held cultural structures are emotionally charged but do not bring emotion to the forefront of their analysis. Weyher’s rereading of Durkheim therefore urges us to see the ‘collective emotional basis’ (2012: 364) of cultural structures.

Another tradition develops from Bourdieu's writing. His work on meaning-making through mechanisms of distinction (1987) conceptualises social change, to some extent, as an affective process. While some argue that parts of his theorizing can be seen as mechanistic (Mead, 2016), limited in accounting for concrete social relations (Bottero and Crossley, 2011) or incompatible with recent concepts such as reflexivity (Archer, 2012; McNay, 1999) and the non-conscious (Atkinson, 2010); others have shown that his work is not only still useful to understanding social change (Steinmetz, 2011) but also deeply linked to and compatible with emotion and affect theory (Skeggs, 2004; Threadgold, 2020). Bourdieu (1977, 1987) developed, for example, the sociological concept of hysteresis, which he frequently used in his studies to explain how people experience profound change. Hysteresis occurs whenever the world, or a certain field, changes, but the habitus of a person moving in this field does not (yet) adapt. This creates a mismatch that is structurally conditioned, but is translated into embodied experiences of change and results in what Margies (2024) calls emotions of hysteresis such as uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and resentment.

In contexts of disruptive collective experiences and transformative events, emotions may express, foster, or mitigate cultural trauma. Alexander (2004: 1) provides a foundational definition, noting that cultural trauma ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, making their memories forever and changing their future identities in fundamental and irrevocable ways’. This definition emphasizes feeling, not in a psychological sense, but in line with Durkheim’s perspective on the social construction and collective effort of representation that operates through affect. Eyerman (2019: 5) adds that it is useful to consider cultural trauma as a ‘tear [in the] the social fabric’. As such, it necessitates collective interpretation, affective processing – particularly of negative affect – and collective efforts at repair and healing. While Eyerman applies the concept to the case of US-American slavery (2001), Sztompka (2004) provides an early application of cultural trauma theory to post-socialist societies and Zhukova (2016) uses it to explain the differing reactions and memories in Belarus and Ukraine to the Soviet-induced Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986. Cultural trauma theory therefore offers a framework for understanding collective meaning-making around emotions. In this Special Issue, we take an initial step in this direction by concentrating primarily on interviews and personal narratives. We unpack micro-level complexities of negative affect and the desire for social repair for example in the contribution on pride by Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte or on the Polish farmers by Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska (more detailed description of contributions in the final section of this article). Hence our approach lays the foundation for connecting these individual experiences to broader, macro-level frameworks of ruptures to the social fabric, typically seen in public narratives about societal transformations. In the post-socialist context, in particular, we also recognize that social change means different things to different people, and we aim to capture this diversity of experiences. Our analysis is working ‘from the bottom up’, concentrating on how specific social groups reference, invoke, represent, and mobilize (collective) emotions.

The Sociology of Emotions and Social Change

The theory of collective emotions as elaborated by the sociology of emotions (see von Scheve and Salmela, 2014) resonates with cultural sociology in their understanding of emotions as not only private and individual, but also social and cultural. Collective emotions are ‘the synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object’ (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013: 406, italics in original). In the most common understanding, collective emotions form through shared emotional experiences and contagion in face-to-face interactions, such as gatherings (Collins, 2014; Sullivan and Day, 2019). In the context of change, this perspective is often used by scholars to understand the transformative power of rituals (Beyer et al., 2014) and emotional events for collective action and resistance (Yang, 2005). Collective emotions also form in response to shared culture and social knowledge (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013), such as cultural codes, norms, values and representations in which we get socialized. For example, Ķešāne and Ozoliņa (2023) analyse how feeling rules embedded in post-Soviet society help to explain the weakness of collective political dispositions that would enable challenging the neoliberalization. Finally, collective emotional dispositions also develop due to group membership (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013: 409). Kojola (2020: 690), for instance, analyses cultural and emotional dynamics of conflicts over copper mining industry in Minnesota and finds that opposing groups in the conflict have different ‘emotional meanings of place’. These groups were bound to their separate opposite dispositions, which led to resentment and anger towards the out-group.

The literature on emotional cultures, emotional climates and emotion(al) regimes offers an additional analytical framework for understanding change. Emotional culture (de Rivera, 1992) is susceptible to slow large-scale societal changes, such as the civilizing process described by Elias (2000 [1939]). This process is related to modernization and individualization, entailing stronger control over one’s behaviour and emotions, and a decreased threshold for (public) discomfort and embarrassment. While emotional culture changes slowly and can be transformed only through generations, emotional climate as a way people relate to the society and each other emotionally is more responsive to cultural, political, or economic transformations (de Rivera, 1992). For example, people may be subjected to the climate of fear by an authoritarian government, and after the revolt enjoy the democratic climate of security, confidence and trust (de Rivera et al., 2007). Emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001), similarly to emotional climates, are ‘modes of emotional expression and thought that are dominant in particular time periods and cultural contexts’ (Garrido and Davidson, 2016: 65). They differ in their strictness of emotion norms and tend to change with the shift of political regimes (see Verbalyte and Ulinskaitė, 2024).

Scholarship on emotion and social movements provides further evidence in this direction. It argues that in societies where there is high inequality and heightened perceptions of injustice, various emotions emerge, such as low self-esteem, feelings of anxiety and inferiority, depression, humiliation, shame, anger and resentment (e.g. Barbalet, 2004; Sayer, 2005; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Such emotional states may lead to the formation of social movements and resistance (e.g. Bayat, 2010; Flam and King, 2005; Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 2018; Summers-Effler, 2002). Most of this literature explores how protesters are guided by their grievances, resentment, and anger toward various ‘offenders’ and how these emotions form collective mobilization for social change. These dynamics, however, seem to differ in the resistance towards totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, as is also the case with the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the socialist system. According to Flam (2004), in these cases, the idea of the explosive anger (Scott, 1990), applicable in democratic contexts where it can be openly expressed, is unsuitable. In oppressive regimes, fear management becomes much more important than anger mobilization (Flam, 1998). Before 1989, anger was present but neither mobilizing nor explosive, it remained concealed and tempered even among dissidents. It required considerable courage for individuals not only to direct their anger towards the government but also to hope for change (Flam, 2004: 177).

Finally, another tradition in emotion sociology looks at the relationship between emotion, reflexivity and social change (Burkitt, 2012; Davidson, 2019; Holmes, 2010). Within this scholarship, feeling is central to the reflexive process of decision and choice-making. When people question their past, present and future in the light of how they would prefer things to be, emotions are active. When these emotionally reflexive processes turn into actions and interactions, there is an opportunity for social change or ‘societal stasis’ to remain (cf. Davidson, 2019: 3; Margies, 2024). For example, emotions such as shame or low self-esteem are associated with inactivity (Barbalet, 2004), and the process by which individuals reflect on them may then, in Davidson’s sense, generate larger social outcomes.

So far, we have seen that emotions and everyday experiences of social change are two deeply cultural phenomena. As we highlighted earlier in this article, through the lens of cultural sociology, we are able to interrogate how people actively relate to social change and how they experience and interpret the temporality of the societal reconfigurations that are happening around them. This section, in turn, has revealed that through the lens of the sociology of emotions, we can explore the ways in which narratives are linked to ‘structure[s] of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and affectively resonate with larger cultural scripts about deep transformations. In the last section, we will now turn to narratives – the way(s) people relate to, talk about and make sense of deep transformations – and how they help us uncover the emotional dimensions of change.

Uncovering Deep Transformations in Narratives: Remembering, Adjusting to and Imagining Change

Narratives expose social processes of sense-making or ‘how people themselves, as “experiencing subjects”’ (Eastmond, 2007) perceive and feel social change, uncovering the ‘deep’, emotionally loaded dimension of the lived experiences of social transformations. Narratives are emotionally deep since they expose ‘meanings and values as they are actually lived’ (Jackson, 1989: 39). They can also provide the framework of meanings which individuals draw upon to decide on lines of action and develop a particular vision of the self (Mattingly, 2014: 21). Focusing on meaning-making and emotion in narratives we can access ‘embodied’ lived experience (Ignatow, 2007). Actually, emotion ‘constitutes part of a narrative [. . .] in which the emotion itself is embedded’ (Goldie, 2000: 13). People socially learn emotions through narratives, connecting objects with emotional responses that they prescribe as normal reactions (De Sousa, 1990: 182). Emotions therefore are twofold sense-making processes (Katz, 1999: 324–325) as ‘they involve the micro-story of the present situation, but this story is embedded in, and gains (emotional) significance through, larger narrative contexts’ (Kleres, 2011).

As personal narratives are structurally and culturally embedded (Chase, 1995; DeGloma, 2010; Steinmetz, 1992) they refer to social structures and meanings which shape broader social reality. Sawicka therefore argues (in this Special Issue) that narratives are not individual stories but emerge out of collective interactions and localized practices of storytelling. Against this background, she pleads for analysing narratives, including Hochschild’s deep stories, as social phenomena, given their role in socio-cultural processes of storytelling. Deep stories, in her view, are much more than simple metaphors but rather collective, interactional achievements, which make them, as objects of study, thoroughly social phenomena. In a similar vein, Chase (1995: 39) underlines that ‘[b]y listening carefully to how speakers express themselves’ we can better interpret ‘how cultural processes are manifest’ in narratives. Against this background, narratives can also constitute possibilities for social change. Langellier (2001: 700), for example, writes that ‘in opposition to institutional discourses, such as science, medicine, education, the law, and corporations, personal narrative also constitutes a powerful way for individuals and groups to tell their unheard stories, resist domination, and rewrite history, thus connecting the personal and the political’. In a similar vein, Riessman (2005: 6) writes that narratives help to ‘re-imagine lives (as narratives do for nations, organizations, ethnic/racial and other groups forming collective identities)’. This dialectical relationship between ‘personal biography and social structure’ (Riessman, 2005: 6) reveals how narratives serve to legitimize thinking and behaviour (Rosen, 2017) and exposes moral claims or ideas of ‘how the world should be’ (Riessman, 2005: 1).

Narratives also express the temporality of social change. Rather than being ‘faithful representation[s]’ of time, narratives forge ‘the shifting connections [. . .] among past, present and future’ or in other words ‘narratives do not mirror, they refract the past’ (Riessman 2005: 6). Their affective quality is one reason why narratives often do not represent time in a linear manner. In a similar vein, Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas and Seebach (2023: 1) demonstrate that (strong) emotional experiences shape people’s narratives ‘because they penetrate and shape the remembered past and anticipated future by enhancing, suppressing and hence shaping past and future experiences’. With this in mind, the contributions to this Special Issue are organized around three ways of representing and engaging with social change: Remembering change, adjusting to change, and imagining change. From these varying angles, we examine which emotions are salient during periods of social change and how this salience resonates with the narratives that emerge from these experiences.

Remembering Change

Remembering is a highly complex entanglement between the memories of the past, present needs and future projections. The past lives in the memory, but only if it is functional from the perspective of the present, and therefore can be reinterpreted or even manipulated. This is particularly true for the remembrance of historical change, which, having multiple sources and public interpretations, is often inconsistent, heterogeneous, and unstable (Jovchelovitch, 2012). Moreover, it can become potentially dangerous if politicized by undemocratic forces (Frevert, 2020).

One area of research that has directly addressed the question of how social change is affectively interpreted is social memory research. Recent works on the post-1989 transformation (Hilmar, 2023; Pehe and Wawrzyniak, 2023), focus not only on ‘large’ events and their remembrance but also on ‘small’, vernacular memories and processes. This includes examining how neoliberal privatizations of the post-1989 period affected people’s work lives and how they comprehend such large-scale changes. Nostalgia (Boele et al., 2019) plays an important role here as an emotion that may become politically salient, as observed in other contexts (Karakaya, 2020). Krastev and Holmes (2019) contend that disillusionment with the aspiration to imitate the West (European) model shapes the affective ‘political psychology’ of many citizens in Central Eastern Europe today. Part of it is an intensely emotional nationalist memory politics, which portrays 1989 as an ‘unfinished revolution’ (Mark, 2010), especially through narratives that suggest that the current political system must be cleansed of its ‘communist’ elements. Another emotion to consider is humiliation, which Frevert (2021) argues, contributes to mobilizing current political discontent. And finally, there are emotions linked to cultural trauma (see earlier in this article), such as shock, grief, anger and resignation which can evolve into ressentiment (Demertzis, 2020; Hutchison, 2016; Lindy, 2001).

Subjects of trauma, ressentiment, and reactionary nostalgia (Szabo and Kiss, 2022) are also present in our contributions. Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska, for instance, demonstrate how Polish farmers, by contrasting their realities in the EU with the time before 2004, construct a ‘golden’ past where everything was still ‘in order’. This idealized past spans from post-1990 Poland to socialist planned agriculture and to past generations who managed the same farms. It is seen as a time of prosperity, in stark contrast to the current feelings of unfairness, endless competition and a winner-takes-all mentality, as well as disappointed hopes, anxiety, and loss. Investigating sources of pride in other post-socialist countries, Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte also note that some still remember the neoliberal transformations as a time when everything seemed possible, while others are sceptical about whether the benefits of the transition outweighed the losses. While this does not translate into strong nostalgia for the former regime, interviewees do remember pre-1990 society as being friendlier, more solidary, and more equal.

Adjusting to Change

After deep transformations, feeling rules that provided stability are often not valid any more and new ones are still not in place (de Rivera, 1992; de Rivera et al., 2007; Röttger-Rössler, 2009b). How people then adjust can vary greatly. For some, adapting to new emotion norms (della Porta, 2016) might come easily especially if their personal norms align with those of the new order. For others, newly established rules may contradict the emotional habits ingrained by the previous system (Elias, 1989). How this unfolds in people’s meaning-making processes of change is explored by Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte (in this Special Issue). Discussing the example of pride, they demonstrate that this emotion is felt and articulated in response to personal accomplishments that resonate with the prevailing structures of worth and feeling rules that deem pride as an appropriate reaction. However, both the former as well as the latter are questioned in the transformation process and need to realign to enable pride.

Emotions related to transformation are as varied as change experiences. Many encounter it with enthusiasm and excitement (Trnka, 2012), others, especially individuals who were loyal to the previous system struggle to adapt, and experience and express sadness, anger, and powerlessness (Rimé, 2007). This might lead to severe conflicts in society, particularly when the legitimate grievances and ‘retributive emotions’ of those persecuted by the former regime (Costa Pinto, 2008) come into conflict with the sentiments of its former loyalists. In the post-socialist context, to be sure, many attempts at transitional justice have largely fallen short in offering sufficient recognition to the victims and establishing a transparent, democratic dialogue about past involvement in the system and the lessons to be learned for building more robust institutions (Stan and Nedelsky, 2015). Transformation processes, however, are also challenging for those who initiate, implement, support or simply have to endure change. Due to the high expectations, the initial enthusiasm about change might be followed by fatigue and disappointment when these expectations are not fulfilled (see Jasper, 1998).

All in all, adjusting to the changed circumstances involves certain self-transformation (Barclay 2017) and emotion work (Hochschild 1979) which takes three different forms: cognitive, bodily and expressive emotion work. The cognitive adjustment implies changing thoughts and ideas in order to change emotions, the bodily adjustment is about changing ‘somatic or other physical symptoms of emotion’, and the expressive adjustment refers to altering ‘expressive gestures in the service of changing inner feeling’ (Hochschild, 1979: 562). How these different forms of adapting often go hand in hand can be seen in Margies’ article (in this Special Issue). When confronted with ongoing lack of employment and crumbling future prospects, young people in post-crisis Spain revised their ideas on work as fulfilling and life as something that should be planned in the long term. While reframing their ideas and expectations, they questioned and sometimes replaced existing explanations as well as feeling rules with new ones and they also worked – implicitly and explicitly – on their emotions by suppressing or altering feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and frustration.

Adjusting to change can also entail the creation of counter-narratives which aim to redefine the meaning of current circumstances and to reappropriate emotions that came along with them. Emotional liberation (Flam, 2005) plays a crucial role here and describes the way in which social actors ‘not only challenge the existing order but, more importantly, challenge and redefine the dominant feeling rules’ (van der Graaf, 2015: 21). This can imply consciously refusing to obey the dominant (feeling) rules or the ones that emerge with change (Röttger-Rössler, 2009a). The interplay between building counter-narratives and reappropriating emotions becomes evident in two of our present contributions. In the case of Polish farmers, Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska demonstrate that in their diaries they affectively frame counter-narratives of Europeanization, for example, through presenting mixed emotions or the narrative of non-change. Since the master narratives about the accession to the EU have been inconsistent with the farmers’ lived experiences, they express contrasting emotions such as hope, fear, anxiety, and feelings of injustice. Counter-narratives also emerge in post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia, as Ķešāne demonstrates in her article. In contrast to the narrative of desire for a western middle-class lifestyle, which prevails among those who have emigrated to the West in the post-Soviet era, a narrative of modesty emerges among those who remained, and functioned as a form of resilience to neoliberalization.

Imagining Change

Ideas about the future are reflected in and translated into narratives, actions as well as material forms (Islas-Lopez, 2013; Koselleck, 2005; Mische, 2014) and can be seen as expressions of change. While most of the scholarship on future projections focuses on the role of cognition, explaining future imaginaries as an interplay of (reflexive) thought and action (e.g. Mische, 2009), there is growing consideration of the equally important role of emotions for how people project themselves into the future and build their narratives accordingly. People may narrate stories of hope to motivate their future behaviour in times of uncertainty and despair (Eggerman and Panter-Brick, 2010; Halperin, 2023; Kleres and Wettergren, 2017; Lamont, 2019). Trust based on past experiences may emerge as meaningful in people’s narratives to legitimize the worth of their actions in the present as well as with regard to the future (Barbalet, 2004: 49).

As Margies in this Special Issue shows, hope and confidence can be both the basis and the outcome when people frame changes in systemic and collective ways. The young people in post-crisis Spain who saw their suffering as a product of structural changes and not personal failure used their emotions (e.g. anger) as a breeding ground for action to collectively invest in the future. Imagining change and the attached feelings (e.g. satisfaction) to it can also be the driver of action, as we see in Ķešāne′s article. Some people who were not able to fulfil their desires for the western standard of living in post-Soviet Latvia followed their imaginations of a better future and left the country towards the West where they hoped their labour would be better rewarded.

In this way, all our contributions see narratives as conceptual and cultural sociological tools to analyse deep transformations. They can serve, in our view, as an alternative to the broadly used categories of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in social change studies, which tend to classify people as either victims or beneficiaries in socio-economic terms. Instead, the narratives we identified in all our articles offer a more agency-based view on subjects of social change and offer insights into how the temporal dimensions of remembering, adjusting to and imagining change influence the way personal narratives relate to larger cultural scripts. By combining sociocultural and emotional perspectives, this Special Issue aims at challenging unidimensional accounts of social change and at providing a deeper and more nuanced picture of lived experiences which accompany the liminal periods, thus contributing to a greater sociological endeavour of researching underlying affects, meanings and sense-making dynamics of social change.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Iveta Ķešāne

Author biographies

Till Hilmar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an assistant editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. His research interests include cultural and political sociology, social memory, post-1989 transformations, and text-as-data. He is a PI in the Horizon Project CIDAPE on climate change, inequality, and the force of political emotions. His book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.

Iveta Ķešāne is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Sociology and Management, Latvian Academy of Culture. Iveta received her PhD in sociology from Kansas State University (USA). Her research interests are related to the sociology of emotions, cultural sociology, political sociology, development sociology, and migration sociology. Her work appears in journals: Cultural Sociology; Social Inclusion (with M. Spuriņa); Emotions and Society (with L. Ozoliņa); Nationalities Papers; Emotion, Space and Society; Social Currents (with L. Frank Weyher); and Communist and Post-Communist studies. Currently, Iveta is working on a study on the meaning and practice of autonomy in the platform economy.

Nina Margies is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences, Urban Sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interest is in the sociology of emotion and its link to questions of social change and urban inequalities. She is co-founder of The Urban Transcripts Journal, an open access journal on urban research, and board member of the ESA Research Network RN11 – Sociology of Emotions since 2019. Her book Emotions in Crisis, published with Bristol University Press in 2024, analyses the impact of structural changes in society on individual and collective emotions. In her current project, she studies organisational changes in urban institutions of the police and fire brigade.

Monika Verbalyte is a research fellow at Europa-Universität Flensburg in the project “Value Conflicts in a Differentiated Europe (ValCon)”. Her research interests are emotion, political sociology, Europeanization, and polarization. She has published peer-reviewed articles in European Journal of Political Science, Comparative Sociology, European Politics and Society, Politics and Governance and Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research. She also served as a guest co-editor for special issues “When emotions run high: Affective responses to crises in Europe” (2022) and “The Emotional Side of Populist Support: Key Affective Determinants at Test“ (2024).

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Deep Transformations: Lived Experiences and Emotions in Social Change Narratives

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Cultural Sociology and Social Change

The Sociology of Emotions and Social Change

Uncovering Deep Transformations in Narratives: Remembering, Adjusting to and Imagining Change

Remembering Change

Adjusting to Change

Imagining Change

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biographies

References