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recorded through explicit and voluminous records. And personnel decisions are supposedly governed by merit (Bidwell 1965).
Within this bureaucratic structure, adminis- trators—such as district superintendents or college presidents, school principals or deans—exer- cise great power. They create jobs and define their responsibilities, establish organizational rules, allocate scarce resources (money, space, staff, etc.), order specific actions, referee conflicts among subordinates, and hire and supervise subordinates (Campbell et al.; Weiss 1990).
Historically, teachers have been objects of administrative power. But increasingly, they themselves are participating in the exercise of administrative duties. The movement for school-based management has given teachers the potential to exercise greater power over how schools are run, though it is still not clear to what extent this has become a reality. In numerous communities, school councils have been set up that include teacher members. These councils have the authority to exercise considerable voice over such things as a school’s budget, teacher hiring (what areas to hire in and whom to recommend to the district), and student discipline rules (Kerchner et al. 1993; Mohrman et al. 1994). However, this authority is often not exercised in practice. Between principal resistance to sharing authority and teacher reluctance to assume it, school councils often end up exerting much less authority than authorized.
Bureaucratic control had become perhaps the dominant form of school control by the end of the Progressive era. But despite its power, bureaucratic control does not handle localized, specific situations well. The general orientation of bureaucratic rulemaking is toward general prescriptions because the aim is to circumscribe the discretion of organizational staff (Weiss 1990). However, stu- dent-centered education—particularly in a highly diverse, politically decentralized society such as the United States—often does not fit easily within bureaucratic universalism.
Professional Authority. However bureaucratic schools are, they are also professional organizations because teachers make up such a large portion of the labor force and administrators are invariably former teachers. The main fount of professional authority lies in the fact that effective teaching requires the exercise of discretion—how
teachers are to interact with students cannot be prescribed—and teachers largely monopolize the knowledge necessary to correctly exercise that discretion. Teachers use their professional authority to strongly shape curriculum, student evaluation, student discipline, proper classroom practices, and teacher training (Weiss 1990).
Nonetheless, teacher professional authority has always been uncertain and contested. This authority is at its apex in the classroom and fades as one goes up the bureaucratic hierarchy (Metz 1978; Weiss 1990). The weakness of teachers’ claims for professional power and autonomy results from several factors. The majority of teachers are women, giving teaching less status than more maledominated professions. Also, because of the unique complexity of the teacher–student relationship, teachers are less able to deliver consistent results than members of professions such as medicine and engineering. Finally, teachers must coexist with a powerful and numerous body of competitors for influence over students; namely, parents. (We discuss teacher–parent struggles for control below.) In the face of these limits to professional authority, teachers have increasingly resorted to market control, in the form of unionism, in order to bolster their influence over the schools.
Ideological Formation. Various actors can shape schools by the power of their ideas; that is, by their successful socialization of educational policy makers to certain values and beliefs (Weiss 1990). This ideological power has been strongly used by the federal government. Repeatedly, it has stimulated schools to take action by focusing attention on certain problems or offering exemplary solutions. One of the most notable examples has been the educational ‘‘excellence’’ movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which was strongly accelerat- ed—though not really sparked—by the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (1983). Within a year of its publication, many states and localities established commissions similar to the National Commission and passed laws implementing its recommendations. On a more global level, the power of ideological persuasion can be seen in the unusual homogeneity across the world in how nations have pursued the expansion and centralization of their educational systems. In large part this commonality of action is rooted in widespread support for a model of societal modernization that emphasizes
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national unification and development by means of the mass mobilization of citizens through a unified school system (Ramirez and Boli 1982).
Once established, ideological control can be extremely powerful and durable. Its main limitation is that it usually takes a long time to establish. And unlike the other forms of power, it is particularly dependent on the willing acquiescence of those who would be influenced (Weiss 1990).
Conflict Between Various Modes of Control.
Many actors attempting to influence the schools utilize—wittingly or unwittingly—several of these modes of control. For example, state governments use political authority, market competition (through categorical aid), and ideological persuasion to get school personnel to act in certain ways. These different modes of influence can often yield great power if they are effectively meshed. But quite often they contradict each other.
Assertions of bureaucratic authority have been met by counterclaims by teachers in the name of professional authority or market control. Teachers have resisted state and local expansions of bureaucratic authority by mobilizing professional associations (for example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) to shape the content of state curriculum standards (Massell 1994; Ravitch 1995). But because assertions of professional authority are often resisted, teachers have resorted as well to market control, in the form of teacher unionism.
But these assertions of power by teachers and by local and state school bureaucrats have in turn provoked democratic counterclaims by groups representing conservative parents concerned about parental prerogatives over education. These groups have strongly criticized teacher unionism and various curricular and pedagogical innovations advocated by teacher professional associations at the national, state, and local levels. These controversial innovations have included not only sex education and values clarification but also state content, performance, and evaluation standards. In California and Pennsylvania, parents associated with such New Right groups as Citizens for Excellence in Education, Focus on the Family, and Eagle Forum have vociferously attacked statewide goals and standards, performance-based assessment, whole-language instruction, and conceptually oriented math education. These groups reject such
curricular and pedagogical reforms as ineffective and unwarranted educational experimentation on children that undermines parental prerogatives to determine the content of their children’s education (Boyd et al. 1996; Kirst and Mazzeo 1995).
Interestingly, there has been little conflict between market control and democratic authority. For example, inadequate critical attention has been devoted to business/school partnerships and the question of how compatible are business desires and public interests in schooling. This absence of scrutiny may be due to the weakness of the socialist tradition in the United States. Because of this weakness, democracy and the market are seen in the popular mind as largely compatible. Both voting and buying tend to be seen similarly, as decisions by atomized actors operating on the basis of narrow self-interest. Public discussion and the public interest tend to be seen as no more relevant to voting than to buying. As a result, efforts to increase market competition within schooling through such devices as vouchers and charter schools are often portrayed in the U.S. as democratic innova- tions—because they ‘‘empower’’ individuals— whereas in Europe there is much more hesitation to equate consumer choice and citizen sovereignity (Whitty et al. 1998).
CONCLUSION
The sociology of U.S. schooling can benefit enormously from keeping in mind several features of that system. The educational system goes well beyond the schools to include such other institutions as families, the mass media, employers, and churches. Even when we focus on the schools, it is important to keep in mind that the U.S. school system is highly unusual compared to those in other advanced industrial societies. And when we turn to control of the U.S. system, we need to look beyond political authority to also consider other, often contradictory, mechanisms of influence over the schools: market competition, bureaucratic decision making, professional authority, and ideological formation.
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KEVIN J. DOUGHERTY
FLOYD M. HAMMACK
ELITES
See Intellectuals; Social and Political Elites.
EMOTIONS
Emotions arise in individual experience, frequently with noticeable physiological signs, such as a racing heart, flushed or pallid face, tense gut, cold hands, and so forth, and thus may seem an unsuitable topic for sociological examination. This attitude, however, reckons without the incontrovertible facts that most human emotions result from real, imagined, recollected, or anticipated outcomes of social interaction and that interaction is the fundamental stuff of sociological analysis. Thus emotions are empirically linked to the social by virtue of their being a consequence of involvement in interaction. But emotions are also precursors of the social, by virtue of their mobilizing energy and motivation for the accomplishment of major social tasks, not the least of which is social solidarity itself.
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Although emotions are thus important features of social life, they have had a varying place in the history of sociology. Early recognized as important by the great founders of the field—Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel—emotions declined in importance after the 1920s, as behavioral and cognitive approaches came to the fore in the social sciences. (Although these two approaches are thoroughly antagonistic to each other, they have agreed that emotions are irrelevant or unamenable to sociological analysis.) Resurrected after a long hiatus, emotions have once again come into their own and are now recognized both as exerting causal effects as well as serving as important results of social endeavors.
This article covers both early and present-day approaches to what has come to be known as the sociology of emotions and examines the role of emotions as both independent and dependent variable.
THE PLACE OF EMOTIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGY
In the great effort to topple the entrenched structures of monarchy and clergy in eighteenth-centu- ry Europe, a signal weapon was reason. By virtue of the application of reason to traditional modes of thought and conduct, philosophers and political theorists concluded that the domininion of kings and priests was falsely premised and that all men were created equal. That reason alone could lead to such a startling conclusion for that day was the result of the conquest by reason in another domain, namely natural science. In astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, the work of reason had accomplished transformations of thought and understanding of a revolutionary nature. The success of reason here gave social thinkers confidence that reason applied to social life would produce results equally significant. And, indeed, it did in form of the upheavals that culminated in the American and French Revolutions.
What had been only thought was put into practice and the tradition of a thousand years swept away. In the ensuing years, reason was enshrined, a new god replacing the old ones that had been discarded. But as this occurred, a counterrevolutionary ideological process was getting under way. In England, Thomas Burke, at first
partial to the aims of the French Revolution, recoiled in horror at its excesses—reason had run amok, with a degree of passion and emotion that was terrifying. Burke argued that society was not amenable to quick constructions or reconstructions. Rather, a slow accretion of time-tested ways that ultimately refined the social rules and customs was the only reliable method for attaining a safe, stable, and satisfactory social order. Opposing the worship of reason, Burke posed rather the validity of an emotional basis for social solidarity. Longstanding mores garnered emotional support and, by virtue of this, violent social change, with its attendant upheaval, was averted.
Burke’s conservative message, which rejected the application of reason to social forms, was to lie fallow for a century, until it was resurrected in a more systematic sociological way by Émile Durkheim. In the interim, Karl Marx, also an exponent of reason in the reorganization of society, had propounded his comprehensive historical theory of the growth and decay of societal organization. Yet in developing his understanding of how society, particularly capitalist society, works, Marx ([1842–1844] 1971, [1867] 1967; Engels [1846] 1947) also produced a paradigm for how to examine emotions sociologically. His approach remains important today, even if the specific political and ideological interests of Marxism are no longer attached to it.
Marx propounded the view that forms of social organization—feudalism, capitalism, social- ism—were products of such factors as technology and the division of labor, which he termed the mode of production, and certain forms of authority and property rights, which he termed the relations of production. A given historical mode of production gave rise, for Marx, to a necessary set of relations of production. In feudal times, the relatively primitive technology required a great deal of hand labor, as exemplified in craft production, where producers owned their tools, their raw materials, and the products of their labor. Property rights and social relations were in line with the division of labor made possible by the technology of the time.
After the Industrial Revolution, with its relatively advanced technology, a new form of division of labor and property rights emerged. The factory
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system entailed labor sold by its owners, the workers, as if it were any other commodity. Factory workers owned neither the tools, the raw materials, nor the products of their labor. Thus a new set of property and authority relations came into existence because of the more advanced technology and the division of labor this enabled.
Here Marx looked closely at the horrible conditions of early entrepreneurial capitalism. The principal, although not the only, defect of capitalism was that workers were reduced to a state of what Marx called ‘‘immiseration,’’ a condition fostered by subsistence wages. Poor housing, poor food, poor health, and impoverishment of spirit were the common lot of factory workers. Beyond this was the state of ‘‘alienation,’’ a concept Marx adopted from the work of philosopher Georg Frederick Hegel. Hegel had reflected on the sad fate that befell human effort, which, once crystallized in material objects, exists separately and apart from the individual who exerted it and, in this sense, was alienated from its producer. Marx used this concept to forge a theory of emotional consequences for workers under capitalism.
The primary form of workers’ alienation was the fundamental experience of chagrin, bitterness, and resentment because of the loss, or alienation, of the product of their labor to the capitalist, who did not labor or produce anything. According to Marx, this was the main emotional result of a system in which those who produced things were not the same ones who owned them.
A second form of alienation resulted from the boring and mentally numbing tasks of factorybased production. Instead of the inherent satisfactions of earlier craft forms of work, workers in modern industry, with its extensive division of labor, obtained little pleasure from their largely repetitive tasks.
A third form of alienation was the emotional isolation and competitive envy of others: both owners and fellow workers. This led to the breakdown of solidarity and community, the comfortable sense of belonging to a group in which one was an accepted member. Melvin Seeman (1959) translated Marx’s forms of alienation into five elements: (1) powerlessness, or a feeling that one had no control over one’s fate; (2) meaninglessness,
or a sense of confusion about the value and significance of one’s efforts; (3) self-estrangement, or a feeling of distance between what one felt oneself to be and what one was required to do at work; (4) isolation, or the longing for a sense of connection with others; and (5) normlessness, or the feeling that one’s efforts lacked aim or goal.
Even if Marx’s critique of capitalism is ignored, it is important to recognize his innovation in sociological analysis, what today we would call social psychology; that is, how social organization affects individual variables. In Marx’s case view, how the social patterns by which labor is organized and its benefits distributed affects emotions. This mode of analysis, designated by the term social structure, is one of the two main types of approach to the analysis of emotions in current sociology. The other, designated as culture, was fostered by the work of Max Weber.
Although he recognized the power and utility of Marx’s social structural analysis of capitalism and its emotions, Weber cast a different light on the process and examined different emotions. In his most famous work, The Protestant Éthic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber ([1904–1905] 1958) engaged Marx in an intellectual battle over who better understood the historical processes that led to capitalism. According to Marx, the economic infrastructure of society—the mode and relations of production—gave rise to the superstructures of society; namely, the way in which other institutions, such as the family, religion, politics, art, and so on, were organized. Further, Marx contended that the infrastructure even determined ideas. And here Weber demurred. Instead, Weber sought to show that capitalism was the product of a distinct set of religious ideas, along with the emotions that those ideas fostered.
For Weber, the crucial ideational matrix for capitalism was the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This is the view that salvation in the religious sense is determined for everyone prior to birth. Some, the elect, are destined to be saved and the remainder, doomed to eternal damnation. According to this doctrine, there is nothing one can do to change one’s fate—no action, no amount of devotion can change one’s predestined fate. For many today, this seems like an odd doctrine, and many wonder how it could have held sway. But in
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Geneva and other places where Calvinism reigned for a while, the belief was of the utmost importance, since it spelled out the possible eternal fate of one’s soul.
Weber conjectured that such a doctrine must have been accompanied by some powerful emotions, mainly a terrible anxiety. At this point, Weber argues, a reaction formation of necessary optimism intervened to forestall despair. Calvinists came to believe that somehow, contrary to doctrine, they might change a dire fate by the most faithful and dedicated service to God’s commandments. One of the most important ways in which to do this was in one’s God-given Beruf, or vocation; that is, one’s life’s work, whether it be as a farmer, artisan, merchant, and so forth. Pursuing one’s daily work in so dedicated a fashion would perhaps avert the severity of a predestined fate.
But such religiously and emotionally driven attention to one’s occupation brought an unsought consequence: It led to worldly success. This in itself, despite doctrinal objections, seemed like a divine signal. Those who succeeded in worldly pursuits began to see this as a hopeful sign that they were among the elect. And, if this were so, then even greater worldly success would ensure that prognosis. Given that Calvinism also inveighed against material display, it led the successful to plow their profits back into their work. In other words, said Weber, it led to the routine practice of the capitalist method of doing business, thus giving rise to that historic form of entrepreneurship. In Weber’s view, anxiety and a form of coping with it were central to the emergence of capitalism.
In the terms of the present-day sociology of emotions, Marx originated an approach based on social structure, while Weber fostered an approach based on culture. The effects of this distinction will be elaborated below.
Émile Durkheim also entered the debate against Marx, but on a different front from Weber. Marx had viewed religion as an opiate, offering hope to and dulling the pain felt by workers who suffered from the extremes of dislocation and poverty, especially during the early stages of capitalism. Marx supposed that when socialism conquered, it would obviate the need for religious belief and practice. Durkheim ([1915] 1965) viewed this as a
form of ultrarationalism and sought to uncover the universal wellsprings of religion, which, he believed, would flourish regardless of what form society took. In order to investigate religious phenomena at their simplest—and hence most likely to prove universal—Durkheim examined the religion of Australian Aborigines, a group that appeared to be about as primitive as one could find according to nineteenth-century understanding.
First Durkheim proposed a distinction between religious behavior and everyday behavior, the sacred and the profane. He saw the two as segregated by time and place as well as by behavior. Among the Aborigines, the sacred emerged during clan gatherings, with the worship of to- tems—animals that stood for the clan and with whom clan members identified. Worship was a matter of ritual practice involving highly emotional activities—rhythmic chanting, frenetic dancing, sexual intercourse—with individuals giving over emotional control to the impulses of the moment. Durkheim reasoned that in these moments of heightened emotional arousal, individuals felt themselves to be in the grip of forces greater than themselves, providing a sense of the presence of something greater than any single individual—a spirit, a god. But Durkheim argued that the only supraindividual entity present was the group itself; that is, the co-presence of the members of the group, giving themselves over to strong emotions, provided the sense of a superior force. In worshiping that force, group members were, unwittingly, worshiping the group itself.
Durkheim generalized this point, arguing that ritual conduct, with its element of emotional arousal, leads to a sense of solidarity among those who engage in the ritual. Thus, religious ritual, far from representing the dead hand of the past, as Marx would have it, enabled group members to cleave to each other and make group continuity possible. This is true, said Durkheim, even when the shared emotion is sadness. Indeed, in examining funerary rites, he showed that coming together on the death of a group member stirred up emotions that transcended the sadness itself. Remarkably, a feeling of strength and renewed vitality emerged from the co-presence of other mourners. Emotions, thus, are not merely individual phenomena; they are crucial to the existence of human groups.
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Society itself is possible only because its members periodically share emotions, whether elation over great victory or sadness over great loss.
EMOTIONS IN MODERN PERSPECTIVE
Although present-day sociologists of emotions treat them differently in many ways than did the founders of the field, they nonetheless hue close to the main insight of the founders; namely, that emotions are socially constituted. This means several things.
First, emotions emerge from episodes of interaction in which valued outcomes are at stake. Second, emotions have a socially normative component. Thus, when one’s emotions deviate from the normative emotional prescription, there is some constraint to adjust one’s emotions to what is normatively specified. Third, over time, as social conditions change, emotional requirements change as well. New conditions mean a somewhat new recipe for emotional life.
In the present-day sociology of emotions, two major sociological traditions converge on the social constitution of emotions, but they do so in different ways. The social structural approach examines emotions as direct products of social interaction and its outcomes. For example, insult leads to anger; deflated ego leads to shame; threat leads to fear; and so on. In each case, the end result of the social interaction is experienced as an emotion.
By contrast, the cultural approach looks mainly at the regulation of emotional expression by social rules. For example, we are enjoined to be happy at weddings, sad at funerals, angry at injustice, and so on. In each case, the individual who is emotionally out of line with what is expected in the situation confronts the possibility of emotional deviance.
The social structural and the cultural approaches form the main body of work in the modern sociology of emotions, and we discuss each in turn.
Social Structural Approaches. The earliest modern sociologist of emotion was Erving Goffman (1959, 1967, 1981), a transitional figure between the works of the founders, especially Durkheim, and later approaches. He focused powerfully on
ordinary conversation as one of the main settings of social interaction. In the social interaction we call conversation, he found high emotional drama. Although conversation most often proceeds without conscious reflection about it by the participants, a conversation has only to break down to receive considerable and sometimes perplexed attention. Goffman saw that conversation actually comprises a miniritual, much in the manner Durkheim described, and that a successful conversation is like a successful ritual: Everyone plays a necessary prescribed role, even if the exact content of the role is not prescripted. In a successful conversation, participants experience a degree of self-realization that produces the kind of satisfaction that ensues from a whole-hearted and authentic participation in a religious ritual. Indeed, there is a similar sacred aspect to conversation, with the most important sacred object on display being the participant’s self. In conversation, that self is accorded a due reverence by other participants or is demeaned by them.
Goffman proposed that in a conversation every actor offers a ‘‘line’’ about himor herself, one which the other participants are expected to take at face value. For example, one has just been promoted to a higher position, or one has sacrificed dearly for a loved one, or one has learned how to play a Bach partita, and so on. If one carries off the line in the conversation such that others confirm one’s projected persona, one feels confident and self-assured. But if one stumbles conversationally and the projected self becomes noncredible, then embarrassment ensues. Unless the actor has what Goffman calls ‘‘poise,’’ which is the ability to mask one’s embarrassment, the conversation falters.
Since conversation by its nature is interactional, other participants must cooperate in sustaining the viability of the conversational interaction. Except in unusual circumstances, Goffman saw in ordinary talk a precarious social order that is supported by the emotions of the participants, requiring their cooperation and emotional sensibility to succeed. The social order of ordinary talk is an instance of social order in general. Although Goffman did not pursue the larger questions of social order in society, his point about the emotional underpinnings of the micro order was extended to the social macro order, especially in the
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formal precedence orders of social power and status. Randall Collins and Arlie Russell Hochschild examined this question in the domain of stratification.
Stratification is the division of the social order into a hierarchy of power, status, and benefits. Some individuals have more and some have less of these desirable attributes and commodities. Since so many life chances are tied up in the stratification order, it is understandable that emotions are focal here, too.
According to Collins (1975, 1981, 1990), social systems, whether large or small, are arenas of conflict in which power, status, and benefits are sought by the participants. In modern societies, the main field of conflict is in organizations devoted to work. Here there are order-givers and ordertakers, whose daily interactions are fraught with emotional consequences. Relative to order-takers, order-givers are secure, confident, and charged with emotional energy. This is because they are at the head of organizational units that support their initiatives and legitimate their orders. Order-tak- ers, on the other hand, are relatively resentful, indifferent, and alienated. They are under constraint from the organizational coalitions headed by the order-givers; they will be punished if they do not obey.
Following Durkheim’s model, Collins views the daily interactions of order-givers and ordertakers as a ritual in which the former display their social value by providing information, evaluating the performances of others, and mobilizing the morale and energies of group members. The or- der-takers are the objects of the ritual, which is intended to arouse them to the same pitch of organizational commitment experienced by the order-givers. But since the order-givers, as the main beneficiaries of the system of organizational stratification, are most aroused in the ritual, they are most likely to cleave loyally to the symbols of the organizations they represent. As beneficiaries of far less, order-takers are also aroused—but with different emotions that are less conducive to good feelings, high energy, and loyal commitment.
Hochschild (1979, 1983) examined some of the emotional accompaniments of labor in service organizations. In an exemplary study of airline flight attendants, she found these workers to be
often conflicted in their emotions. Although they were trained specifically to do what Hochschild called emotional labor—namely, to cater to passengers’ expectations in situations of high time and space constraints, as well as passengers’ sometimes impolite or obstreperous behavior—flight attendants’ own emotions had to be suppressed. Insulted by a passenger, they were required to suppress anger; disgusted by a passenger’s conduct, they were required to overlook their own emotion; and so on—all in the service of not alienating customers. According to Hochschild, this left many of the flight attendants emotionally numb from the overpractice of emotion suppression. Hochschild generalized these findings to the service economy at large, where most of the occupations that require emotional labor are staffed disproportionately by women.
Taking a broader perspective on social structure, Theodore Kemper (1978, 1987, 1989, 1990) proposed that most emotions could be examined as resultants of interaction outcomes in two dimensions; namely, power and status. Power is a relationship in which one actor compels another actor to do something the latter does not want to do. This entails the employment or threat of employment of a variety of noxious stimuli—from physical and verbal violence, through withholding of deserved rewards, to subtle manipulations such as lying and deception. Power is exercised pandemically, whether in informal social interactions or in organizations that carry out the broad work of society.
Status (or status-accord), on the other hand, is a social relationship in which actors voluntarily provide rewards and gratification to other actors. Coercion plays no part here. Status-giving is the basis of true social solidarity, and individuals who voluntarily share membership with each other in a social group are normally motivated to provide each other with the benefits of status, the ultimate degree of which is love.
Kemper proposed that outcomes of interaction in power and status terms give rise directly to emotions. For a sense of how this works, it is important to see that a relatively simple model of social relational outcomes suffices for the analysis. Every relational exchange takes place along the dimensions of power and status. For each actor,
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the outcomes can be: an increase in power and/or status, a decline, or no change. This produces 12 possible outcomes (2 actors × 2 dimensions × 3 results), but only 4 of these will actually occur, namely a power and status outcome for each actor A. Emotions will flow from these.
In the power dimension, the available evidence suggests that actor A loses power or actor B gains it, the emotional outcome for actor A is some degree of fear or anxiety. If actor A gains power and/or actor B loses it, the emotional outcome for actor is likely to be a sense of security. In the status domain, the outcomes are a bit more complex. If actor A gains status, he is likely to feel contented, satisfied, and happy. If actor A loses status, the emotional outcome depends on the felt sense of agency: Who was ultimately responsible for the status loss? If actor B is held culpable, the emotional result is anger. If the self is held culpable, the emotional result is shame or, more seriously, depression, if actor A feels that the situation is irremediable.
When the situation is one in which actor A gives status to actor B, we may expect satisfaction and contentment on the part of actor A. When actor A withholds or withdraws status from actor B, several emotional outcomes are possible. If actor B is deemed responsible (‘‘deserving’’ this treatment), the result is likely to be satisfaction of a self-righteous kind on the part of actor A. If actor B was not responsible (not ‘‘deserving’’ the treatment), then two emotions are possible, either singly or jointly. If actor A deems that he or she did not live up to his or her character standing—that is, the amount of status with which he or she is generally credited by others as deserving—he or she will feel shame. On the other hand, if actor A concentrates on the harm or hurt he or she did to actor B, guilt is likely to ensue. In the instance of shame, actor A recognizes that he or she has acted in such a way as not to deserve the status he or she has been accorded. In the case of guilt, actor A recognizes that he or she has used an excess of power against actor B.
Some aspects of emotion also follow from anticipations that are either confirmed or disconfirmed by subsequent interaction. Thus, the actor who anticipated losing power but did not should feel especially secure. The actor who did
not anticipate receiving status but received it is likely to feel especially pleased. In general, disconfirmations of expectations tend to exert a multiplier effect on the emotions that would ordinarily be felt from the power–status outcome in the situation.
Kemper’s approach to emotions through power and status analysis also allows a social relational perspective on love and on its frequently confused near-relation, liking. Kemper defines a love relationship as one in which at least one actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of status (for terminological purposes, status is equated with affection) to another actor. The definition includes nothing about power, but since power is a feature of all relationships, including it allows for seven different ideal-typical love relationships: (1) Adulation, in which one actor gives or is prepared to give extreme affection to another who may not even know of the other’s existence. Neither actor has or uses power. (2) Ideal love, in which each actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of affection to the other. Neither actor has or uses power.
(3) Transference or mentor love, in which each actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of affection to the other, but one of the actors also has a great deal of power over the other. This pattern is prevalent in ideal teacher–student, thera- pist–client, or mentor–mentee relationships, in which the former in each case is the one with power over the latter. (4) Romantic love, in which each actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of love to the other, but each actor also has a great deal of power over the other. This is the kind of relationship in which each can suffer intensely from the real or imagined withdrawal of affection by the other. (5) Unfaithful love, in which only one actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of affection to the other, but both actors have a great amount of power. Infidelity is a case of this kind of relationship; the betrayer has withdrawn affection from the betrayed, although the betrayed still has a great deal of power, which is why most infidelities are kept secret. (6) Infatuation or unrequited love, in which one actor gives or is prepared to give extreme amounts of affection to the other but has no power, while the other actor gives no affection but has a great deal of power. (7) Parent–Infant Love, in which the parent gives extreme amounts of affection to the infant and the
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