We explore the literature to deepen our understanding of how emotions connect people to society. We dig into the sociological literature on emotions and review the research on collective emotions and social bonds, emotional energy/batteries, and emotional capital. In doing so we provide a toolkit to help researchers study emotions beyond the individual and contribute to our understanding of emotions’ role in social embeddedness. 

Emotions as Social Phenomena

Scholars in organisation and management have mainly theorised emotions as an individual-level phenomenon. However, emotions are at the heart of how people connect with each other, with organizations, and with society as a whole. Emotions in organizations are generated through social interactions and are deeply intertwined with our social structures. This paper engages with emotions as fundamentally social phenomena.

For example, in the first 48 hours of the Ferguson shooting, spontaneous acts of anger emerged that facilitated sensemaking in the protest crowd, and sparked the Black Lives Matters social movement. Emotions such as care, passion, and enthusiasm shaped governance in Okanagan Water Stewardship Council by increasing diverse and fragmented members’ commitment and engagement in constructing a new shared governance logic, which eventually transformed water management in Okanagan, the only desert and one of the driest inhabited regions in Canada.

Three Ideas from Sociology

In our recent paper, published in the Journal of Management Studies, we take the reader beyond individualistic perspectives that have dominated management and organisation studies, to emphasise that emotions are inevitably embedded and authorised in social structures. We review 162 papers and 40 books that take a sociological approach to emotions. From our review, we developed a toolkit to deepen our understanding of emotions in organisations, focusing on three core ideas: collective emotions and social bonds, emotional energy and moral batteries, and emotional capital. 

Collective emotions are more than the aggregation of individual emotional experiences. They are rooted in shared experiences and social interactions. For example, collective emotions of localizing passion bind diverse hobbyists together, clustering them within industries that align with their interests. Social bonds attach people to others and create a sense of belonging and togetherness. The affective bonds of friendship effectively turned newcomers to valued members of a community.

Emotional energy and moral batteries fuel social action. High emotional energy is resultant from successful and positive emotional contagion and coordination in an interaction: it is “a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action”. But emotional energy is a continuum and lower emotional energy can lead people to withdraw from further interaction. Indeed, events can be designed to generate emotional energy. As Ruebottom and Auster found that organizers of “We Day” (a rock concert for social change) purposefully evoked emotional energy in the design of the concert to encourage youth to commit to a new community of change. Moral battery refers to a pair of positive and negative emotions, which motivate action away from an unattractive state and towards an attractive one. For example, anger and pride provided the fuel for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) LGBT movement.

Finally, emotional capital is the idea that emotional resources provide a social advantage within a group by enabling activities that are desirable or beneficial. It is used to understand social hierarchies and inequalities. For instance, the use of emotions representing sexist joviality displayed at work helped women gain status in organizations but might perpetuate sexual stereotypes in the broader society. Building on these three ideas, we propose an integrative model that captures how emotions are embedded within social structures. 

Implications for Management and Organisations

Our conceptualisation opens up several areas of research and provides new ways to explore questions about organizations, leadership, institutions, and the links between our working and non-working lives. Importantly it asks us to see the way emotions are embedded in social relations and more than fleeting bodily experiences.