Deep Transformations: Lived Experiences and Emotions in Social Change Narratives

Introduction

Our time is an era marked by the profound destabilization of liberal capitalist democracies and a crisis of political trust. Hence inquiries into both public and private emotions, as well as their interplay, are now often at the forefront of research on populism and political polarization (Gidron et al., 2019; Hochschild, 2016; Reiljan, 2020; Salmela and von Scheve, 2018; Wodak, 2015). They show that the backlash against the forces of modernity – such as science, increasing global interconnectedness, diversity, and postmaterialist values – is driven by an affective reflex, a style of contentious politics that is rooted in the rejection of a sense that things ‘have gone too far’ (Alexander, 2019; Alter and Zürn, 2020; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). They also reveal that emotions don't merely shape differing political opinions; they also strain the very bonds between people (Ķešāne, 2023, Lawler et al., 2009; Scheff, 1994). Society is increasingly divided along these political-emotional allegiances and affective meanings that are created and circulated in public through everyday experiences (Durnová, 2019; Revers, 2023).

In this Special Issue, in turn, we focus on emotions that become politically salient due to the transformations that societies and people undergo. The political salience of these emotions arises in response to complex relationships between subjective experiences and systemic change. Profound change brings not only shifting conditions of existence but also involves the destabilization of references, imaginaries and narratives over time (Atkinson, 2013). In terms of emotions, social change can result in an ‘insecure state’ (Berezin, 2002) or ‘climate of instability’ (de Rivera et al., 2007) causing many to feel stress and anxiety (Maor, 2023). In this Special Issue, we therefore connect emotions and the cultural analysis of social transformations by looking at personal narratives of change. Narratives are a powerful mechanism to interpret and frame transformations as well as to retell and re-imagine lives in ways that allow individuals to feel good about themselves (Hochschild, 2016). Hence, narratives not only expose the meanings and values people carry but also how they feel about them and how they act towards what they feel.

To understand the link between social change, its experience, meaning-making and emotions, we introduce the notion of ‘deep transformations’. In a broad sense, ‘deep transformations’ refer to radical and overarching shifts in political, social, cultural, as well as personal aspects of life. They include the shift itself as well as meanings and emotions related to it. Deep transformations are also linked to Hochschild’s ‘deep story’, or the ‘story feelings tell’ (2016: 135), which can be understood as a narrative organizing our experiences and centred on emotion (see more: Sawicka in this Special Issue). Furthermore, the notion of deep transformations includes the fact that emotions are ‘deeply ingrained’ (Reddy, 2001: 55) in our psyches (Elias, 2000 [1939]), bodies (Bourdieu, 2004; Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]) and socio-cultural structures (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Mauss, 1966; Williams, 1977). Thus, they are interactive outcomes of automatic and spontaneous bodily sensations, cognitive processes, and norms focused on emotions, called ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979). In other words, in times of profound change, deeply held convictions, beliefs, feelings, desires and commitments are at stake and might be challenged, fought for, or adjusted. All of this is part of an affective and meaning-related process we refer to as deep transformations.

We highlight three main contributions of this Special Issue to the field of cultural sociology. First, we introduce a novel perspective by focusing on social change through the perspectives of both meaning and emotion. While cultural sociology recognizes the relevance of affectivity and emotionality during liminal, critical and transitional periods, it often lacks a detailed understanding of how affect and specific emotions underlie these processes (for a more extensive argument see e.g. Verbalyte, 2016). What is needed is an approach that sees emotions as active mediators between the self and a changing society, considering them as ‘adapt[ing] with society and culture in a collaborative process of reinvention’ (Barclay, 2017: 6) and ‘not only a response to events [but] also capable of shaping the meaning that inheres in events’ (Barclay,2017: 3). Therefore, this Special Issue uses conceptual tools of the sociological study of emotions to deepen the cultural analysis of social change.

Second, throughout the issue, we analyse how the narratives of social change offer access to meaning structures and accompanying emotions. To aim for a more specific focus on the affective modes or forms through which social change may be interpreted in everyday life, we propose to foreground narratives, analyse emotion and meaning-making in accounts and stories of social change. The relevant emotions might include specific emotions or combinations of emotions, which are based on certain emotional connotations and which might be imbued with political meaning. These modes, forms and practices may also be linked to larger narratives as part of broader emotional arrangements. The analysis of narratives of social change is designed to trace its effects and meanings on the micro and macro levels. Following an interpretive methodology, the contributions address sociocultural and emotional experiences and how they unfold in various contexts of social change and over different social categories.

Third, the majority of our contributions discuss cases from the post-socialist world. The dissolution of state socialism after 1989 led to a simultaneous realignment of political, economic, cultural and social life in 27 countries (Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021). Some processes, such as privatization, liberalization and deregulation impacted the entire region, whereas other changes were more specific to individual cases. Hence, these cases constitute ‘laboratories’ for the historical, cultural and comparative analysis of large-scale change and are therefore also particularly intriguing for cultural sociologists. It is illuminating to explore how historically formed meaning structures and structures of feeling are selectively applied to interpret social change in these contexts. This is of particular relevance as the insights offered by post-socialist cases have often been treated either as a contribution to institutionalist perspectives of policy change or as area studies and have therefore not been systematically considered for cultural sociological theory-building (with a few exceptions, for example Bernhard and Kubik, 2014). In this Special Issue, we therefore combine insights from post-1989 Central Eastern Europe (namely Poland, see Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska in this Special Issue) and the Baltics (Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte; Ķešāne in this Special Issue) as well as post-1989 Germany (Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte in this Special Issue) with the related case of post-2008 austerity Spain (Margies in this Special Issue) to interrogate parallels in the affective dynamics around deep transformations.

The Special Issue then brings together a diverse range of perspectives and voices from individuals belonging to different social groups. We explore the viewpoint of the post-socialist middle class, including professions such as engineers or pharmacists, schoolteachers, nurses, musicians, librarians, but also construction workers, small business owners, and farmers; individuals who migrated in search of better economic prospects – a defining experience of the post-1989 period in Central Eastern Europe – and those who chose to stay. We also document and analyse the experiences and aspirations of various age groups: middle-aged and more senior citizens in East Germany and Lithuania and young people in Spain.

Methodologically, we combine theoretical and empirical contributions to examine deep transformations. Sawicka critically examines the theoretical foundations of Hochschild’s ‘deep story’ concept and aims at reconstructing it as an analytical rather than descriptive-rhetorical category which can be used to account for collective emotional dynamics during social change. Most empirical studies in this issue use interviews as a way to uncover meanings and emotions in narratives of change. Ķešāne’s contribution on post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia and Margies’ article on post-2008 Spain are based on in-depth interviews, demonstrating how emotions can be traced in these types of data. Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte use a biographical and semi-structured interview approach in their comparative study on pride in post-Soviet Lithuania and Eastern Germany while Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska study memoirs written by Polish farmers to examine their accounts of change. These memoirs are cultural artefacts, and like the various interview forms, they are objectified representations of the connection between emotions, social change, and cultural meaning.

In what follows, we provide a concise overview of the literature that presents a cultural analysis of social change, as well as studies that examine social change from the perspective of emotion. Then, we discuss these insights in relation to the concept of ‘deep transformations’. From this, we distinguish three modes of representing and engaging with social change – remembering change, adjusting to change, and imagining change – and demonstrate how the contributions to this Special Issue each provide a distinct perspective on this integrative concept.

Cultural Sociology and Social Change

Periods of social change are liminal situations (Alexander and Smith, 1993), times of passage (Elias, 2000 [1939]), when what is of value for society becomes more manifest and possibly reconsidered. Such liminal moments are historically important as their unfolding fundamentally defines the future in terms of the relation between state and society, (in)justice, morality, solidarity and so on (Mische, 2014; Wagner-Pacifici, 2017). On the one hand, cultural sociological analyses of narratives can offer crucial insights into social change, its relevance for societal development and reveal dominant and competing visions of society. On the other hand, cultural sociology focuses on ‘collective emotions and ideas’ since they frame subjective experiences (Alexander, 2003: 5).

The cultural analysis of social change can be traced to several traditions. The cultural and historical sociology of events (Berezin, 2012; Mast, 2006; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) represents one such line of thought. In her model of political semiosis, Wagner-Pacifici (2017) foregrounds events and processes as an analytical framework for sociological analysis, but also asks how popular interpretations and representations of events – essentially, the hermeneutics of the event – shape political ideas and action. Similarly, Reed (2011) has proposed a theoretical framework for cultural sociology that prioritizes meaning-making within the context of historically formed ‘landscapes of meaning’.

Approaches that centre around the Durkheimian tradition analyse how social change relates to deeply held cultural structures or symbolic codes (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Alexander and Smith, 1993; Farrell, 2015; Lee, 2018; Smith, 2005). Within this tradition, societies cohere and solidarize around cultural structures, such as various symbolic codes that are deeply meaningful to them yet often taken for granted. Social change, including conflicts it may bring, exposes these cultural structures or transforms them. For example, Farrell (2015) analyses how the rationalities of parties involved in environmental conflicts at Yellowstone National Park are differently culturally structured. Smith (2005) explores how cultural structures in narratives account for military logic, policies and strategies, while Lee (2018) offers an insightful analysis of how symbolic codes guiding the civil sphere in South Korea shifted as society went from authoritarian to democratic rule. These studies recognize that the deeply held cultural structures are emotionally charged but do not bring emotion to the forefront of their analysis. Weyher’s rereading of Durkheim therefore urges us to see the ‘collective emotional basis’ (2012: 364) of cultural structures.

Another tradition develops from Bourdieu's writing. His work on meaning-making through mechanisms of distinction (1987) conceptualises social change, to some extent, as an affective process. While some argue that parts of his theorizing can be seen as mechanistic (Mead, 2016), limited in accounting for concrete social relations (Bottero and Crossley, 2011) or incompatible with recent concepts such as reflexivity (Archer, 2012; McNay, 1999) and the non-conscious (Atkinson, 2010); others have shown that his work is not only still useful to understanding social change (Steinmetz, 2011) but also deeply linked to and compatible with emotion and affect theory (Skeggs, 2004; Threadgold, 2020). Bourdieu (1977, 1987) developed, for example, the sociological concept of hysteresis, which he frequently used in his studies to explain how people experience profound change. Hysteresis occurs whenever the world, or a certain field, changes, but the habitus of a person moving in this field does not (yet) adapt. This creates a mismatch that is structurally conditioned, but is translated into embodied experiences of change and results in what Margies (2024) calls emotions of hysteresis such as uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and resentment.

In contexts of disruptive collective experiences and transformative events, emotions may express, foster, or mitigate cultural trauma. Alexander (2004: 1) provides a foundational definition, noting that cultural trauma ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, making their memories forever and changing their future identities in fundamental and irrevocable ways’. This definition emphasizes feeling, not in a psychological sense, but in line with Durkheim’s perspective on the social construction and collective effort of representation that operates through affect. Eyerman (2019: 5) adds that it is useful to consider cultural trauma as a ‘tear [in the] the social fabric’. As such, it necessitates collective interpretation, affective processing – particularly of negative affect – and collective efforts at repair and healing. While Eyerman applies the concept to the case of US-American slavery (2001), Sztompka (2004) provides an early application of cultural trauma theory to post-socialist societies and Zhukova (2016) uses it to explain the differing reactions and memories in Belarus and Ukraine to the Soviet-induced Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986. Cultural trauma theory therefore offers a framework for understanding collective meaning-making around emotions. In this Special Issue, we take an initial step in this direction by concentrating primarily on interviews and personal narratives. We unpack micro-level complexities of negative affect and the desire for social repair for example in the contribution on pride by Ulinskaitė, Hilmar and Verbalyte or on the Polish farmers by Radowska-Lisak and Kowalska (more detailed description of contributions in the final section of this article). Hence our approach lays the foundation for connecting these individual experiences to broader, macro-level frameworks of ruptures to the social fabric, typically seen in public narratives about societal transformations. In the post-socialist context, in particular, we also recognize that social change means different things to different people, and we aim to capture this diversity of experiences. Our analysis is working ‘from the bottom up’, concentrating on how specific social groups reference, invoke, represent, and mobilize (collective) emotions.

The Sociology of Emotions and Social Change

The theory of collective emotions as elaborated by the sociology of emotions (see von Scheve and Salmela, 2014) resonates with cultural sociology in their understanding of emotions as not only private and individual, but also social and cultural. Collective emotions are ‘the synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object’ (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013: 406, italics in original). In the most common understanding, collective emotions form through shared emotional experiences and contagion in face-to-face interactions, such as gatherings (Collins, 2014; Sullivan and Day, 2019). In the context of change, this perspective is often used by scholars to understand the transformative power of rituals (Beyer et al., 2014) and emotional events for collective action and resistance (Yang, 2005). Collective emotions also form in response to shared culture and social knowledge (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013), such as cultural codes, norms, values and representations in which we get socialized. For example, Ķešāne and Ozoliņa (2023) analyse how feeling rules embedded in post-Soviet society help to explain the weakness of collective political dispositions that would enable challenging the neoliberalization. Finally, collective emotional dispositions also develop due to group membership (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013: 409). Kojola (2020: 690), for instance, analyses cultural and emotional dynamics of conflicts over copper mining industry in Minnesota and finds that opposing groups in the conflict have different ‘emotional meanings of place’. These groups were bound to their separate opposite dispositions, which led to resentment and anger towards the out-group.

The literature on emotional cultures, emotional climates and emotion(al) regimes offers an additional analytical framework for understanding change. Emotional culture (de Rivera, 1992) is susceptible to slow large-scale societal changes, such as the civilizing process described by Elias (2000 [1939]). This process is related to modernization and individualization, entailing stronger control over one’s behaviour and emotions, and a decreased threshold for (public) discomfort and embarrassment. While emotional culture changes slowly and can be transformed only through generations, emotional climate as a way people relate to the society and each other emotionally is more responsive to cultural, political, or economic transformations (de Rivera, 1992). For example, people may be subjected to the climate of fear by an authoritarian government, and after the revolt enjoy the democratic climate of security, confidence and trust (de Rivera et al., 2007). Emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001), similarly to emotional climates, are ‘modes of emotional expression and thought that are dominant in particular time periods and cultural contexts’ (Garrido and Davidson, 2016: 65). They differ in their strictness of emotion norms and tend to change with the shift of political regimes (see Verbalyte and Ulinskaitė, 2024).

Scholarship on emotion and social movements provides further evidence in this direction. It argues that in societies where there is high inequality and heightened perceptions of injustice, various emotions emerge, such as low self-esteem, feelings of anxiety and inferiority, depression, humiliation, shame, anger and resentment (e.g. Barbalet, 2004; Sayer, 2005; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Such emotional states may lead to the formation of social movements and resistance (e.g. Bayat, 2010; Flam and King, 2005; Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 2018; Summers-Effler, 2002). Most of this literature explores how protesters are guided by their grievances, resentment, and anger toward various ‘offenders’ and how these emotions form collective mobilization for social change. These dynamics, however, seem to differ in the resistance towards totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, as is also the case with the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the socialist system. According to Flam (2004), in these cases, the idea of the explosive anger (Scott, 1990), applicable in democratic contexts where it can be openly expressed, is unsuitable. In oppressive regimes, fear management becomes much more important than anger mobilization (Flam, 1998). Before 1989, anger was present but neither mobilizing nor explosive, it remained concealed and tempered even among dissidents. It required considerable courage for individuals not only to direct their anger towards the government but also to hope for change (Flam, 2004: 177).

Finally, another tradition in emotion sociology looks at the relationship between emotion, reflexivity and social change (Burkitt, 2012; Davidson, 2019; Holmes, 2010). Within this scholarship, feeling is central to the reflexive process of decision and choice-making. When people question their past, present and future in the light of how they would prefer things to be, emotions are active. When these emotionally reflexive processes turn into actions and interactions, there is an opportunity for social change or ‘societal stasis’ to remain (cf. Davidson, 2019: 3; Margies, 2024). For example, emotions such as shame or low self-esteem are associated with inactivity (Barbalet, 2004), and the process by which individuals reflect on them may then, in Davidson’s sense, generate larger social outcomes.

So far, we have seen that emotions and everyday experiences of social change are two deeply cultural phenomena. As we highlighted earlier in this article, through the lens of cultural sociology, we are able to interrogate how people actively relate to social change and how they experience and interpret the temporality of the societal reconfigurations that are happening around them. This section, in turn, has revealed that through the lens of the sociology of emotions, we can explore the ways in which narratives are linked to ‘structure[s] of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and affectively resonate with larger cultural scripts about deep transformations. In the last section, we will now turn to narratives – the way(s) people relate to, talk about and make sense of deep transformations – and how they help us uncover the emotional dimensions of change.

Uncovering Deep Transformations in Narratives: Remembering, Adjusting to and Imagining Change

Narratives expose social processes of sense-making or ‘how people themselves, as “experiencing subjects”’ (Eastmond, 2007) perceive and feel social change, uncovering the ‘deep’, emotionally loaded dimension of the lived experiences of social transformations. Narratives are emotionally deep since they expose ‘meanings and values as they are actually lived’ (Jackson, 1989: 39). They can also provide the framework of meanings which individuals draw upon to decide on lines of action and develop a particular vision of the self (Mattingly, 2014: 21). Focusing on meaning-making and emotion in narratives we can access ‘embodied’ lived experience (Ignatow, 2007). Actually, emotion ‘constitutes part of a narrative [. . .] in which the emotion itself is embedded’ (Goldie, 2000: 13). People socially learn emotions through narratives, connecting objects with emotional responses that they prescribe as normal reactions (De Sousa, 1990: 182). Emotions therefore are twofold sense-making processes (Katz, 1999: 324–325) as ‘they involve the micro-story of the present situation, but this story is embedded in, and gains (emotional) significance through, larger narrative contexts’ (Kleres, 2011).

As personal narratives are structurally and culturally embedded (Chase, 1995; DeGloma, 2010; Steinmetz, 1992) they refer to social structures and meanings which shape broader social reality. Sawicka therefore argues (in this Special Issue) that narratives are not individual stories but emerge out of collective interactions and localized practices of storytelling. Against this background, she pleads for analysing narratives, including Hochschild’s deep stories, as social phenomena, given their role in socio-cultural processes of storytelling. Deep stories, in her view, are much more than simple metaphors but rather collective, interactional achievements, which make them, as objects of study, thoroughly social phenomena. In a similar vein, Chase (1995: 39) underlines that ‘[b]y listening carefully to how speakers express themselves’ we can better interpret ‘how cultural processes are manifest’ in narratives. Against this background, narratives can also constitute possibilities for social change. Langellier (2001: 700), for example, writes that ‘in opposition to institutional discourses, such as science, medicine, education, the law, and corporations, personal narrative also constitutes a powerful way for individuals and groups to tell their unheard stories, resist domination, and rewrite history, thus connecting the personal and the political’. In a similar vein, Riessman (2005: 6) writes that narratives help to ‘re-imagine lives (as narratives do for nations, organizations, ethnic/racial and other groups forming collective identities)’. This dialectical relationship between ‘personal biography and social structure’ (Riessman, 2005: 6) reveals how narratives serve to legitimize thinking and behaviour (Rosen, 2017) and exposes moral claims or ideas of ‘how the world should be’ (Riessman, 2005: 1).

Narratives also express the temporality of social change. Rather than being ‘faithful representation[s]’ of time, narratives forge ‘the shifting connections [. . .] among past, present and future’ or in other words ‘narratives do not mirror, they refract the past’ (Riessman 2005: 6). Their affective quality is one reason why narratives often do not represent time in a linear manner. In a similar vein, Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas and Seebach (2023: 1) demonstrate that (strong) emotional experiences shape people’s narratives ‘because they penetrate and shape the remembered past and anticipated future by enhancing, suppressing and hence shaping past and future experiences’. With this in mind, the contributions to this Special Issue are organized around three ways of representing and engaging with social change: Remembering change, adjusting to change, and imagining change. From these varying angles, we examine which emotions are salient during periods of social change and how this salience resonates with the narratives that emerge from these experiences.