Making Sense of Change: Emotive-Cognitive Reframing of Young People in Post-crisis Spain

Abstract

This article explores how people interpret deep transformations, how they integrate them into their everyday meaning-making and what role emotion work plays therein. To do so, the article draws on the experiences of young people (n=68) in post-crisis Spain and their narratives of change. In the wake of the severe economic crisis of 2008, many of them had lost their jobs as well as their future prospects. They experienced a mismatch between their expectations of their (working) life and the actual opportunities on the precarious labour market. Disappointed expectations and crumbling future prospects made it necessary for them to search for explanations and coping strategies. The article proposes the concept of emotive-cognitive reframing to capture the ways in which the young people adapted their emotions, ideas and expectations and the different forms and directions this could take. It shows that emotive-cognitive reframing was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which existing patterns of explanation were questioned and partly replaced by new ones. If these explanations were individualistic in nature, people considered their emotions and how they dealt with them to be a personal matter. In this case, emotion work was more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action. If the explanations were systemic, though, emotion work consisted primarily of turning emotions inside out and redirecting them from the individual towards external actors and structural conditions laying the seeds for collective mobilisation.

Keywords

change crisis emotion work emotive-cognitive meaning-making reframing Spain transformation young people

Introduction

With the multiple crises in the recent years, young people have been much at the centre of public and scholarly attention as a generation of being particularly affected. Described, for instance, as ‘Youth in an Age of Lost Opportunity’ (World Economic Forum, 2021: 39) or a generation ‘in permanent crisis mode’ (Schnetzer and Hurrelmann, 2022) research has shown what impact the 2008 economic crisis (Coppola and O′Higgins, 2016; Schoon and Bynner, 2017), the Covid-19 pandemic (Gittings et al., 2021; for an overview see Li and Yu, 2022) and the increasingly tangible climate crisis (Barford et al., 2021) have on young people, their everyday lives and future (perspectives). In addition to studies on (more limited) access to the labour and housing market (Antonucci et al., 2014; France, 2016) and the (prolonged) transition into adulthood (Gentile, 2014; Moreno Mínguez et al., 2012), researchers increasingly raised the question of how these profound changes affect young people’s narratives and imaginaries (Benedicto et al., 2014). Findings revealed that disappointed expectations and broken promises for the future led, among other things, to narratives of pessimism (Alonso et al., 2016; McKenzie and Patulny, 2022) and a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) of uncertainty, anxiety and frustration (Margies, 2024). This structure includes among others the anxiety of downward social mobility (Peugny, 2009), frustration about intergenerational inequalities (Simpson and Bui, 2021) as well as eco anxiety (for an overview see Brophy et al., 2022) and is increasingly reflected in the young people’s mental and physical health (Bartoll et al., 2014; Djurdjevic et al., 2022; Fernández-Rivas and González-Torres, 2013; Hawes et al., 2022). These deep transformations and their multiple effects have led, as studies show, to young people gradually reconsidering their expectations of themselves and of society, adapting their narratives of self-location within the world, and developing new coping strategies that oscillate between individual paralysis and collective mobilisation (Benedicto et al., 2014; Hurrelmann and Albrecht, 2021; Luz Morán and Fernández de Mosteyrín, 2017). So, if there is a revisiting of expectations and dreams in both individual and collective directions, then what exactly does this process of adjustment look like? What cognitive and emotional practices play a role here? And how do these influence the individual or collective direction the adjusting process may take?

I explore this using empirical data from a qualitative case study with young people in Madrid in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis in Spain as an example of meaning-making of change. To do so, I draw on two strands of research. First, on frame analysis (Goffman, 1974) and the idea that people make sense of their (changing) environment by means of (different) frames. Second, on the sociology of emotions and the idea that meaning-making processes are deeply emotional and involve, for instance, practices of emotion work (Hochschild, 1979; see also Introduction of this Special Issue). I therefore argue that both the emotive and the cognitive dimension of meaning-making processes need to be combined as in their combination they highlight how making sense of change is both about working on thoughts and on emotions. Against this background, I will first show that the way the young people in Madrid related to and dealt with the profound changes in post-crisis Spain involved what I call emotive-cognitive reframing. This was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which existing patterns of explanation were questioned and partly replaced by new ones. Second, I demonstrate that if these explanations were individualistic in nature, the young people considered their emotions and how they dealt with them to be a personal matter. In this case, emotion work was more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action. If the explanations were systemic, though, emotion work consisted primarily of turning emotions inside out and redirecting them from the individual towards external actors and structural conditions laying the seeds for collective mobilisation.

Relating and Adjusting to Change: Frames, Cognitions and Emotions

In his influential work on frame analysis, Goffman (1974) suggests that people organise their experiences by means of frames, which help to classify and give meaning to what is lived and felt. Based on the question ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ (Goffman, 1974: 8), people use frames ‘as a more or less complex general (meta-)instruction for understanding’ (Willems, 1997: 35, italics as in the original, own translation). Similar to a picture frame, they define what is possible or appropriate in a certain situation and therefore act as an orientation as well as an indicator of boundaries (Goffman, 1974: 345). They help people organise and provide information about what to think about an experience and how to make sense of it.

The concept of frames to capture the process of meaning-making has been widely used both empirically and analytically (see for instance McAdam et al., 1996; Snow et al., 2019 in movement studies; Čapek, 1993; Wahlström et al., 2013 in environmental studies; or Cornelissen and Werner, 2014 in organisational studies). In research on change, the concept is most commonly applied in two ways: First, to show the ways in which people relate to and explain different forms of transformations be it in their lives, work environments or in society in general (e.g. Margies, 2024). Second, to demonstrate how people try to bring about change, for example in organisations or social movements (e.g. Carroll and Ratner, 1996; DellaPorta and Parks, 2014). In this context, scholars have identified a range of processes and practices of ‘frame alignments’ (Snow et al., 1986) that are involved in the dealing with and initiating of change. Snow et al. (1986), for instance, speak of the four processes of frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension and frame transformation, the first three being about adjusting existing explanatory frameworks, while the last, frame transformation, goes one step further and ‘refers to changing old understandings and meanings and/or generating new ones’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 625). This may be due to the ambiguity of frames (Goffman, 1974: 302), in other words, the uncertainty as to how people should interpret certain situations, for example in the case of societal changes. Feront and Bertels (2021) use the example of the emerging field of responsible financial investment in South Africa to show under which conditions such frame ambiguity can promote institutional change. And Werner and Cornelissen (2014: 1450) highlight the different discursive tactics, which they call frame switching and frame blending, that play a role when people ‘aim to mobilize and align actors and groups in a field and build common ground for institutional change’.

While these (and other) different framing concepts have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of how people engage in meaning-making processes, much of this theorising is located on the cognitive and action-oriented level. It is about ideas, thoughts and values that are articulated differently, (re)ordered, adapted or, if necessary, exchanged for new ones. Depending on the direction of these cognitive processes and practices, it can shape people’s actions (Polletta and Kai Ho, 2006; Williams and Benford, 2000). Movement studies in particular have addressed this relationship in great detail. Benford and Snow (2000: 614), for example, speak of collective action frames as ‘action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization’. These ‘cognitive constructs’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614[AQa: As above]) contribute to a shared understanding of the world through practices of ‘diagnostic’, ‘prognostic’ and ‘motivational’ framing (Benford and Snow, 2000: 615) – hence a process from cognition to action.

Frames, however, do not only function cognitively, they also indicate how to feel about an experience as Hochschild’s influential work (1979) has shown. Building on Goffman’s frame analysis, she argues that they provide a set of ideas and expectations as to which feelings are appropriate in a given situation. Hochschild (2003: 97) calls them ‘feeling rules’ and defines them as ‘social guidelines that direct how we want to try to feel’. They imply certain ‘rights and duties [that] set out the proprieties as to the extent (one can feel “too angry” or “not angry enough”), the direction (one can feel sad when one should feel happy), and the duration of a feeling, given the situation against which it is set’ (Hochschild, 2003: 97, italics as in the original). To take an example:

if I interpret a dismissal as a capitalist injustice, the feeling rule associated with this frame says it is legitimate, even expected of me, to feel anger and rage over the dismissal. But if I understand the dismissal as a personal failure, shame, frustration and self-hate follow as legitimate feelings. (Flam, 2002: 131, own translation)

This implies that, as people move between various and at times ‘quickly changing frames’ (Goffman, 1974: 563) throughout the day, people classify and make sense of both their experiences and feelings with their help.

This intertwining of cognitive and emotional processes has been conceptualised by Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2018) with their term of the emotive-cognitive (judicial) frame. They developed this concept as part of their research on emotions in court to show how legal professionals are influenced by this frame in their daily decisions, practices and performances, a frame that views emotions and (legal) objectivity as opposed to one another. Believing that their work and conduct is rational, structures how judges and prosecutors perceive themselves and the language they use. At the same time, it glosses over the multiple ways in which background emotions and the habitual use of emotion work are essential to, and inseparable from, the performance of cognitive judgements (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018: 163).

Frames thus help people to constitute and structure cognitive and emotive experiences. Consequently, framing is the practice by which people apply and use frames in everyday life (Willems, 1997: 46 f.). According to Wettergren (2019: 34, italics as in the original), this ‘is not merely a process of learning to feel but simultaneously learning to think in particular ways (and the reverse)’. When people do the framing, they may not necessarily be conscious of the frame as such. In most cases, as Bergman Blix (2015) has demonstrated, people adapt their behaviour and feelings to the situation in an unconscious and habituated manner. There is often no need for constant active reflection on how one should behave or feel as much of this knowledge is internalised through experience, repetition and routine in the process of socialisation (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018: 19; Scheer, 2012). This knowledge is embodied in the individual’s habitus, a concept Bourdieu (1979) developed to capture people’s ‘sense of orientation’ (Bourdieu, 2020: 339) or ‘practical knowledge [. . .] of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 2020: 67). As ‘embodied feelings and thoughts connected to commonsense understandings of the world [. . .] and arising from particular social positions, including those of class, gender, nationality, and ethnicity’ (Reed-Danahay, 2005: 2), the habitus informs and guides our processes of framing.

Here, however, inconsistencies and ruptures can occur when the habitus and its frequently used frames no longer help to situate and understand events of everyday life. As Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2018: 22) highlight, frames ‘are taken for granted as long as the interaction that takes place fits with our interpretations’. If this is no longer the case, people may try to adjust their behaviour as well as emotions to make them fit again. In doing so, people often engage in what Hochschild (2003: 94) calls emotion work whereby people try ‘to change in degree or quality an emotion’ by either evoking or suppressing it. This means that as people work on their emotions, they generally also seek to change their framing. With this cognitive technique¹ (Hochschild, 2003: 96), people aim at redefining the way they make sense of events and assign new meaning(s) to their thoughts and actions.

Times of deep transformations such as an economic crisis, I argue, can become moments in which frames are called into question or even cease to help people understand or explain their experiences and feelings adequately. Goffman (1974: 439) speaks here of the ‘vulnerability of framed experience’, which is particularly evident when people feel that frames they have previously applied no longer seem to be applicable or that people cannot fit into the frame that is supposed to be applied.

This is where people may replace existing frames with new, alternative ones, provided, for example, by youth subcultures, religious groups or social movements. People then engage in what Flam (2005: 19) has coined as ‘emotional re-framing’, where they ‘re-interpret specific aspects of social reality [and] call for new, obligatory emotions and feeling rules’. Taking the example of social movements, Flam demonstrates that both the situation and the emotions are redefined. This is done through deconstructing emotions such as fear or shame, reappropriating anger or redirecting blame. By doing so, social movements attempt to ‘detach individuals from the established institutions, organizations, and cognitive and normative patterns’ (Flam, 2005: 31) in order to mobilise them as well as to keep people mobilised (see also Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 2014).

Drawing on the concepts of emotive-cognitive (judicial) frame by Bergman Blix and Wettergren and emotional reframing by Flam, I will bring together both of them and will speak of emotive-cognitive reframing when the young people worked both on their ways of thinking and their ways of feeling to deal with or adjust to experiences of change in post-crisis Spain.

Methods

The findings of this article are drawn from a larger research project on young people’s perceptions of and dealing with the impacts of the 2008 economic crisis in Spain. To learn about their deep stories (Hochschild, 2016), I did a qualitative case study and spent a total of 19 months in Madrid between 2016 and 2018. Besides expert interviews with youth organisations, labour unions and local authorities, I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 68 young people. The sampling was designed to best represent the group most affected by the changes in the labour market due to the economic crisis. It therefore included young people aged 18 to 35 whose work situation reflected the different forms of non-/work that were subject to or expression of the changing labour conditions, that is, temporary work, several part-time jobs at the same time, self-employment, unemployment and unemployment but in some form of training. The young people’s educational level varied from primary to higher education. Their number was equal in terms of gender and while the majority of them were born in Spain, some were from Latin/South America and Africa.

Following each round of data collection, I prepared the data for the coding process. This meant that all the interviews I had conducted with young people – which varied between 45 minutes and 2 hours with the majority lasting for about 1.5 hours – were transcribed verbatim and in their original language, that is, in Spanish (n=66) or in French (n=2). The fully transcribed interviews then formed the main textual basis for analysis. In addition, the notes from the unrecorded expert interviews and from further encounters with some of the young people were included in the analysis as well as my descriptions of the interview situations that I had noted in my field diary.

There were different levels of analysis: In a first step, I applied a form of open coding (Emerson et al., 1995: 150 ff.; Flick, 2002: 259 ff.), which was empirically close and still descriptive. This inductive approach, closely tied to the data and, as Emerson et al. (1995: 155) note, ‘suggesting a myriad of possible issues and directions’, made me aware of the role of emotions in experiencing and dealing with the crisis after the first round of data collection and helped me to adjust my research focus. After the second round, coding of the interviews was more focused (Emerson et al., 1995: 160 ff.) and followed the three broad categories of work, emotion and emotion work. For the analysis of emotions, I marked all expressions in which the young people used direct emotion words and those sections in which certain linguistic or narrative markers pointed to experiences of emotions or emotion work. I then developed subcodes such as: type of emotion, place, intensity, direction, function or interpretation. Some of the subcodes, like ‘cambiar el chip’, which described a certain way of dealing emotionally and cognitively with experiences of change, emerged from the interviews and thus from the direct description of the interviewees themselves. Others, such as extent, direction and duration of emotions, derived directly from theory, in this case from Hochschild’s concept (1979: 564) of emotion work and feeling rules. From this analysis with reference to the analytical framework, I moved to the level of interpretation, in which I conceptualised the practices of meaning-making that entailed a complex interplay of emotional, cognitive and bodily work as emotive-cognitive reframing.

Young People in Post-crisis Spain

When the economic crisis hit Spain in 2008, one of the groups that was most affected by its socio-economic impact were young people. Of the jobs that were lost between 2008 and 2011, 71% were held by young people (Fundación 1o de Mayo, 2012: 62). This corresponded to a figure of 1.5 million jobs. As a result, youth unemployment rose massively, from an average of 17% to 55.5% in 2013. In some regions, this figure was even considerably higher (Eurostat, n.d.). At the beginning of 2013, Andalusia, Extremadura and the Canary Islands, for example, reported levels between 66% and 70% (Consejo de la Juventud de España, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), placing them as unfortunate frontrunners not only in Spain but also in Europe (France, 2016: 200).

Although this young generation was considered the best educated since Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975 (Moreno Mínguez et al., 2012: 121, 144; Pineda-Herrero et al., 2016), it faced structural precarity inherited from pre-crisis times and reinforced considerably from 2008 onwards (Campos, 2018; López Gómez and López Lara, 2012). For young people, temporary contracts were among the most common forms of employment available to them, especially when they first entered the labour market (García López, 2011). Yet such contracts were also the first ones that were ended when the crisis reached Spain. Even for those who had jobs, employment did not necessarily mean financial independence. The average salary of those under 35 had dropped significantly after 2008 (Pineda-Herrero et al., 2016: 152–153; Pique et al., 2017: 744). Such structural precarity paired with high youth unemployment meant that social exclusion and poverty among young people remained at high levels until well after the beginning of the crisis (Consejo de la Juventud de España, 2017: 16).

To escape from such conditions, many put their hopes in investing in (further) education (Colectivo Ioé, 2013: 41 f.; France, 2016: 188; García López, 2011: 15) as they had grown up with the narrative that investing in education would pay off and ease the transition into the labour market and thus into adulthood. These ideas, nurtured by the example of parents and societal discourse, had guided their decisions and shaped expectations. It had influenced which (career) path they considered possible and which social position, social recognition or remuneration they thought appropriate. With the onset of the economic crisis, however, this promise of social mobility through cultural capital lost its validity. Young people were hardly able to convert their educational qualifications into work for which they were trained or from which they could live. This explains why, despite high educational performance, the number of young people dropping out of education and training was equally high, which placed Spain among the lowest in Europe at the beginning of the crisis (Moreno Mínguez et al., 2012: 124). It is in this context that Moreno Mínguez et al. (2012: 144) note that young people’s experiences on the labour market – both those with high and low levels of qualification – were characterised by a structural mismatch between their level of education and the opportunities to find work (see also Herrera Cuesta, 2018). They state that ‘both the over-qualification of the most highly educated and the under-qualification of the least educated (i.e. young people at the two educational extremes) illustrate this negative lack of matching between training and labour market penetration, which highlights the social vulnerability of this group’ (Moreno Mínguez et al., 2012: 144, own translation). In addition to this structural mismatch, young people also faced a symbolic one (Margies, 2024). They felt a mismatch between their expectations of what would be an appropriate job for them and the actual opportunities to fulfil these expectations. In personal narratives, this was expressed in the metaphors of being stuck in an impasse and in the impression of having lost something, something they were entitled to, something they had prepared for and worked towards. The perception of education as an unfulfilled promise ran like a thread through their accounts.

Emotive-Cognitive Reframing: ‘Cambiar el Chip’²

Disappointed expectations and crumbling future prospects made it necessary for young people to look for explanations and coping strategies. As a result, they questioned some of the available explanations, and in some cases, adjusted them. At the centre of these practices was what the young people described in their narratives as ‘cambiar el chip’. Whilst this expression is generally translated as ‘changing one’s mindset or way of thinking’,³ I maintain the literal translation of ‘changing the chip’. I do so as the way the young people used this term involved not just cognitve processes but also the working on and changing of their feelings and behaviour. It was a genuinely embodied practice raised in many interviews when young people talked about how they dealt with their impasse and related feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and frustration.

We are the most educated generation with the least work. Well, no generation will ever live the way our parents did. I don’t know that’s how it is, we have to change the chip, the way we understand work, because it’s never going to be the way it was. (Nuria, 28)

So, by ‘changing the chip’ [. . .] of course it’s not easy, of course it’s not easy [. . .] Do you feel like it? Not at all, but you have no choice. If you want to get ahead, you have no other choice. (Belén, 26)

Joaquín:

That’s how it is now and we have to learn to live with it. So, you have to ‘change the chip’ and say: ‘Well, my parents taught me that, or I always felt that if I did well in my studies, I would have a permanent job, but it’s not the case more [. . .] This is not what I expected but I’m not going to get anywhere if I just do nothing, I’m going to try something else that might work out well for me.

Nina:

How did you manage to ‘change the chip’?

Joaquín:

How did I change it? Pfff, well I guess it’s a process [. . .] When it’s affecting you in a negative way, you learn to detect it and to say ‘No! I don’t want this, and as scary as change is, and as much anxiety as it may cause, I’m going to change it because it’s not what I want, nor is it making me feel good. (Joaquín, 26)

These quotations show that ‘changing the chip’ involved cognitive reframing by putting aside ‘old’ ideas of social mobility and social reproduction and facing up to the ‘new’ ones. This included the belief that it was better to get used to the changes in post-crisis Spain and that there was usually no other choice if one wished to get along and ahead under the changing circumstances. Looking at Joaquin’s statement also shows the role emotions played in this. They were a signal informing him that it was ‘affecting [him] in a negative way’. As such, emotions acted as a trigger for reassessing his situation and, if necessary, readjust. Furthermore, his words imply that, sometimes, certain emotions had to be reassessed. Fear and anxiety, for example, were not supposed to take over and hinder him from ‘changing the chip’.

The foregoing interview extracts illustrate another important point. Belén framed changing the chip as something that was in her own hands and Joaquin’s words demonstrate that his form of dealing with fear and anxiety was above all an individual act. Nuria, by contrast, did not believe that it was possible to deal with the situation through individual reframing alone, but rather believed that a collective effort was equally necessary. This call for a change in framing at a societal level was expressed, among other things, by the use of the pronoun ‘we’. By claiming that ‘we have to change the way we understand work’, Nuria stressed that finding a new definition of work was not up to her, rather, society as a whole would have to rethink and adapt it accordingly.

There are thus two forms of emotive-cognitive reframing: I call the former individualistic, the latter systemic emotive-cognitive reframing. Before I explain these two forms in more detail in the next two sections, it is however important to point out that the distinctions were by no means as clear-cut as this juxtaposition might suggest. Since emotive-cognitive reframing was about young people’s practices and not about their characteristics or attitudes, the practices could also intertwine or shift. Often, the young people were moving between the individualistic and systemic and in their narratives the forms, sometimes, merged. Many of them who saw their impasse as a personal problem that only they could fix, clearly understood that the economic crisis had had an impact on the labour market and their opportunities to get into jobs. At the same time, resorting to systemic frames did not necessarily imply that they were no longer receptive to individualistic explanation. As Benedicto et al. (2014: 156, own translation) emphasise these contradictions in narratives and framing are ‘a fundamental tool of survival and an instrument of adaptation’ which result from the young people’s ‘sense of lack of control over life trajectories, of constant adaptability and flexibilisation in the face of continuous changes in life’.

Individualistic Emotive-Cognitive Reframing

Individualistic emotive-cognitive reframing was based on narratives where young people saw their situation as a personal matter. This implied that they associated uncertainty, anxiety or frustration with their character, biographical events or their difficulties in dealing with these emotions effectively. Many of them shared the belief that it was possible ‘to break with this structural situation on the basis of their own resources and individual effort’ (López Calle, 2012: 178, own translation). ‘Changing the chip’ here meant adapting one’s own ideas, expectations and feelings to the changed circumstances. One way to do so, was for the young people to define their own situation as fortunate compared to that of others. Thereby, the young people usually put parts of their impasse and precarious working conditions into perspective. They no longer compared themselves with others who were getting ahead, but rather with those who were having an even harder time. As Dubet (2008: 256, own translation) argues, ‘the mechanism of comparison is [. . .] reversible; it increases frustrations but can also reduce them depending on the comparison criteria used’. The choice of comparative points of reference was therefore key to emotive-cognitive reframing. The interviews with Vidal and Antonio – both stuck in short-term employment loops – illustrate how this form of reframing was done.

I have been very lucky, I have had many opportunities, that is, I mean, precarious opportunities, but good opportunities, so to speak, to develop in what I have been trained in. (Vidal, 25)

Personally, I think I was lucky in terms of what I decided to learn although the jobs are not well paid and so on [. . .] I was lucky to find them compared to other sectors. My work in installations [as a mechanic], where I can change jobs more easily, is not the same as that of someone who studies. . . who has opted for a degree and studies history, for example. Of course, in their situation, if you find a job, you can’t go taking another one every year. (Antonio, 26)

In order to try and make sense of their situation they shifted the reference points of comparison. Vidal considered it more important to have opportunities at all, however precarious they may all be. Good opportunities were hence not those that offered decent working conditions, but those that enabled him to work in a field for which he has been trained. The same applied to Antonio. He described his situation as fortunate, noting that it was still possible to switch jobs in his field, even if the pay was generally quite low. He framed the succession of short-term jobs, which is in fact characteristic of structural precariousness, as an advantage, as it offered the possibility of changing at any time. To emphasise this advantage, he compared it to higher education which used to hold greater opportunities in terms of pay or social mobility, but whose image started to crumble during the crisis. What Antonio’s example clearly shows here is that reframing also involves comparisons with social groups that go beyond one’s own reference group (Merton, 1968: 335 ff.).

So far, I have demonstrated how the young people focused on thoughts and action when reframing their situation while emotions changed rather implicitly. I will now turn to examples where the focus was more explicitly on emotions and the ways the young people changed or worked on them. Mateo, for instance, was stuck in a job that was originally meant to be temporary. He recalled how he deliberately tried to deal with his frustration at being stuck for years by focusing on any improvements, however small.

I try to say to myself: ‘Man, look on the bright side. What do you have?’ You look back and say: ‘Well, what have you gained?’ I, for example, have been [at the company for] 10 years, well, I’m already in a better situation, financially I’m doing better, I’m no longer earning 500 euros working weekends [. . .] You start to see certain things, and it might not have been easy but you get better little by little, and with regard to things that you didn’t used to think about before, well, you say ‘It might well be that I can start to think about them now albeit with great difficulty, because the way the standard of living is now it is like that, but, well, if you can keep on going, these are small successes. (Mateo, 29)

He intentionally pointed out minor improvements such as his slightly higher salary. By framing his impasse in this way, the increasing financial recognition that comes with increasing professional experience became a ‘small success’ rather than a matter of course. To do so, Mateo used the deep acting techniques described by Hochschild (1979). He worked on his feelings when he tried to decrease his frustration, and he worked on ideas and images that went along with these feelings or could trigger them, for instance the expectations of the time needed to achieve professional and financial progress.

This form of reframing in fact did not happen in a vacuum, but was embedded in and supported by the public discourse of the time. It suggested that given the general difficulties on the labour market young people were not to make (higher) demands or even criticise their working conditions. Additionally, the significant imbalance between low supply and high demand for jobs limited the ability to negotiate or demand better employment terms, because employers could easily replace anyone who was not satisfied. In the face of high youth unemployment and general hardship throughout the country, asking for better conditions was seen as a lack of gratitude and therefore shameful, as the following case illustrates.

The government has made you believe that the salary you have is good, but it isn’t good, of course it’s not, it’s very bad [. . .] I mean, it seems that you can’t work in what you want to because there’s no work, which means, you have to work in what’s there, with the salary on offer and under the conditions on offer and you have to keep your mouth shut. But sometimes it becomes a little difficult, you’re frustrated because you say to yourself: ‘I want to play the flute’ (laughs) but you can’t [. . .] So they kind of make you believe that, you know? In other words, ‘feel grateful because. . .’. (Monica, 28)

Monica’s account highlights a normative shift in shaming, that is which situations should make people feel shame. The form of shaming she identified, as carried out by the government, was meant to serve as a call or reminder that one had to adapt to the changed circumstances. In this context, framing one’s situation as fortunate in comparison to that of others was a form of internalising the framing and feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979: 563 ff.), which saw it as appropriate to keep expectations and demands in check and, in a sense, to be grateful for having a job considering the situation in post-crisis Spain.

Besides putting their own impasse into perspective, much of the emotive-cognitive reframing concerned aspects of work. Many young people were stuck in jobs for which they were (largely) overqualified. Another form of reframing was hence to define these jobs as enriching or informative experiences. Natalia, for instance, had a number of jobs that required lower qualifications than those she had acquired. In the following passage, she talked about how these jobs made her aware of other social realities with which she otherwise had little or no contact.

In the end, you also get to know other realities depending on the job you’re in [. . .] I’ve worked as a receptionist or a call centre agent and you get to know other social realities that also connect you to the world, because you live in a circle of freelancers, designers, sociologists, people who see life in a different way, and you end up isolating yourself from the reality of the majority, because it is the reality of the majority; so, it’s also good to work with a lady who has a grandson and children whose concern is her home. It also helps you to understand that yours is not a big deal, that you can’t be all the time [. . .] In other words, there are bigger concerns than yours [. . .] And that’s enough for them. And there’s a lot to learn there too, because, maybe, you have to realise that you’re not always going to love your job and that it doesn’t matter. (Natalia, 30)

Natalia’s account demonstrates how young people who were overqualified framed jobs as enriching when neither their institutionalised nor their embodied cultural capital ‘fitted in’. Comparing herself to another social reality, where she identified different standards of evaluation (‘whose concern is her home’) prompted Natalia to put her own discontent into perspective (‘there are bigger concerns than yours’). She framed it as a learning experience that taught her how basing an identity on and seeking self-fulfilment through work was not a priority for everyone, and might not even be possible for her either. Framing and feeling rules become apparent in her statement, particularly in the line ‘you have to realise that you’re not always going to love your job’. This sentence implies that being disappointed or frustrated should be minimised or reduced as it was not so much about changing or replacing these feelings with a ‘positive’ emotion but mainly about reducing the intensity of these emotions.

Redefining one’s impasse as an enriching experience, however, was a form of emotive-cognitive reframing that was possible above all for highly educated young people facing over-qualification. They were able to benefit from the ‘framing potentials’ described by Willems (1997: 215, italics as in the original, own translation), which arise according to a person’s social position and imply that certain frames can be mastered only by certain (social) groups.

Systemic Emotive-Cognitive Reframing

Systemic emotive-cognitive reframing was based on narratives the young people drew on when they believed that the situation in which they were stuck was caused by structural factors. If this was the case, they interpreted their feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and frustration as a result of the political and socio-economic environment on which they, as individuals, felt they had little or no control. Here too, reframing included emotion work, but in a different form. It consisted primarily of validating and redirecting (deviant) emotions from the individual level towards the sociostructural.

Let me start with the latter: the redirecting of emotions. This form of emotion work is about diverting emotions that were originally directed at oneself to the outside. One might also speak of emotions being turned inside out (Ahmed, 2014: 9). Ahmed describes (and criticises) this idea as being based on psychology, assuming that people carry feelings inside themselves and externalise them by expressing them. I therefore use the term of turning emotions inside out rather as a way to show how the (emotional) conflict is carried from the individual level to a social interaction level (Summers-Effler, 2002: 51). In so doing, it allows for recognising personal situations such as an impasse as part of a social pattern. Part of this process is what Flam (2005: 20) describes as the generation of ‘subversive counter-emotions’ which often lead to a ‘disaffection from the system’. Such counter-emotions entail, for instance, feelings of shame and guilt. They play a central role here as they are usually directed at individuals and their deviations from the norm and tend to have a demobilising effect.

The TV doesn’t tell you this, the TV tells you figures and tells you that there are people who don’t study and that there are people who don’t work, so we seem to be the ones to blame. So, it’s like: is it the individual’s fault or society’s fault? Well, more that of society, of those who run society. So, for me it’s a worrying issue at the moment. We are still in crisis and, although everything seems to be going phenomenally well, this continues to be a crisis, especially for those of us who are poor [. . .] and even more so for us young people. (Amelia, 23)

Well, understanding that it’s a problem of our generation, that it’s not a problem of my own, that it’s not that I’m not worth it in some way, right? A little bit of convincing yourself that, it’s not convincing yourself, it’s about getting things straight in your head, that it’s not really you who’s doing it wrong, that it’s the labour system that’s wrong, it’s an overall issue. (Alberta, 27)

Amelia’s and Alberta’s narratives illustrate quite clearly how drawing on systemic rather than individualistic explanations made them reject feelings of guilt and shame. In Amelia’s case, these emotions were triggered in part by the way media talked about young people and the labour market, making her feel as if young people themselves were responsible for their impasse. However, she dismissed these feelings of guilt and shame and redirected them at society, especially at ‘those who run society’. Similarly, Alberta related her situation to structural conditions (‘it’s the labour system that’s wrong, it’s an overall issue’), thus rejecting possible feelings of shame. Both cases therefore reflect what Flam (2005: 30) refers to as the shift ‘from being ashamed to shaming out’. Shame is used to remind people where they stand within a group or society and acts as a means of maintaining social order (Kemper, 1981; Neckel, 1991). It is, however, ‘only effective when the individuals at which [. . . it is] directed share norms with those applying these sanctions’ (Flam, 2005: 23). If this is not the case, and shaming is not accepted but redirected, as in the case of Alberta and Amelia, it can become liberating or even activating rather than demobilising (Gould, 2002).

Kemper’s early work (1978) helps to understand the reasons for this. He argues that when people sense that they receive less status or power than they believe they are entitled to, and blame themselves for this, then people tend to feel shame. However, when people think that the blame is situated outside themselves, then they are more likely to feel anger. Therefore, if people use systemic explanations as a basis for understanding their own situation, then demobilising feelings such as shame and guilt can be suppressed, providing space for feelings such as indignation and anger. Yet, this process of emotive-cognitive reframing involves what I would refer to as validation work. This is necessary in order to validate the perception and display of anger. Following the line of argument made by Thoits (1985: 239) and Skeggs (1997: 85), I will refer here explicitly to validation rather than legitimisation. The latter demands sufficient symbolic capital to render feelings not only intelligible and appropriate, but also normative, which was not the case for the majority of the young people in my research.

Vidal and Jesus, both temporary employees in their companies and active unionists, expressed frustration and anger about their impasse but made it very clear that they saw these feelings as appropriate.

It’s an appropriate feeling and a sense of injustice, of course, because it’s not fair for anyone to have to feel like this. It’s a feeling appropriate to the circumstances in which we live. In other words, it’s a consequence of the system in which we live, wage labour and capitalism. That’s how it is. (Jesus, 34)

Man, of course, because it’s normal to be indignant about such situations, especially the way things are today. I mean, that’s what I’m telling you, that feeling is indeed widespread. No one says: ‘Ah, well, I’m fine with it’. No, everyone says: ‘It’s a bloody disgrace’. (Vidal, 25)

From their narratives, it is possible to get an idea of how such validation work was done. Firstly, they did this through linguistic normalisation. Both Jesus and Vidal used a particular choice of words to emphasise that their feelings were normal and appropriate (for example, ‘it’s normal’ or ‘it’s an appropriate [. . .] feeling’). This is how by using language, they produced what can be understood as situational normality (Misztal, 2001). With reference to Heritage (1984), Misztal notes that:

Under the condition of change, what was abnormal/deviant becomes the focus of the development of a new accounting framework. As a result of the new normalizing coda of ordering, what was seen as ‘deviant’ in the light of the old framework will be viewed under its new alternative ‘as appropriate, normal or natural’ (Heritage 1984: 231). (Misztal, 2015: 54)

Second, validation work was about putting emotions in their context. The feelings of outrage and anger were for Vidal and Jesus ‘appropriate to the circumstances’ and ‘the way things are today’. They framed them as a consequent result of the circumstances at that time and not as result of their own biographies or limited capabilities.

Finally, they validated their emotions by relating to a shared experience. Vidal and Jesus presented their impasse as a situation which was shared by other people of their generation. This implied that they were not alone in their experiences and their emotional reactions to them. Feelings of frustration and anger were therefore portrayed as a collective experience: ‘that feeling is indeed widespread’ and ‘everyone says: “It’s a bloody disgrace”’. Moreover, these emotions were used as a form of vocabulary that carried a moral quality and referred to a moral order which Vidal and Jesus regarded violated. Jesus, for instance, pointed to values of fairness and justice that he considered as being breached (‘it’s not fair for anyone to have to feel like this’), thereby expressing very clearly that he would not feel anger if the situation were more just.

Conclusion

With the multiple crises in the recent years, young people’s ways of relating to and dealing with deep transformations became a central concern in public and scholarly debate. Much of this research has shown that young people’s meaning-making of change entails the reconsidering of their expectations, an adaptation of their narratives and the development of new coping strategies. This article has demonstrated that it can be helpful to look at the emotive-cognitive practices involved to get a more nuanced understanding of young people’s ways of adjusting. What I identified as emotive-cognitive reframing was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which the young people questioned existing patterns of explanation and partly replaced them by new ones. What they referred to as ‘changing the chip’ helped them to make sense of the contradictions between what they perceived as expectations and entitlements and the opportunities available to them in post-crisis Spain and involved the shifting of reference points and expectations.

Two forms of emotive-cognitive reframing were identified: individualistic and systemic. When the young people drew on individualistic explanations, the shift happened at the individual level. ‘Changing the chip’ was then about adapting their ideas and expectations according to the new conditions. For this purpose, the young people changed practices of social comparison or adapted their view on the role of work. Emotion work, therefore, involved primarily the suppression or modification of emotions such as uncertainty, anxiety or frustration. This was different when young people resorted to systemic explanations. Here, emotive-cognitive reframing was not about carrying the social conflict inside but instead to move it from the individual to the societal level. The impasse was not framed as the result of individual mistakes, but as a product of social crisis. Accordingly, the function of emotion work here was to recognise (deviant) emotions such as shame or anger and validate them as appropriate. In doing so, the young people adopted what I called turning emotions inside out, whereby being ashamed turned into shaming out and disappointment with oneself turned into anger with the system.

Emotive-cognitive reframing as a concept thus allows an analytical approach to experiences of deep transformations, in which emotions and emotion work are used as an indicator of society in transition. It makes it possible to recognise practices that people use individually or collectively to interpret change, make sense of it and adapt to changing circumstances. In doing so, it builds on and substantiates two lines of thought within the sociology of culture and emotion.

First, the idea that body and mind are not two separate entities that are opposed to each other, but rather are intertwined. As I have demonstrated in the article, certain emotions are evoked or suppressed by working on thoughts, ideas and perceptions. At the same time, certain cognitive framings go hand in hand with the mobilisation or processing of emotions. Emotive-cognitive reframing as a concept thus substantiates Bourdieu’s way of thinking (1977): knowledge about adequate framing is embedded in a person’s habitus (see the second section of this article), and for Bourdieu the habitus was the incorporated knowledge about the world in the form of embodied feelings and thoughts. Similarly, hysteresis, Bourdieu’s concept (1977, 1979) for the mismatch between a person’s habitus and the changing environment, a state in which reframing occurs, combines cognitive, emotional and bodily practices (Margies, 2024).

Second, the concept of emotive-cognitive reframing contributes to considerations that see emotions as facilitators or barriers to social change (Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 2014). As shown in the article, people who deal with their experiences of change individually see their emotions and how they deal with them as a personal matter. Emotion work is then more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action, so people tend to hold on to certain things or practices rather than change them. This was also the case with the young people in Madrid, who held on to precarious jobs and accepted exploitative working conditions because they feared that they would be worse off if they changed jobs.

However, when people have the opportunity to create collective spaces in which they can develop an awareness that their situation is not only shared but also structurally conditioned, emotions can more easily become a driving force. With systemic framing and done collectively, emotions such as uncertainty, anxiety or shame can be turned inside out and can then also provide the breeding ground for collective mobilisation motivating people to become active and initiate change.

Looking at these practices and the dynamics they can entail is of concrete political importance. On the one hand, deep transformations such as those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have shown that (collective) emotions such as uncertainty or fear can be politically fuelled and instrumentalised (Perriard and Van de Velde, 2021; Wettergren et al., 2020). On the other hand, experiences of change and the ways in which they are dealt with can have an impact on the dynamics of social fragmentation or social cohesion. The question of how people, and in particular young people, who may lose their future prospects as a result of profound change, perceive and make sense of it is an important issue that is likely to recur in different contexts and generations. For future research it would therefore be important to investigate not only which forms of emotive-cognitive reframing – individualistic or systematic – then emerge, but also under which conditions these forms may develop, at which times and in which places and, last but not least, in which (political) directions they move.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support by the Studienförderwerk Klaus Murmann and Casa de Velázquez – École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques for the research of this article.

Notes

Author biography

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.

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Making Sense of Change: Emotive-Cognitive Reframing of Young People in Post-crisis Spain

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Relating and Adjusting to Change: Frames, Cognitions and Emotions

Methods

Young People in Post-crisis Spain

Emotive-Cognitive Reframing: ‘Cambiar el Chip’ 2

Individualistic Emotive-Cognitive Reframing

Systemic Emotive-Cognitive Reframing

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

Notes

Author biography

References

Emotive-Cognitive Reframing: ‘Cambiar el Chip’²