Investigating Collective Emotional Structures: Theoretical and Analytical Implications of the ‘Deep Story’ Concept

Abstract

Since Hochschild proposed the notion of a ‘deep story’ to address a collective emotional structure (particularly resentment) underpinning political attitudes and social divisions in the contemporary USA, this category has been widely embraced across social sciences to reflect upon links between sedimented emotions, motivations, actions and means of social mobilization. Simultaneously, however, criticism of this concept has been articulated which pointed out that Hochschild was inconsistent in her understanding of deep stories and the role this category performs in a sociological investigation. Acknowledging critical addresses presented so far, the article aims at the reconstruction of this concept as an analytical device which can be used to account for collective emotional dynamics accompanying prolonged social transformations. I propose that a deep story can be best understood as a social space in which emotions emerge through an interactional, collaborative process of storytelling. I draw, first, from social-psychological investigations into collective processes of meaning-making to analyse the interplay between the emergence of group-based cognitive categories and their affective implications. Second, I employ narrative theories to account for socio-psychological processes in which group-based, collectively generated cognitive and affective elements are integrated into actual lifeworlds and deployed in sense-making. Finally, I consider the insights pertaining to emotions collectively felt and practised to reflect upon the social dynamic of emotion-sharing. I argue that the notion of a ‘deep story’ is analytically useful only insofar it is embedded in clearly articulated theoretical assertions about cognitive and affective, collective and interpersonal, dynamics of meaning-making.

Keywords

deep stories emotions narrative research social change social representations storytelling

Introduction

Hochschild (2016) coined the notion of a ‘deep story’ to address a collectively shared emotional narrative (particularly resentment) underpinning political attitudes and social divisions in the contemporary USA. Since then this category has been widely embraced across political sciences and sociology to reflect upon links between sedimented emotions, motivations, actions and means of social mobilization. In particular, these applications addressed the issue of Donald Trump’s rise to power in the 2016 presidential elections. They strived to identify underlying layers of (mostly negative) emotions in some parts of the US population, especially white men (see e.g. Boler and Davies, 2018; Kreiss et al., 2017; Polletta and Callahan, 2019). In a more general context, the notion of a deep story and the use which Hochschild made of it resonated with a growing interest in the spread of populism, perceived as the key, albeit most problematic, political process in the western democracies in the 21st century (Betz, 2005). Deep stories served to highlight the emotional dynamics underpinning contemporary populist upheaval (Berman, 2021; Gidron and Hall, 2017; McQuarrie, 2017). This category, then, more than any other, strived to capture the dynamics of a ‘deep transformation’ – a structural and cultural transition occurring both on the level of declared opinions and political orientations, and in how people experience social reality, how they feel about it.

Although the deep story concept apparently took off successfully, closer scrutiny of how it was used in the research on contemporary cultural change in the USA reveals that in its present formulation, this notion falls short of enabling an in-depth analysis of emotional mechanisms mediating shared feelings and collective action in the times of social change in the USA and beyond. More often than not, deep stories were employed only in an illustrative capacity. For instance in the literature on the populist upheaval in the USA, deep stories were referred to in order to illustrate the nativist and nationalist cultural (re)orientation of citizens of liberal democracies. The actual analytical category to conceptualize this ‘deep transformation’ was the ‘cultural backlash’: a collective counter-reaction to ongoing democratization, diminishing social distances and shifts in relations of power induced by liberal social policies (Berman, 2021; Inglehart and Norris, 2017). Furthermore, the deep layer (emotional content) of a cultural backlash has already been efficiently analysed through the body of concepts relating to particular and well-theorized emotions, described as fuelling the populist turn: (white) anger (Zembylas, 2022), resentment (Betz, 2005) or ressentiment (Salmela and von Scheve, 2017), and shame (Watkins, 2018).

It could be argued, therefore, that existing theories of anger, resentment/ressentiment, and shame already shed light on the pivotal emotional dynamics of deep transformations. Any analysis, however, which focuses on a singular, isolated emotion, will probably fall short of explaining interconnections and interdependencies within lived experiences of members of populations most affected by social change. Lived experiences are necessarily complex, contextual, and to some extent emotionally ambiguous, with blurred boundaries between certain emotions, as analyses of resentment clearly show (Salmela and von Scheve, 2017). In this regard, I posit, the notion of deep stories offers a significant explanatory potential to illuminate multifaceted social processes such as political polarization or populist upheaval which entail essential shifts in emotionality (Boler and Davies, 2018). By recognizing the multidimensional and contextual nature of emotion regulation in human collectives, the focus on deep stories can potentially enable us to perceive emotions as complex collective resources fostering certain kinds of political and collective action, and circumscribing or discouraging others, thus bringing shared feelings into focus of culturally oriented analysis of social change processes.

Assuming that the notion of deep stories is analytically useful only insofar as it is embedded in clearly articulated theoretical assertions about cognitive and affective, collective and interpersonal, dynamics of meaning-making, in this article I reflect upon conceptual implications of this category. To reconstruct it as an analytical, rather than descriptive device, I propose that a deep story can be best understood as a social space in which emotions emerge through the interactional, collaborative process of storytelling.

As a point of departure, I discuss the treatment of emotions within cultural sociology so far, focusing on its narrative-oriented branch, and explaining how deep stories can complement existing approaches to emotions and narratives (stories) within political and cultural sociology. Next, I proceed toward the theorization of the deep stories by presenting a framework of related notions providing further insights into how emotions participate in collective meaning-making. Finally, I analyse the implications of this concept and demonstrate how it can be used to account for collective emotional dynamics accompanying prolonged social transformations.

Emotions in Narrative Approaches: The Potential of the Deep Story Concept

It would be an overstatement to claim that emotions have been absent from the dominant approaches in culturally oriented research on political and societal transformations. On the contrary, in his call for the development of genuine cultural sociology, Jeffrey Alexander directly referred to emotions stating that ‘cultural sociology makes collective emotions and ideas central to its methods and theories precisely because it is such subjective and internal feelings that so often seem to rule the world’ (Alexander, 2003: 5). The explicit focus on emotions offered by the concept of deep stories, however, is still somewhat novel for cultural sociology. If adopted, it could become an analytical tool for narrative approaches, enabling them to account for the affective aspect of meaning-making dynamics.

Hochschild defines a deep story as a ‘feels-as-if-story – it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel’ (2016: 135). She designed this category to serve as a methodological device to investigate the lifeworlds of the Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, a method of ethnographic immersion aimed at unravelling the most in-depth emotional underpinnings of their political orientations. In her original formulation, a deep story is, first and foremost, a narrative that organizes how reality is experienced and assigns meanings to particular experiences. Hochschild’s conceptual proposal taps into a well-established view within cultural sociology that narratives shape attitudes and behaviours, ‘helping [individuals] to develop a more general understanding of how they should orient to the world around them’ (Jacobs, 2001: 226). In this perspective, the emergence, presence, and dominance of certain narratives can be linked to social change or, conversely, to the preservation of the status quo. In particular, narratives provide vocabularies that enable the exploration and acceptance of ideas, including new ones (Jacobs and Smith, 1997). Even more importantly, narratives, in general, provide public discourse with an emotional context or backdrop against which events are assessed and reality is ‘felt’. As noted by Jacobs (2001) in relation to racial unrest in the USA during the 1990s, the prevalence of ‘tragic narratives edged out the possibility of a hopeful, romantic understanding of the events’ (2001: 224). Jacobs suggests, in other words, that the social impact of racial concerns was limited through narratively-mediated affective circumscription. In a similar fashion, Philip Smith (2005) argues that the dominance of the ‘Apocalyptic genre’ was the key cultural factor that constituted the emotional foundation upon which the public could be persuaded to support the ‘War on Terror’ in the USA following the 9/11 attacks. The significance of affect and emotions, however, is only implied in this body of work, and emotions are not explicitly emphasized as either an object or a feature of narratives.

Much the same can be said about a narrative approach in cultural sociology that emphasizes the epistemological and ontological value of narratives. It is recognized that ‘it is through narratives that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities’ (Somers, 1994: 606). The emergence of narratives is closely linked to the development of identities, and the latter are viewed as the ultimate expression of lived experiences that are shaped and conveyed through storytelling. The main argument presented here is that action should be understood as a result of sense-making dynamics. As Somers (1994: 614) argues, individuals are ‘guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives’. Crucial in this regard is the mechanism of emplotment, which highlights and emphasizes certain aspects of experiences while silencing or downplaying others (Somers, 1992, 1994). Once again, this argument fails to directly address emotions. According to Somers, what is guided by emplotment is attention, feeling is not explicitly discussed. If emotions are considered in analyses in this vein, they are categorized as part of an ‘evaluative’ system that works in conjunction with the narrative’s event structure and ‘explanatory’ system (Steinmetz, 1992).

In this context, the concept of deep stories has significant potential for culturally oriented analyses of narratives. A deep story shifts our attention to these stories in which emotions take centre stage. A narrative of this kind should be viewed not only as a stimulus that activates emotions and triggers specific emotional responses, but primarily as a space in which emotions are actually constructed through the inherently social process of storytelling. In other words, although all ‘highly mimetic’ (Smith, 2005) political discourses and framings generate emotional responses in individuals, deep stories direct our attention towards how emotions are collaboratively constructed through storytelling. Thus, this concept could complement the existing toolbox of cultural analysis by focusing explicitly on the emotional dimension of narratives and their collective, collaborative character.

The concept, however, cannot be taken from Hochschild as a ready-to-use entity. As critics point out, it was diluted through how Hochschild applied it, employing deep stories simultaneously as a theoretical concept, a descriptive metaphor, and a sensitizing concept to provide a thick description of the analysed political subculture (Henricks, 2017). Inconsistencies in the use of the concept generated inconsistencies in the inference about the investigated lifeworld: a category primarily formulated to serve as a metaphor describing emotional experiences of communities in a particular predicament, which was eventually equated with a ‘real, underlying, durable psychological structure’ (Martin, 2016, no pagination) characterizing this community’s members, producing certain observable results, such as political support for a far-right party.

Reworking the notion would require, first, conceptualizing it as a symbolic resource of a community, rather than an intra-individual psychological structure. Storytelling should be viewed as a relational dynamic through which communities and shared identities are constructed (Maly et al., 2012). Since other individuals are ‘constitutive rather than external to identity’ formation (Somers, 1994: 629), the process of the social construction of a shared lifeworld in and through telling stories should be traced in the making: in how, by, and with whom the stories are being told, how meanings are collectively negotiated, (re)defined, and reused to form them. Storytelling in this regard becomes a significant and consequential meaning-making practice, part and parcel of a group’s ‘meaning work’ (Alexander, 2003). Alexander defines meaning work as ‘a complex and multivalent symbolic process that is contingent, highly contested, and sometimes highly polarizing’ (2003: 94). By calling this process work, he emphasizes the effort that groups need to invest into making meanings. The same can be said about constructing deep stories, which become a collective achievement of a group, rather than an individual property.

Second, and in connection with the reflection upon the contextual, collective and emergent character of deep stories, we need to consider to what extent deep stories should be treated as coherent ‘units’ of meaning. Existing conceptualizations of narratives within cultural sociology emphasize that narratives, in general, are open-ended cultural resources (Jacobs, 2001). Coherence should be viewed as ‘a variable rather than a constant feature of social discourse’ (Steinmetz, 1992: 492). Applications of deep stories within political sociological research support this position, recognizing that deep stories, like other narratives, may not accurately reflect empirical reality but still hold significant emotional weight and influence axiological and political orientations (e.g. Kreiss et al., 2017). The acknowledgement of the open-endedness or lack of empirical precision does not explain, however, how emotional ambiguities are incorporated into deep stories.

For example, in Hochschild’s description of the Tea Party followers’ lifeworld, resentment plays a crucial role, as a basis for political anger. Resentment, though, has been already criticized as a vague category, an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of emotional experiences. Salmela and von Scheve (2017), arguing for the focus on ressentiment rather than resentment, enumerate the following distinct emotions as components of resentment identified in existing analyses of the feeling: ‘distrust, alienation, discontent, cynicism, pessimism, insecurity, and feelings of powerlessness’ and anger (2017: 572). Not only are these emotions diverse; but most importantly they significantly differ in how they shape action and perceptions of reality, some of them fuelling action and retaliation (as anger), and the others discouraging an active engagement with the external world (like sadness) (Kemper, 1990). How are, then, deep stories actually formed, accommodating diverse or even divergent emotions? Neither Hochschild’s conceptualization of the concept provides an answer to this question, nor can it be easily addressed on the grounds of the body of work developed within narrative-oriented cultural sociology. Simultaneously, accounting for the complexity and multidimensionality of emotional processes, and for how they operate in particular, social circumstances, constitutes the key part of an in-depth investigation into collective emotional dynamics.

In the following section, I present a theorization of deep stories, aimed at transforming this notion into a conceptual tool for researching the emotional aspect of collective meaning-making dynamics. I emphasize the formation of deep stories, their integration into group lifeworlds, and their embedding in localized storytelling processes.

Theorizing Deep Stories: Towards the Conceptual Reconstruction of the Notion

To theorize deep stories as an analytical, rather than descriptive or metaphorical category, I draw, first, from social-psychological investigations into collective processes of meaning-making to analyse the interplay between the emergence of group-based cognitive categories and their affective implications. I use the concept of ‘social representations’ (SRs) and argue that SRs constitute shared images of objects important for a group, due to which they can serve as basic ‘building blocks’ for a deep story. The rationale for bringing Social Representations Theory (SRT) into focus is that this theory offers important analytical advantages for culturally oriented investigation into group-based meaning-making processes, especially in the periods of profound social change, called here deep transformation. I discuss these advantages in detail in the next section. Next, I employ narrative theories to account for socio-psychological processes in which collectively generated cognitive and affective elements (SRs) are integrated into actual lifeworlds and deployed in sense-making. SRT explains how the experience of a novel, or rapidly changing, reality is anchored in existing symbolic resources, and how they are altered and extended to capture the novelty. Narrative theories show how salient meanings are shaped in actual social interactions entailing storytelling, that is, how a certain perspective emerges from an array of potentially available SRs through localized cultural practices. Eventually, I consider how emotional narratives assume their final shapes, by reflecting upon the social dynamic of emotion-sharing.

Social Representations as Shared Emotional Resources

An interrelation between emotional dynamics and meaning-making has been widely acknowledged. It was documented that powerful emotional stimuli such as, for instance, visuals, trigger collective meaning-making (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995; Joffe, 2008) and that emotions are intertwined with common-sense thinking (Smith and Joffe, 2013), mediating cognition. In fact, in the field of socio-cultural emotion studies, cognitive and emotive processes were described as mutually constitutive (de-Graft Aikins, 2012) from a variety of perspectives ranging from behavioural neuroscience (e.g. Damasio, 2005) to the sociology of emotions (Barbalet, 2001; Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2016).

Social Representations Theory (Moscovici, 1973, 2000) is a distinct approach within the field that perceives meaning-making as an inherently social and cultural process in which cognitive and emotional dynamics co-constitute each other. In his original writings, Moscovici (1973) described social representations (SRs) as collectively shared tools enabling the navigation of the social world. In his formulation, an SR is:

a system of values, ideas and practices with a twofold function; first to establish an order which will enable individuals to orient themselves in their material and social world and to master it; and secondly to enable communication to take place among the members of a community by providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world. (Moscovici, 1973: xiii)

The analysis of how SRs are developed and used in group communication sheds light on how meanings are constructed in communicative interactions within social groups, and, therefore, how social realities encompassing new meanings and identities emerge (de-Graft Aikins, 2012; Liu and Hilton, 2005; Smith and Joffe, 2013).

Already, early formulations of the theory emphasized a connection between SRs and emotions, and defined SRs as ‘cognitive-emotional’ phenomena (Markovà and Wilkie, 1987). More recent applications of the theory draw attention to the fact that both emotions and SRs are forms of embodied knowledge, underpin thinking, and trigger actions (Piermattéo, 2022). This emphasis on emotions enables the analysis of mechanisms through which emotions and cognition are mutually constitutive, namely, emotional anchoring and emotional objectification (Höijer, 2011). Emotional anchoring is ‘a communicative process by which a new phenomenon is fastened to well-known emotions’ (Höijer, 2011: 9). The recent pandemic provides some relevant illustrations of this cognitive-affective operation: calling COVID-19 a ‘sort of flu’ enabled people to manage fear triggered by the novel and potentially deadly infection (Sawicka, 2023). Emotional objectification pertains to an operation through which a novel concept is represented by an ‘icon’ triggering a strong emotional response. Höijer (2011) provides an example of emotional objectification in the context of pro-climate communication, mentioning an image of a cute polar bear on melting ice as a strongly-loaded emotional visual giving a particular face to the abstract phenomenon of global warming.

The perspective which sees SRs as the central fabric of culture offers some analytical advantages. First, it highlights the aspect of change in the study of cultures. SRs are described as ‘susceptible to change and transformation’ (Duveen, 2007: 545) due to which culture may be analysed as dynamic rather than static (Psaltis, 2012). Second, such perspective enables tracing ‘intra-cultural and inter-group cognitive-emotional tensions’ (de-Graft Aikins, 2012: 16) without assuming homogeneity of distinct cultures (Psaltis, 2012). To emphasize the diversity and multiplicity of categories and rationalities that can be employed in meaning-making, Moscovici (2008) introduced the term ‘cognitive polyphasia’. SRs constitute a shared repertoire for a social group which enables communication among this group’s members, but, as implied by the notion of cognitive polyphasia, we should not think of such a repertoire as homogenous: diverse and divergent SRs can coexist within it to be activated and employed in meaning-making based on the requirements of localized circumstances.

These particular potentials of the SRs-based approach may be also extrapolated on the analysis of the entanglements of emotions in meaning-making. If we assume that SRs are cognitive-affective phenomena, cognitive polyphasia implies the existence of affective polyphasia. We can define affective polyphasia as a multiplicity of potential emotion labels, and feeling and display rules which may become salient in a given context, concurrently with activation of a SR that nests in them. SRs should, thus, be perceived as symbolic cognitive-emotional resources stored in cultural ‘toolkits’ (Swidler, 1986) of a given group, enabling sense-making and emotional management in a given situation. When approaching novel circumstances, a group may use and adapt existing SRs, but can also construct new ones, to guide thinking and feeling in this situation. We should thus see SRs as ‘building blocks’ for deep stories, their most rudimental components. Hochschild (2016) herself suggested this line of theorizing when she described the deep story of Tea Party followers as a powerful iconic image of a line constantly disrupted by ‘line-cutters’. Deep stories can be, therefore, conceptualized as strings of SRs embedded in feeling and display rules that shape and regulate the experience of emotions, for instance, in the case described by Hochschild, of anger, shame, or status-related anxiety.

This formulation emphasizes that deep stories are not only metaphors used by a researcher to capture otherwise obscure and ambiguous emotional experiences of the people she engages with; on the contrary, they have actual epistemological value for the group members, because they consist of networked SRs of specific objects important for the group in given circumstances. This conceptualization does not explain, however, how these strings of interconnected SRs are formed; in other words, how affective polyphasia and emotional ambiguity are ordered. Some relevant insights into this issue can be found in the narrative-oriented approaches.

Storytelling in Shaping Emotions

A connection between narratives (or stories, when ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ are used as synonyms – see Polletta and Callahan, 2019) and SRs has been already noted in narrative-oriented literature. For instance, in the narrative research on knowledge, narratives are perceived as ‘ordered representations’, and their analysis as a keyhole enabling the investigation of how everyday knowledge is constructed through situated encounters between different narratives (Squire et al., 2013). Narratives are also described as a ‘medium of social representations’ (Jovchelovitch, 2012: 443) through which they operate in communication, and as larger conceptual phenomena which may be activated through a reference to a representation embedded in them. Polletta and Callahan (2019: 58) imply the significance of this dynamic when they claim that ‘to refer to the “welfare queen” calls up a story, or stories, of women on welfare taking advantage of the system to live in the lap of luxury [. . .] Audiences know the story without having to hear it fully recounted’. In this example, the ‘welfare queen’ is a powerful representation with a significant emotional load: when referred to, it activates and simultaneously strengthens, a ‘public’ narrative (Somers, 1994) of social (in)justice involving a variety of emotions including anger and envy.

Much like SRs, narratives participate in meaning-making. Storytelling organizes experience and patterns thinking (Jovchelovitch, 2012) enabling ontological anchoring of individuals’ lived experiences by shaping ‘our conceptions of what is real, what must be real’ (Bruner, 2010: 45; cited in Monahan and Maratea, 2021: 3), and guiding action (Bruner in Monahan and Maratea, 2021). On a collective level storytelling contributes to the emergence of a shared culture (Bruner in Monahan and Maratea, 2021) by integrating representations; as Jovchelovitch (2012: 446) put it, ‘the narrative form provides a core structure to a representational field, bringing together and investing with meaning the various notions, values and practices it contains’. Narratives, thus, provide ‘sense-making tools’ (Andersen et al., 2020: 367) essential for ordering SRs and the constitution of collective phenomena, such as symbolic boundaries or social identities (2020).

As it has already been said, this is not to claim that a narrative form implies coherence. On the contrary, the narrative approach continuously emphasizes that stories are rarely internally coherent (Jacobs, 2001; Squire et al., 2013), homogeneous, or consensual (Jovchelovitch, 2012). Rather, they should be viewed as vehicles ‘of alternative, often contradictory, representations’ (2012: 441–442). How does, then, the structuring effect occur, constitutive of identities, boundaries, and other social phenomena? Key seems the mechanism of emplotment emphasized by Somers (1992, 1994). According to her, emplotment underpins the ‘storying’ of social life. In its course, events are arranged in an emplotted structure that highlights some and belittles others, thus forming a narrative. Emplotment is crucial because it is the actual mechanism for sense-making. If we integrate Somers’ work on emplotment with the Social Representations Theory, we can infer that events can be regarded as a category of objects that bear significance for a social group, alongside actors, places, and things, all of which contribute to a narrative. In a broader context, thus, emplotment can be understood as a mechanism for relating and interconnecting representations through storytelling. During the process of establishing connections between specific representations, ambiguities, including emotional ones, are resolved through the collaborative efforts of individuals involved in the storytelling process. Through emplotment, specific aspects of experiences are emphasized while others are downplayed, enabling the emergence of certain emotions as significant in a particular context. This allows these emotions to operate and further shape social phenomena. ‘Nostalgia narratives’ identified by Maly, Dalmage, and Michaels (2012) may serve as an illustration of this dynamic: through the selection and organization of representations of childhood and the past, nostalgia emerges and, in turn, contributes to the formation and preservation of a ‘white’ identity.

In this sense deep stories are entangled with collective remembering dynamics. According to collective memory scholars, remembering is a thoroughly social process that takes place in interactions (Schwartz et al., 2005), through collective means such as ‘language, narrative, and dialogue’ (Olick, 1999: 343), within particular mnemonic communities (Zerubavel, 1996). Memory enables the emergence of collective identities as it forms ‘a precondition for narrative construction’ (Saito, 2006: 353). Collective remembering processes can be thus incorporated into the picture and seen as intertwined with the construction of resonant deep stories.

Conceiving deep stories as emplotted emotion centred narratives offers an alternative to the frame-based approach. Framing has already been discussed as a dynamic that accompanies social and political transformations, such as the rise of Trump to power. Monahan and Maratea (2021) argue that Trump’s Twitter communication gained significant appeal through specific framing. Frames ‘give meaning to what otherwise seems confusing’ (Best, 2021: 71, cited in Monahan and Maratea, 2021: 4). As a result, framing can also be viewed as a mechanism for resolving emotional ambiguities that are inherent in SRs. Narratives, however, differ from frames in the extent to which they are collaborative (Polletta, 1998). Polletta (1998: 421) defines frames as ‘persuasive devices used by movement leaders to recruit participants, maintain solidarity, drum up support and, in some instances, demobilize opposition’. Narratives, on the contrary, emerge through a collective effort and collective meaning work, we can say; a ‘[n]arrative’, according to Polletta (1998: 423), ‘necessitates our interpretive participation, requires that we struggle to fill the gaps, to resolve the ambiguities’. In the case of deep stories, this collaborative effort results in the development of an emotion-centred narrative, which in turn shapes the feelings of the individuals engaged in the storytelling process.

Narratives in this sense do not express pre-existing, individual internal states, but they should be analysed as social phenomena per se (Esin et al., 2014). They do not convey already existing emotions, as suggested by Hochschild’s (2016) use of a deep story in her study in Louisiana when she depicted an emotionally loaded image of standing in a line for the American Dream to her interviewees to hear if it resonates with their feelings. Through particular emplotment, deep stories enable emotions to emerge in the first place and be experienced as real and meaningful. Deep stories should be seen as social phenomena because they are embedded in – enabled, regulated, and constrained by – ‘larger social patterns of social and cultural storytelling’ (Squire et al., 2013: 6; see also Jovchelovitch, 2012). And, even more importantly, because they are socially constructed in a network of relations in which the speaker is placed (Esin et al., 2014). A story, in this sense, is not an individual, but ‘an interactional achievement situated in particular social and local contexts’ (Andersen et al., 2020: 368). It is, therefore, an emergent phenomenon, stemming from localized practices of storytelling (Polletta et al., 2011), norms regulating performance (Polletta and Callahan, 2019), and particular interactional dynamics. In the next section I will argue that the same factors offer significant insights into the social nature of emotions.

The Emergence of Deep Stories

The dynamics of social sharing of emotions has for long attracted attention within the field of social sciences. Starting from the early Durkheimian concept of ‘collective effervescence’ and continuing toward contemporary socio-psychological notions of ‘collective emotions’ (Goldenberg et al., 2014; Sullivan, 2015; von Scheve and Ismer, 2013), an array of conceptualizations of the phenomenon of shared emotions has been offered. Diverse as they are, they all have a strong common denominator: they define collective emotions as expressed and experienced simultaneously by many individuals. A definition by Goldenberg, Saguy, and Halperin (2014) may serve as an illustration: according to their formulation, collective emotions are ‘emotions shared and felt simultaneously by a large number of individuals in a certain society’ (2014: 2, emphasis added). This one and other similar conceptualizations of collective emotions have, on the one hand, significantly advanced our understanding of how emotions operate in society, shifting the attention from the feeling individual to the feeling collective. On the other hand, they are also problematic insofar as they blur the boundary between observable (displayed) and not observable (felt) reality, and depict emotions as collective (shared by many) but not necessarily social (shaped by social forces), flattening the social and cultural nature of emotions.

The deep story concept enables collective emotions to be brought back into the sociological realm. In line with the formulation proposed so far, deep stories enable the emergence and expression of emotions in a particular situational setting. Deep storytelling is a crucial social practice in this regard: the cognitive-affective process of constructing feelings through deep stories cannot be disentangled from practice as emotions are ‘done’ through ‘doings and sayings’ (Scheer, 2012, 2021). Doing emotions such as nostalgia, anger, or pride through deep stories is, thus, an inherently social process, because practices, including those that are emotional, are culturally regulated. Emotions emerging in social settings are not collective because they typify a collective. They are collective because they are done in ways shaped by culture, that is, with the use of the symbolic toolkit (Swidler, 2001) specific for a given group, and because they are constructed in actual interactions, for instance in those in which deep stories are being told.

The perspective which sees emotions as practices (Scheer, 2012, 2021) emphasizes that every individual acquires the ability to do emotions in culturally defined ways through the training of the body. A trained body is a ‘knowing body, one that stores information from past experiences in habituated processes’ (Scheer, 2012: 201), that is, one which underwent an ‘emotional socialization’ in a given emotional culture or subculture (Gordon, 1990). A trained body can effortlessly engage in the emotional practice, presenting ‘adequate’ emotional reactions to situational stimuli such as, for example, religious elation in response to acts performed by a preacher (Scheer, 2021). In a similar vein, emotional storytelling, or, in other words, the ability to tell particular deep stories and experience emotions emerging through them, can be seen as an embodied practice acquired through interactions within a group.

The embodiment of emotional practice is, however, consequential not only for the social functioning of an individual who acquires the ability to display certain emotions in response to given stories or emotional stimuli in general. It is also crucial for the maintenance and (re)creation of social structures such as group boundaries and shared identities. A shared ability to react emotionally in a particular way in response to a given stimulus generates ‘affective attunement’ (Papacharissi, 2015; see also: Boler and Davies, 2018) in those engaged in the situation. In other words, a deep story can employ certain representations to a given emotional effect because the group members share a particular ‘emotional habitus’ (Scheer, 2012) that enables them to experience emotions in response to the story. As a result, the story feels ‘natural’ and ‘true’ to them. The collective experience of emotions constructed through the story, in turn, strengthens the group boundaries and identities, as already noted in research on narratives (Andersen et al., 2020; Polletta, 1998; Somers, 1992, 1994) and collective emotions (Piermattéo, 2022). In this sense, deep stories stem from the emotional habitus of a group, further enabling and forming collective emotional experiences and displays.

Emotional habitus is crucial for the emergence of emotional experiences through deep stories because it equips group members with dispositions to feel. Emotional habitus, however, may also be adapted in the process because dispositions to feel are not fixed and determining. The intertwining of the dynamics of maintenance and change through social sharing has already been observed in the research on social representations: in and through communication, meanings carried by social representations are reinforced and stabilized but also ‘updated’ (Piermattéo, 2022). Dispositions to feel in general and deep stories in particular operate similarly. When a speaker engages in deep storytelling, they utilize and relate with one another social representations that are initially cognitively and affectively ‘open-ended’ (Rafanell, 2013), and acquire actual meaning through social sharing. Deep stories are, therefore, deeply social, in that they are co-constituted by an interacting collective when they are being told. In actual social settings, the audience is not mute and passive but all interaction participants actively engage with each other to negotiate both meanings (Esin et al., 2014) and feeling rules.

The interaction in which deep storytelling occurs cannot, obviously, assume any dynamic; its course is regulated by localized norms on which kinds of stories, and how, can be told in a given situation (Squire et al., 2013). Nevertheless, we should also see those rules as partially flexible, and under-determined (Rafanell, 2013). Both social regulation of storytelling and the elements (representations, plots) that the story utilizes are defined in particular, localized interactions. It is, then, through interactions that deep stories emerge and operate, constituting emotional experiences.

Deep Stories in the Analysis of Collective Emotional Processes

In this concluding section, I look at three issues central to the sociology of emotions: social regulation of emotions, change in emotional regimes, and the interplay between emotions and social divisions, to mark those paths for future research that can potentially be fruitfully studied using the deep stories concept.

Articulating feeling and display rules (Hochschild, 2003 [1983]) was a breakthrough in the understanding of the social regulation of emotions. Feeling and display rules guide feeling and its expression in a given social situation and prescribe emotional behaviours to social categories, for instance, people of a given gender, age, or occupation (Boler and Davis, 2018). Hochschild (2016) assumed that there is a close connection between feeling rules and deep stories: ‘we can understand the feeling rules at work in a social context by looking at the deep story to which they are attached’ (Boler and Davies, 2018: 78). The deep stories concept offers another angle with which to study social regulation of emotions: if we accept the argument that narratives are epistemic tools mediating the world-out-there (Somers, 1992, 1994), then we see that deep stories can afford some feeling rules in a particular context, but not others. Sense-making implies not only cognitive but also emotional work; defining a social situation requires establishing which feeling rules will count as significant in this situation and to whom they apply. Emplotment is again crucial in this regard because it explains how the regulatory effect is achieved: it is through relating SRs of events, actors, and all other significant objects to one another that certain emotions emerge not only as potential but also obligatory in a given context.

The use of anger in Trump’s political communication (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018) can serve as an illustration: Wahl-Jorgensen notes that Trump’s anger should not be perceived as a ‘byproduct’ of his speeches but as an emotional obligation binding for listeners, ‘a rhetoric which seeks broad appeal through the deliberate expression of anger’ (2018: 766–767). In other words, Trump’s communication created grounds for deep stories which potentially afforded the emergence and open displays of anger, an emotion strictly regulated and silenced in other contexts. Deep stories can provide a framework for analysing emotional regulation in diverse social contexts, and, most importantly, one which enables an exploration not only of the emotions being regulated, but also how they are regulated in specific settings (which SRs are utilized; how they are interrelated; which emotional norms are implied) and for which specific purposes.

The connections to emotional norms also offer a basis for considering how deep stories contribute to the emergence of emotional ‘cultural structures’ which ‘are deeply constraining but also enabling at the same time’ (Alexander, 2003: 3). Constraining, as they circumscribe feelings. They are also enabling, however, because they allow certain emotional experiences to emerge in the first place. They provide individuals with symbolic tools that are crucial for expressing and, more importantly, experiencing emotions. Theorizing deep stories as social spaces that underpin the emergence and display of shared emotional experiences allows us to conceive of emotions as thoroughly social phenomena. Emotions are not solely triggered in individuals, but rather co-constructed by all those who actively engage in deep storytelling. The approach that I develop recognizes the presence of dispositions to feel, which are imprinted in individuals through specific social experiences (Scheer, 2012, 2021), and the significance of cultural toolboxes providing symbolic expressive means. Unlike approaches which see cultural resources as determining, the perspective outlined here is indeterministic because it emphasizes that feelings are shaped through a collaborative process of storytelling in actual, real-life interactions.

The question of how deep stories operate in the social regulation of emotions connects with the issue of change in emotional cultures. How, and why, emotional cultures change, has been investigated from many theoretical perspectives, including those which look at behavioural changes (e.g. Elias, 2000), shifting emotional ideologies (Scheer, 2021), or regimes (Reddy, 2001). Each of these approaches assumes that emotions are socially shaped and controlled, due to which in various historical periods different emotions and ways of expressing them are advocated, and others silenced; socio-structural change is accompanied by a change in emotional culture (Elias, 2000), generating what we call in this special issue deep transformation. In this way, diverse emotional regimes emerge.

Reddy (2001: 129) defines an emotional regime as a ‘set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and ‘emotives’ that express and inculcate them’. The notion of emotives is key in understanding how deep stories intertwine with shifting emotional regimes. Emotives arouse feelings when they activate particular social representations and fit into deep stories. As already discussed, however, neither SRs nor narratives in which they nest are fixed structures. The potential for change is imprinted in social-emotional dynamics of meaning-making: deep stories are ‘open-ended’ (Jacobs, 2001), speakers can interconnect available SRs differently, constituting new deep stories, and providing different feeling rules; new SRs may emerge to capture novel phenomena and be employed in the construction of deep stories. In this regard, we can view deep storytelling as a creative process of articulating emotives that (potentially) accumulate to bring about a change in the prevailing emotional regime. It is in this sense that we can see Trump as a herald of a new emotional regime based on anger (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018). A deep stories lens provides a novel angle on how emotions are being organized within an emotional regime, and how an emotional change (or stability) is induced.

This is not to say that we can analyse a shift in emotional regimes without reference to structural changes. On the contrary, deep transformation entails both structural, and emotional change. The interdependence of emotional cultures and structural circumstances has already been emphasized (Elias, 2000), and it was pointed out that socio-structural changes generate not only economic but also emotional interests (Hochschild, 2016). An approach based on deep stories enables the identification of structurally generated emotional interests which become politically significant in times of social change. In Hochschild’s account of Tea Party followers in Louisiana, the focus on the deep story revealed the importance of structurally induced status shifts, and corresponding status anxieties (Kreiss et al., 2017). The social construction of some deep stories, especially those which enable the emergence of pride and regulation of shame, can be thus seen as a collaborative process of managing such anxiety through boundary work (Lamont et al., 2017). Boundary work becomes both a sense-making process through which ‘individuals make sense of their social position’ (Lamont et al., 2017: 161), and an emotional dynamic involving deep storytelling, which, in turn, enables the emergence of collective emotions, and the construction of social structures, such as social boundaries and identities. In this sense, deep stories do not only reflect existing social boundaries or ‘recognition gaps’ (Lamont et al., 2017) as suggested by Hochschild’s use of the category during her study in Louisiana. Deep stories co-constitute social boundaries and identities by affording cognitive and affective attunement among involved individuals. They are, therefore, consequential for the dynamics of social divisions.

Concluding Remarks

My main objective in this essay was to subject Hochschild’s (2016) category of deep stories to a conceptual analysis to reveal its theoretical entanglements and potential. As a result, I proposed an understanding in which a deep story is more than a descriptive phrase or a metaphor but captures an actual social phenomenon: an interactional, collective process of storytelling through which emotions are constructed that enables cognitive-affective meaning-making and is consequential for the lifeworld of a given group. Deep stories enable and organize sense-making, providing social representations interconnected within an emplotted narrative through which a situation or a problem can be known, understood and felt. But also, coming from a social constructionist perspective, and in line with existing approaches within cultural sociology, I see cultural structures such as narratives as being to some extent flexible and open-ended. Deep storytelling underpins the dynamics of meaning-making but does not determine the results. Meaning-making should be always perceived as occurring in localized settings, in actual interactions, in which storytelling takes place. Each deep story, in this sense, is a collective, interactional achievement, and this makes emotions, as objects of study, thoroughly social phenomena. As a conceptual lens, the focus on deep stories enables linking micro-dynamics of storytelling and emotion regulation with wider social processes such as individual and collective adaptations to social change or the emergence of (new) social divisions throughout deep transformations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maja Sawicka

Author biography

Maja Sawicka, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Digital Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Warsaw. She is interested in the sociology of emotions and social interactions. In her research, she investigates the emotional mechanisms underlying social interactions and the emergence of emotional subcultures. She specializes in qualitative research methods.

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