Repository | Book | Chapter

Sociology has had little to say about the nature of "affective" or emotional conduct, perhaps primarily because, following Max Weber's lead, it has generally been hived off theoretically from the bulk of "rational" action in human affairs, downgraded to a sort of appendage to social relations and consigned to a permanently residual status. Mistakenly thought of as beyond the scope of social convention and constraint, affective states have been allowed to fall exclusively within the province of psychology. In its turn, psychology has generated a variety of ways of handling the phenomena of affect, but few of them have remained consistent with, or controlled by, the conceptual structure of emotion-concepts, and this has entailed a serious neglect of the socio-cultural dimensions integral to the very constitution of the phenomena under study. It will be argued here that such dimensions are primary in the consideration of affective states and conduct. Affect and rationality are much more closely inter-related than has been noted in the behavioral sciences, and both are throughout subject to socio-cultural and sociolinguistic analysis. Affective states have too frequently been identified with feeling-states, or with other "contents of consciousness"; they have also been theoretically "reduced" to biological impulses or other visceral, vasomotor and biochemical transformations, or to the perception of such changes on the part of the organism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-09379-3_8

Full citation: