The Sociology of Psychologies

Defining the Sociology of Psychologies

Among sociologists, interest in popular uses of psychotherapeutic narratives and practices has been considerable in recent years, in reference to a number of focal terms, such as “self-help” (Hazleden 2003), “therapeutic culture” (Wright 2008), and “happiness” (Frawley 2017). A string of high-profile and frequently cited studies (Binkley 2014; Davies 2015; Davies 2018; Illouz 2008; McGee 2005; Rimke 2000; Rose 2019; Wright 2010) illustrates this interest well. Nonetheless, the sociology of psychologies has hardly been recognized as a distinctive area of sociological inquiry. References to it are scarce in published research. The most significant discussions date back to the third quarter of the twentieth century and concern historical debates in academic psychology that have little bearing on the subject matter of this essay (Buss 1975; Sanford 1952). References in sociological publications are few and not recent, and they generally are passing mentions in the context of broader arguments in other fields, such as the sociology of knowledge (Berger 1966). However, contemporary sociological interest in therapeutic culture can be traced back to this period and the publication of Philip Rieff’s ([1966] 1987) influential The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

In recent years, a growing academic literature has expanded the thematic and conceptual scope of sociological engagement with the therapeutic, in response to the contemporary pervasiveness of psychotherapeutically motivated explanations of the self, social relationships, and social problems across a heterogeneous range of institutional domains, in diverse societies around the world. This growth of sociological research on what might be termed the “psychologization of society” (Madsen 2018) has been paralleled in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, cultural studies, education, politics, development studies, and psychology.

The sociology of psychologies thus examines the diffusion of academic and clinical psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge across nonspecialist institutional domains, such as government, families, organized religion, education, mass media, economic systems, and so forth, and it considers processes of institutional transformation that may result from this diffusion (Madsen 2014; Nehring and Kerrigan 2019). It analyzes the ways in which individuals draw on such knowledge to account for everyday experiences of self, social relationships, and social problems and to inform their actions with regard to everyday personal issues (Lichterman 1992; Nehring and Kerrigan 2018). Finally, it interrogates the social, cultural, and political consequences of the uses of psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge beyond the remit of academic debates and clinical practice (Rimke 2000; Salmenniemi 2019).

In this sense, the sociology of psychologies is concerned with transformations of social structures, institutional forms and objectives, interpersonal relationships, and modes of self-experience enabled by processes of psychologization or, in other words, the emergence of psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge as a pervasive “way of understanding the nature of man and an ordering of human experience on the basis of this understanding” (Berger 1965:27). The consequences of the social transformations engendered by psychologization are specifically therapeutic, in that societal institutions are reordered, interpersonal relationships rearranged, and individual self-experience redefined so as to facilitate, tendentially, personal fulfillment and the realization of individuals’ potential in its entirety (Madsen 2015). The processes and outcomes of such therapeutic transformations are defined in a variety of idioms, such as those of happiness (Denny 2010), mindfulness (Purser, Forbes, and Burke 2016), positive thinking (Linley, Joseph, Harrington, and Wood 2006), and so on, that reflect the internal heterogeneity of psychotherapeutic discourse and the diversity of its popular uses. It is in response to this diversity that it seems useful to write of the sociology of psychologies in the plural.

Research on these themes speaks to a range of established lines of inquiry in sociology, such as the moral organization of social life in modern societies and the cultural, political, and personal consequences of capitalism. It is through these shared affinities that it is possible to write of the sociology of psychologies as a distinct field of contemporary sociological inquiry. The antecedents of the sociology of psychologies can be found, notably, in sociological debates about the crisis and transformation of social solidarity in modern societies (Durkheim [1893] 2013), about the moral fundaments of capitalism (Weber [1930] 2005), about the implications of social inequalities in the cognitive and emotional organization of everyday experience (Du Bois [1903] 1994), and about the cultural dimensions of technologies of social control in capitalist societies (Marcuse [1964] 1991).

Consequently, the most significant and lasting controversy in the sociology of psychologies has juxtaposed scholars who have emphasized the individualizing, commodifying, and depoliticizing consequences of psychologization (Illouz 2018; Nehring and Kerrigan 2018) and academics who have highlighted the capacity of therapeutic narratives and practices to engender new forms of sociability, social solidarity, and political engagement (Salmenniemi 2019; Wright 2010). The thematic remit of the sociology of psychologies has grown considerably over the past two decades, moving from studies on self-help culture and self-help texts (McGee 2005; Simonds 1992) to the critical interrogation of the therapeutization of society (Wright 2010) and the emergence of a large-scale happiness industry able to engender profound transformations of institutional processes and individual conduct (Binkley 2014; Cabanas and Illouz 2019; Davies 2015).

The sociology of psychologies is tied into broader, multi- and sometimes interdisciplinary debates about the roles of therapeutic narratives and practices in contemporary society, particularly in global mental health (Fernando 2014; Mills 2014), anthropology (Cassaniti 2018; Yang 2018), and psychology (Cabanas and Sanchez-Gonzalez 2016; Purser 2019). As the following discussion will show, this overlap of research agendas across disciplines may enrich sociological analysis as much as it may inhibit it.

The Tyranny of Happiness

At its core, Manufacturing Happy Citizens is concerned with the sociological explanation and critique of the rise of happiness as a socio-culturally dominant ideological construct. Happiness, the book explains, has become a central moral objective of contemporary social life: “In fact, happiness is now generally seen as a mindset that can be engineered through willpower; the outcome of putting into practice our inner strengths and authentic selves; the only goal that makes life worth living; the standard by which we should measure the worth of our biographies, the size of our successes and failures, and the magnitude of our psychic and emotional development” (p. 3).

The book thus treats happiness as the contemporary focal point of the broader pursuit of individual self-realization that has long lain at the heart of therapeutic culture (Morris 1981; Secord 2003). It maps the convergence of developments in science, public debates, governance, business, and work over the past 20 years to explain the hegemony of happiness, and it takes the measure of the consequences that this hegemony has had. Its conclusions are clear: “Happiness has become useful to control our lives because we have become servants to its obsessive pursuit; because it is not happiness that stretches and adapts to us: to the chiaroscuros of our feelings, the ambiguities of our thoughts or the complex texture of our lives. It is rather we who have to stretch and adapt to fit happiness’s consumerist logic, to comply with its tyrannical and veiled ideological demands, and to accept its narrow, reductionist and psychologistic assumptions” (p. 177).

In this rendering, happiness is a blunt tool when it comes to enabling in some sense positive individual self-transformation. At the same time, it is quite effective in promoting certain economic and political interests, as an instrument of social control. Manufacturing Happy Citizens is thus a book about ideology, about the social organization of power, and about the role of psychological knowledge in its pursuit.

For a review essay on the sociology of psychologies, this book seems an obvious choice. Written by Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, whose previous work has done much to define the field (Cabanas and Sanchez-Gonzalez 2016; Cabanas and Huertas 2014; Cabanas 2016; Illouz 1997; Illouz 2007; Illouz 2008; Illouz 2019), the book was published in 2018 and 2019 in five languages—French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and English—to considerable acclaim. Thematically, it represents key debates in a field that has moved outward from the often-small-scale engagement with self-help texts and popular psychology (Crawford 2004; Hazleden 2003) toward critical engagement with an internationally pervasive and socially, culturally, and politically influential happiness industry. In terms of its conceptual underpinnings and its style, it exhibits a skepticism about the promise of therapy culture that has long been prominent in social research (Furedi 2004; Hochschild 2003; Lasch [1979] 1991; Lasch 1984; Moloney 2013; Moskowitz 2001; Rieff [1966] 1987).

At just over 200 pages, this is a concise book. As the foregoing extracts may have shown, it is also a well-written book. This is a book that has clearly been composed for a broad audience of academics, students, and general readers; and Cabanas and Illouz achieve a style that is accessible while sustaining sophisticated sociological analysis. In this sense, Manufacturing Happy Citizens does much to showcase the broad relevance and appeal of the sociology of psychologies.

The book’s argument falls into five chapters, bracketed by a short introduction and conclusion. The rise of happiness, Cabanas and Illouz explain in Chapter One, is closely associated with the development of positive psychology and happiness economics and their success in popularizing their core tenets beyond specialist academic debates. The chapter charts the success of happiness academics in establishing and funding their field. Happiness academics have successfully deployed entrepreneurial strategies to establish and legitimize the cultural authority of happiness narratives in public life, to turn happiness into a commodity and set up lucrative happiness-related business ventures, and, importantly, to “worm” (p. 11) happiness into the politics and practices of governance, as a yardstick by which policy objectives may be set and national progress assessed.

Chapter Two ties the social and political success of the happiness sciences to neoliberalism as an internationally dominant logic of governance. The chapter examines the convergence between the individualism of neoliberal political progress and the conceptual and methodological individualism of the happiness sciences and the public narratives they have generated. Happiness thus provides an overtly non-ideological source of legitimacy for neoliberal politics. At the same time, it constrains the terms by which both governments and individuals may imagine solutions to personal troubles, thus potentially propagating the dissatisfaction that the happiness sciences have set out to remedy.

Chapter Three then looks at the organizational realm and the world of work. Happiness has become a dominant psychological model of work behavior, by which workers’ identities are formulated, by which workers and organizations assess conduct, and by which modes of authoritarian organizational control are formulated. Happiness, Cabanas and Illouz conclude, is at least tendentially implicated in the facilitation of workers’ acquiescence to corporate culture and the displacement of anxieties about intra-organizational powerlessness, competition, and precarious and scarce employment.

Chapter Four returns to the commodification of happiness, a key theme of the book. Here, Cabanas and Illouz survey the making and the operations of a multibillion-dollar industry of global scale that draws on the scientific credibility of happiness narratives to market a range of popular therapeutic products and services, from self-help books and smartphone applications to coaching programs, that speak both to individual consumers and to a range of organizations, from business corporations to universities. This entrepreneurial mobilization of happiness at once produces a regime of constant individual self-actualization and the demand for the commodities that facilitate such self-improvement.

The final chapter pulls together the core themes and findings of the book to argue that happiness has become common sense, defining “what it is to perform, act and feel within psychological and social standards and expectations—thus establishing itself as the yardstick to measure what is considered healthy, adaptive and even normal” (pp. 12–13). The authors problematize this common sense by pointing to the fact that, alongside its capacity to inspire hope for a better future, happiness is tied to a cognitive and emotional solipsism that disables collective responses to social problems as social problems: “We need a kind of hope based on critical analysis, social justice and collective action, that is not paternalistic, that does not decide what is good for us on our behalf, and that does not aim to spare us from the worst, but that places us in a better position to confront it. Not as isolated individuals but together, as a society” (p. 181).

Through these five chapters, Cabanas and Illouz problematize the accomplishments of the happiness sciences. They call into question the notion of happiness on which positive psychology and happiness economics are predicated, signaling conceptual and methodological shortfalls, problematizing the de-socializing individualism in which both academic and popular happiness narratives are grounded and questioning the social, cultural, and political implications of happiness’s hegemony. In its critical interrogation of happiness and the happiness industry, Manufacturing Happy Citizens is more explicit and arguably more incisive than prior research on the subject matter. As an academic text and as a work of public sociology, it aptly articulates arguments about power, ideology, and the implications of psychology in strategies of social control under conditions of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it highlights the importance of the sociology of psychologies to foundational concerns of the discipline at large.

At the same time, though, it illustrates some of the analytical lacunae and gaps of the field. Cabanas and Illouz acknowledge the transnational scale of the happiness sciences and the happiness industry, but they pay little attention to the differential effects of the growing social, cultural, and political prominence of happiness around the world. They correctly emphasize the origins of the happiness sciences in U.S. academia and their dissemination from there outward. However, they have very little to say about the precise mechanisms of the transnational diffusion of happiness narratives (Damousi and Plotkin 2009; Nehring et al. 2016), about their heterogeneous uses in socially and politically disparate societies (Yang 2012), or about the processes by which postcolonial hierarchies between global North and global South might mediate the globalization of happiness (Fernando 2014; Mills 2014). Absent close attention to these issues, the book remains too closely focused on the global Northwest. This division between largely Eurocentric scholarship and research attentive to processes of psychologization in the majority world has long been a characteristic of the sociology of psychologies (McGee 2012), and Cabanas and Illouz do not manage to overcome it. Nonetheless, Manufacturing Happy Citizens may be considered a key text in the sociology of psychologies that deserves the acclaim it has gained.

Therapeutic Craftwork

Assembling Therapeutics can be usefully read as a complement to Manufacturing Happy Citizens and its account of psychologization. Edited by Suvi Salmenniemi, Johanna Nurmi, Inna Perheentupa, and Harley Bergroth at the University of Turku, the book innovates in conceptual and methodological areas left largely unvisited by Cabanas and Illouz. Manufacturing Happy Citizens offers a sweeping macro-sociological analysis of the ideological system erected by the happiness sciences and its proponents. In contrast, the contributors to Assembling Therapeutics cast their net wider and survey a diverse range of popular therapeutic narratives, modes of experience, and practices. An introduction by the editors and an afterword by Elaine Swan set out the thematic, conceptual, and methodological remit of the book, bracketing eleven ethnographic explorations of the therapeutic in contemporary everyday life. These eleven studies address topics from the therapeutic dimensions of religious life to mindfulness and relationship and sex counseling, in varied settings in Finland, Germany, Russia, and Israel. They set out how therapeutic engagements on the part of individuals, social groups, and organizations may take shape across a range of social, cultural, and material contexts, with diverse political effects.

The authors’ emphasis on variation and diversity in therapeutic engagements is closely linked to a central objective of the book: Assembling Therapeutics is defined by a critical stance toward prior research that has sought to critique the homogeneity of processes of psychologization and their social consequences, often with particular attention to the association of therapeutic culture and neoliberal capitalism. The book’s broad thematic remit, its methodological orientation, and its theoretical contribution follow from this objective. Notably, the adoption of a micro-sociological, ethnographic methodological approach serves to foreground disparate modes of therapeutic engagements and their heterogeneous implications: “Through the ethnographic approach, we seek to move away from the ‘epistemology of suspicion’ (Illouz 2008:4), which tends to posit therapeutics as politically and culturally dubious and its practitioners as politically reactionary and imprisoned by false consciousness, and to explore how people encounter, engage and live with therapeutic practices. Some chapters examine how people narrate and experience therapeutic practices, while others analyze the practices themselves, such as mindfulness or self-tracking—and many chapters tackle both” (p. 5).

Assembling Therapeutics is thus foremost a book about therapeutic practices, that is to say the localized, socio-culturally and institutionally situated ways in which individuals, social groups, and organizations draw on popular therapeutic knowledge to organize social interaction and delimit its moral and political legitimacy. The therapeutic, the book suggests, is actively crafted into everyday social life, as varied actors use popular psychological knowledge to give meaning and purpose to their conduct.

From this conceptual point of departure, the authors of Assembling Therapeutics accomplish an important theoretical innovation, as they work with assemblage theory to rework sociological understandings of the therapeutic:

We suggest that, rather than as “culture,” therapeutic practices and discourses can be productively conceptualized as diverse, situated and context-specific “assemblages” that may be politicizing or depoliticizing, individualizing or collectively oriented, commonly welcomed or shunned by the public imaginary—and, of course, many of these things simultaneously. By engaging with assemblage thinking, the book seeks to decenter the somewhat totalizing narratives of therapeutic culture, which tend to depict it as a coherent and unified entity producing similar effects regardless of time and place. The analytical lens of assemblage allows us to bring to the fore the multiplicity of therapeutic configurations in different contexts, and to underscore their material and political dimensions, which have not been studied enough in previous literature. (p. 2)

In recent years, assemblage theory in its various iterations (e.g., DeLanda 2006; Deleuze and Guattari 2013; Ong and Collier 2005) has become widely influential in sociology and allied disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies. Assembling Therapeutics uses it to significant effect. Through the concept of therapeutic assemblage, the book’s authors address the aforementioned long-standing tension in the sociology of psychologies between generalizing critiques of psychologization and fine-grained studies of the localized uses of popular therapeutic knowledge:

Each chapter looks at how people and other-than-people participate in crafting and maintaining therapeutic assemblages, that is, make sense of and act upon themselves, and make promises, paths and possibilities for a good (or at least better) life to happen. The therapeutic happens through a coming together of many different elements: different technologies, beliefs, programs, discourses, metaphors and beings, whether “real” or “imaginary” (another persistent binary to overcome). This work of “assembling therapeutics” reveals the multiplicity of the therapeutic, and how the meaning of “the therapeutic” itself shifts with shifting assemblages. (p. 9)

Bringing the concept of therapeutic assemblage to life, Assembling Therapeutics highlights the embodied and sensory grounding of therapeutic experiences. Thus, Steven Stanley and Ilmari Kortelainen (Chapter 2) explore mindful modes of embodiment, looking at intersubjective dynamics and interactions in a mindfulness training course in Wales. Marjo Kolehmainen, in Chapter Three, then builds on participant observation in relationship and sex counseling sessions in Finland to portray the affective atmospheres of therapeutic cultures.

Engagement with embodiment and the senses forms part of a broader interest of the book in the materiality of therapeutic assemblages, a notable blind spot in previous research. Across its chapters, technology, material structures, the social organization of space, and the enmeshment of human and non-human actors in the assembling of therapeutics emerge as necessary elements in the sociological analysis of therapeutic engagements. For example, Harley Bergroth and Ilpo Helén in Chapter Seven document “therapeutic life management” in Finland through data-driven self-tracking, drawing from the qualitative analysis of online promotional materials, in-depth interviews with self-trackers, and auto-ethnographic data involving the use of a tracking wristband. Felix Freigang (Chapter 8) then explains how smartphone mood-tracking applications come to be incorporated into everyday life in Germany, in response to the pursuit of self-transformation, well-being, and empowerment. In Chapter Nine, Virve Peteri questions the role of fun in workplace cultures and management in Finland. She examines how the promotion of a ludic workplace ethos interacts with the rearrangement of space in office settings to facilitate the surveillance and regulation of workers’ conduct.

The role of therapeutic assemblages in the social organization of moral life is a further central theme of the book. In this context, Chapters Four and Five reexamine the much-discussed association of therapeutic engagements and religious life. Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir explores therapeutic knowledge and practices in Finnish Orthodox Christianity, while Julia Lerner analyzes the mutual implications of the therapeutic and the religious through ethnographic research on Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel. In Chapter Six, Ariel Yankellevich is concerned with generational shifts in civic morality, as he examines the role of coaching programs in the transformation of subjectivities through interviews with middle-aged coaches in Israel.

A final issue that cuts across the book is the problem of therapeutic politics. On the one hand, contributions such as Peteri’s or Bergroth and Helén’s show how the therapeutic may ensnare, participating in the production of distinctive modes of social control, (self-)surveillance, and disempowerment. On the other hand, the capacity of popular therapeutic knowledge to produce new forms of political consciousness and to empower collective agency equally looms large in the book. Thus, Chapters Ten to Twelve further problematize the association of therapeutic engagements with power, social control, and the rationalities of contemporary capitalism. Salmenniemi, Nurmi, and Joni Jaakola (Chapter 10) discuss fieldwork among practitioners of alternative therapeutic practices in Finland to examine how therapeutic narratives and practices may variously serve to reinforce or contest modes of subjectification amenable to the generation of value in neoliberal capitalism.

In Chapter Eleven, Inna Perheentupa then looks at the association of feminist activism and therapeutic politics, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Russia. Her chapter documents how feminists’ public engagement with traumatic experiences of gendered violence may simultaneously serve as a form of political agency and perform a therapeutic function in a repressive political system. Finally, Chapter Twelve discusses the rarely considered association of the therapeutic and the supernatural. Kia Andell, Harley Bergroth, and Marja-Liisa Honkasalo use autobiographical narratives to show how experiences of supernatural or “uncanny” events, such as visions, contact with strange beings, and so on, may interact with prevalent technoscientific rationalities to produce simultaneously sickening and healing effects and encourage care for the self and others.

Assembling Therapeutics is a theoretically and methodologically complex and innovative book that successfully addresses persistent analytical tensions and controversies in the sociology of psychologies. The book’s nuanced ethnographies do much to address a long-standing dearth of nuanced analyses of everyday therapeutic experiences and practices (McGee 2012; Nehring and Kerrigan 2018). The concept of therapeutic assemblage is highly original and analytically productive, and it is to be hoped that it will be developed further in future research. Importantly, the authors also take some, albeit small, steps to move beyond the narrow focus of the Anglophone sociology of psychologies on a few societies in the global Northwest. This is an important book that clearly signposts future directions for the sociology of psychologies.

Happy in the Marketplace

Of the three books I review in this essay, Benjamin Hunnicutt’s The Age of Experiences is the most difficult to do justice to. While its subject matter very much coincides with those of Manufacturing Happy Citizens and Assembling Therapeutics, the academic debates in which Hunnicutt grounds it and the terms through which he constructs its argument are notably different. This is self-consciously much more of a business book than a sociological text, with manifest implications for the course its narrative takes.

The Age of Experiences explains how the convergence of recent developments in the happiness sciences, technology, business, and the socio-economic organization of work and leisure may liberate human potential and enable self-fulfillment. The book’s point of departure is the problem of “shorter hours,” that is to say the reduction in paid labor that has resulted from economic and technological shifts, most significantly automation and the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence. Hunnicutt sets out the historical context of his argument (Chapter 1), in the form of a political and economic shift, around the time of the Great Depression, away from the promotion of leisure and toward a model of economic organization predicated on the notions of full-time work and full employment. In an age of chronic unemployment and the progressive automation of economic activity, the full-time, full-employment model has become unsustainable, Hunnicutt argues, while the recovery of leisure as a central focus of human activity and a central source of human fulfillment seems promising. The book’s end point is the argument that these shifts may usher in a new age of human fulfillment (Chapters 2 and 3). Hunnicutt summarizes the trajectory between these two points as follows:

Labor’s traditional solution to the technological dilemma, shorter hours, has been virtually obscured over the last fifty years. However, technology’s ability to create jobs faster than machines replace humans is increasingly doubtful, as is government’s ability to spend enough to ensure Full-Time, Full Employment. The eternal creation of work now seems to many a utopian fantasy. However, the new eudaimonic technology promises to resurrect labor’s old unemployment solution by increasing the demand for leisure. By employing the new sciences of happiness, the technology promises to create better experiences and transformations that will require more time for their consumption. Whereas technology once supported work reductions by the invention of laborsaving devices, eudaimonic technology will support shorter hours by increasing the demand for leisure necessary for consumption of its experience products, a process that may reawaken the forgotten American dream. (p. 20)

This extract points to the complex conceptual model that Hunnicutt develops to facilitate this transition to a liberating form of capitalism. Fundamentally, Hunnicutt is concerned with assembling the theoretical resources necessary to set capitalism on this path, across nine chapters, a preface, an introduction, and an afterword, as well as a foreword by B. Joseph Pine II, a business writer and motivational speaker from whose work—notably the book The Experience Economy (Pine and Gilmore [1999] 2011)—Hunnicutt draws considerable inspiration.

The concept of experience is the building block on which Hunnicutt’s argument rests (Chapters 2 and 3). His development of the concept differs markedly from its common usages in academic sociology. The book’s index, for instance, features “experience capital,” “experience design,” “experience economy,” “experience marketing,” “experience-product design,” and “experiencescapes” (p. 279), but not “experience” on its own. What Hunnicutt means by experiences is that “the customer is the product” (p. 44); his narrative explains how businesses may structure their products and services around the promotion of fulfilling experiences in their customers in an “experience economy.” In other words, The Age of Experiences proposes a positive mode of the commodification of human experience. In yet other words, The Age of Experiences discusses how to sell happiness and, in doing so, enhance human life.

Hunnicutt’s optimism about the potential of business as a source of in some sense fulfilling experiences rests on his diagnosis of a post-materialist shift in contemporary cultural life (Introduction), the emergence of what he labels “experience” and “transformation” economies (Chapters 2 and 3), and the growing capacity of technology, positive psychology, and the neurosciences to bolster these trends (Chapters 5 to 9). Hunnicutt derives the concept of the experience economy from the eponymous business book by Pine and Gilmore ([1999] 2011). In his account, it refers to the recognition, in the late 1990s, that “[g]oods and services are no longer enough” (p. 20). Instead, to thrive, businesses must also and foremost sell their customers experiences, as the latest stage in the progression of the creation of economic value: “What is needed are special kinds of experiences that build up a kind of experience capital in the consumer—that change consumers so that they become better at and more appreciative of the experiences they purchase” (p. 45). This trend in business dovetails, says Hunnicutt, with the growing salience of post-materialist values in the United States, in the form of “a shift from concerns about wealth, safety, and consumerism to new aspirations: autonomy, quality of life, creativity, experiences, and self-expression” (p. 11). One of the examples Hunnicutt gives of this economic activation of experiences is that of birthday parties:

This progression of economic values is often illustrated by the familiar example of spending on birthdays. 17 years ago, birthdays were celebrated at home and largely beyond the reach of the marketplace. At most, spending was limited to the ingredients (commodities) needed to bake a cake (at a cost of less than one dollar). Gradually, store-bought presents, cake mixes, and candles were added to the celebration. Then the cake was ordered from the supermarket already made, adding up to ten times the cost of making it at home (tens of dollars). Parties were added to the event, which were then gradually expanded and catered. Then the whole celebration was relocated to Chuck E. Cheese’s, Jeepers!, Dave and Busters, or a myriad of local family-oriented experience providers, increasing the cost of the birthday by a factor of ten once again (hundreds of dollars). Entrepreneurs are now offering the services of professional planners and the option of having the party at exotic locations: Six Flags Over Georgia, Disney World, and elsewhere (thousands of dollars). (pp. 30–31)

Importantly, this commodification of birthday parties should not just matter to owners of Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants and the managers of Six Flags; the significance of the commodification of experiences reaches far beyond the business world. Hunnicutt shows this through a lengthy discussion of what he terms the transformation economy. The transformation economy marks a further advance beyond the experience economy. In the experience economy, products acquire central intangible dimensions, as in the “birthday experience,” and customers co-participate in the products they consume, such as a birthday party. In the transformation economy, commodified experiences are furthermore designed so as to facilitate customers’ self-realization in potentially far-reaching ways:

The assumption that nearly everyone would like to become healthier, wiser, stronger, more skillful and accomplished, better looking, more interesting, better able to relate to other people, interested and involved in more things, better able to see and appreciate the beauty around them, better neighbors and family members—in short, better human beings—is fundamental for the transformation economy. Many agree with Pine and Gilmore’s universal claim: “We want to transform ourselves.” . . . Flowing from this fundamental assumption, a new kind of specialized language specific to the transformation economy has gained wide acceptance. . . . In the transformation economy, businesses become “transformation elicitors,” . . . offering effectual experience products to customer aspirants and guiding development toward desirable goals through a gradual, unfolding series of graded experiences. . . . Willing intent is generally required, on the part of both customer and vendor. Transformative experiences have purpose and direction. . . . Brian Solis, a principal digital marketing analyst at the Altimeter Group, explains that “aspiration and intention become the North Star,” guiding “enablers in the delivery of magical experiences.” (p. 45)

For commodified experiences to become “magical” and acquire the potential to enable individual self-transformation in the way Hunnicutt describes, they need to be carefully designed, as Hunnicutt explains. Much of The Age of Experiences is thus concerned with questions of experience design (Chapters 7 to 9), and Hunnicutt, to borrow his own term, devotes considerable attention to “cataloging” findings from the neurosciences and positive psychology that might be usefully employed in this context (Chapters 5 and 6). These two happiness sciences consequently constitute Hunnicutt’s primary theoretical resources in explaining how the commodification of experiences might be harnessed to enable self-improvement amid the advent of a post-work world.

Hunnicutt thus makes an optimistic case for a model of the capitalist marketplace that offers potential for human liberation and should therefore be pursued (Chapter 9). This optimism notwithstanding, he also acknowledges the potential of consumer culture to promote exploitation and alienation on the part of workers and consumers. He addresses these critiques in some detail (Chapter 4), citing mostly classical scholarship by E. P. Thompson, Thorstein Veblen, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and others.

The Age of Experiences proposes a complex vision for socio-economic transformation. This vision is distinctly optimistic at a time of crisis, when optimism may be hard to come by. Regrettably, read as a contribution to the sociology of psychologies or to economic sociology, it falls short of accomplishing its objective. Perhaps most importantly, it lacks the full array of conceptual resources necessary to construct a plausible model of socio-economic transformation. Hunnicutt’s main points of reference are business studies, psychology, and the neurosciences, and the methodological individualism of these disciplines prevents him from engaging with problems of social stratification and social inequalities, of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexualities, and so forth, that form part of the texture of contemporary capitalism.

Hunnicutt does not devote any attention to these dimensions of capitalism, and as a result The Age of Experiences is far less convincing than it could perhaps have been. His engagement with potential criticisms of the transformation economy in terms of the pitfalls of consumer culture (Chapter 4) ultimately seems reductive and does not do the complex social and political problems of contemporary capitalism justice. It is telling, for example, that Hunnicutt cites companies such as Disney, Starbucks, or Airbnb as prime examples of the successful commodification of experiences (p. 4). Likewise, Hunnicutt’s terminology reveals the narrowness of his conceptual frame of reference. This is a book about the “economy” and “consumers,” and it does not have much at all to say about society, its citizens, or forms of collective experience and action in which they might engage.

Moreover, the lack of international scope of Hunnicut’s argument must be mentioned. In an age of global economic interdependence and cultural exchange—albeit, at the time of writing, severely interrupted—it would seem necessary to look beyond the confines of a single nation-state when conceptualizing the relationship between individual happiness and economic transformations. Yet The Age of Experiences contents itself with a look at American economic history, American businesses, and American consumers. Shorn of a meaningful analysis of the implications of globalization and global economic and cultural ties, the book’s conceptualization of the transformation economy seems overly simple and lacks plausibility.

Finally, reading The Age of Experiences from the perspective of the sociology of psychologies, it is striking that Hunnicutt treats positive psychology and the neurosciences simply as resources to build his argument. Academic debates on the psychologization of society and the role that both fields have played in its context have been profoundly controversial (Binkley 2014; Rose 2019). Yet Hunnicutt does not situate his narrative in these debates, instead drawing on the happiness sciences as ostensibly unproblematic sources of economically useful knowledge.

This lack of attention to the details of fraught academic debates extends to his account of happiness, one of the key terms of the book. Even though it plays a central role in its narrative and features frequently, Hunnicutt never quite gives it the philosophical, historical, and sociological grounding it needs, for example, in terms of socio-cultural variations in its meaning or its differentiation through global and local social inequalities. Developed through the individualistic idiom of psychology and the neurosciences, Hunnicutt’s notion of happiness and attendant self-transformation remains sociologically uncomfortably “thin.”

Conclusion

Taken together, the three books illustrate key themes, debates, and areas for further research in the sociology of psychologies. In particular, three problems may merit attention in the further development of the field. The first of these is the problem of therapeutic politics and the persistent debate about the capacity of therapeutic culture to serve as a tool of ideological manipulation and a source of anomie or to act to empower individuals and social groups and provide them with the cultural resources to lead meaningful lives in contemporary society. This question spans the history of the field, from Rieff’s ([1966] 1987) seminal work to contrasting voices in the present, such as those of the three books discussed here. Divergent assessments of therapeutic politics seem at least to some extent bound up with widely differing methodological strategies, as exemplified by the contrast between Cabanas and Illouz’s interest in large-scale cultural narratives and socio-economic structures and the focus of Salmenniemi and her coauthors on closely localized experiences, practices, and forms of interaction. Studies that bridge this gap are as yet rare, and there is therefore a distinct need for holistic methodological approaches that combine macro- and micro-sociological analyses of the political implications of the therapeutic turn.

Novel holistic approaches are also needed with regard to the transnational scale of processes of psychologization. Of the three books analyzed here, only Assembling Therapeutics looks beyond the global Northwest, albeit in a limited way and without making much of the potential for systematic comparative analysis of the book’s case studies. Both Manufacturing Happy Citizens and The Age of Experiences remain firmly rooted in the global Northwest, in keeping with a general trend in the Anglophone academic literature in the field. In response to this gap, it will be important to develop research attentive, first, to the transnational circulation of therapeutic narratives, practices, and products and, second, to their uses beyond the global Northwest. Here, greater attention to the postcolonial dimensions of psychologization and to the ways in which it responds to transnational hierarchies and forms of social inequality is needed.

Finally, there is a need for enhanced interdisciplinary dialogue between sociologists of psychologization and scholars working on relevant subjects in other fields. The preceding review of The Age of Experiences highlights the cross-disciplinary disjunctions that exist in the conceptual resources and thematic frames of reference that are brought to bear on the analysis of psychologization in sociology and business studies. Similar analytic gaps exist between the sociology of psychologies and, for example, psychological anthropology, critical psychology, and global mental health. More systematic and extensive interdisciplinary dialogue might serve to overcome these disjunctions and shape a large interdisciplinary field of research on psychologization, as a key social trend in the twenty-first century.