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Commentary: Sociology of emotions from an embedded perspective

Sociology of emotions (SoE) is indeed ‘a tradition in flux’. Patulny’s, McKenzie’s and Olson’s effort to grasp the field in its unruliness is thus both an inspiring and provocative read for a European emotion-sociologist. The article study is illuminating and the aim to reach beyond the review articles of American colleagues, who usually confine themselves to the US, is truly commendable. But in practice ‘Europe’ seems to be conflated with the UK. Missing are crucial outlets for European scholars, such as International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion and Emotion, Space and Society (listed in SCOPUS). From a European perspective they would deserve to be hand-searched, as the authors did with Emotion Review, and their omission may account for some bias in the findings. For instance, my experience from more than a decade in the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 11 Sociology of Emotions is that macrosociological approaches (e.g. Barbalet, Kemper) and interaction ritual theory (Collins) are also widely used by European scholars. I also wonder why the Kuhnian paradigm approach was chosen. It contradicts the authors’ own point that there is more than one SoE tradition. The paradigm perspective orients towards identifying one general development, reducing the richness and diversity of SoE more than necessary, even for a global overview. Consequently, the authors make too big a case for the ‘paradigm-shift’ towards inclusion of affect theory and interdisciplinarity. In this commentary, I wish to constructively challenge this story from an ‘embedded’ perspective. While emotions are part of many classical sociological studies (e.g. Elias, Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, Martineau), they are often under-theorized. Since the 1970s they have been pulled into the dazzling light of sociological inquiry as objects of scrutiny for their own sake. What are they, what is their function, how can we conceptualize them and