Pranam
Emotions that interact with the economy
Futurist Richard Yonck first coined the term, describing the emotion
economy as *an ecosystem of emotionally intelligent devices and software
iterations* that will completely change the way we interact with machines.
We all know that our *emotions affect our decisions*. In fact, scientists
have found that without emotions we become completely ineffective at making
decisions. Emotions also impact teamwork. That's a big reason why recent
research shows emotional intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of
success at work.
Western societies have considered emotions and emotionality as the
antithesis of reason and rationality (Harding and Pribram 2004
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR36>). In
particular, economic analysts interested in rational economic behavior have
largely ignored the role of emotions (Elster 1998
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR24>), or
at best treated them as a residual category, as noise that is captured by
the error term in the utility function. And while economic sociologists
have examined a variety of social forces that influence economic processes,
including networks, institutions, politics, and culture, they too have paid
little attention to the role of emotions.
Recently, however, considerations of emotions and emotionality have
returned to the analyses of economic processes. The most prominent among
the economists, Robert Frank (1987
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR29>, 1998
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR30>),
investigates the strategic role of emotions. Economic sociologist Viviana
Zelizer (2000
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR72>, 2003
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR73>, 2005
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR74>) has
forcefully argued against the commonly assumed separation of
emotion-infused intimate relations and economic rationality into two
“hostile worlds.” Paul DiMaggio (2002
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR21>) has
made a call for “endogenizing animal spirits” in economic analyses. Jocelyn
Pixely (1999
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR59>,
2002a <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR60>
, 2002b
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR61>, 2004
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR62>) and
Jean-Pierre Hassoun (2005
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR37>)
have written on emotions and finance. In one of the rare reviews on the
topic, Mabel Berezin (2005
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR9>) in
her chapter on “Emotions and the Economy” for the *Handbook of Economic
Sociology*, made a call for more research by economic sociologists into the
link between emotions and economic action.
Most current literature that recognizes the importance of emotions for the
economy adopts an atomistic perspective because it focuses on how emotions
shape an individual’s economic preferences or behaviors. What remains
largely unexamined is the role of emotions in economic *interactions* between
actors. Indeed, in the field of economic sociology atomistic approaches
have been heavily criticized ever since Mark Granovetter (1985
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR35>)
famously argued that economic action is crucially influenced by networks of
social relations in which actors are embedded. Following this line of
inquiry, I propose that we pay attention to *emotional embeddedness*. That
is, I urge researchers investigating the social foundations of the economy
to recognize that emotions influence economic action not only because they
shape an individual’s utility function or economic role performance, but
also that emotions matter because they result from, and are influenced by,
interactions that an individual has with other social actors during
economic processes. Moreover, once we adopt this interactionist stance, we
need to reconsider the extent to which economic action can be judged as
rational. Admittedly, from the individual actor’s viewpoint, emotions can
very well be (and are) considered as a heuristic aiding rational economic
behavior. However, during economic *interactions* emotional reactions of
all the interacting persons, with their immediate, *in situ*, visceral and
physical manifestations, come to the fore as the interaction is on-going.
Such emotional undercurrents and manifestations likely complicate the set
means-ends rational logic of any individual’s economic decision making and
give rise to economic action principles different from utility
maximization. I propose two such creative action types in this article,
improvisation and situational adaptation, and outline the conditions when
they are more or less likely to occur
Most of the existing work on the intersections between emotions and economy
adopts a viewpoint of an individual and/or focuses on the self in economic
situations. This work includes research on: a) emotion management, b)
emotional intelligence, and c) emotions as heuristics aiding economic
rationality. I briefly review each of these bodies of work in turn.
How does emotion management relate to economic action? Hochschild developed
her ideas based on a study of flight attendants and their emotion work,
published in a book entitled *The Managed Heart* (1983
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR39>).
The author underscored that service workers are trained to express
particular emotional reactions as part of their job, so that managing
emotions becomes work. For instance, she noted that flight attendant
trainees were constantly reminded that their own job security and the
company’s profit rode on a smiling face (p. 104). Much other work followed
this line of research, by investigating how occupational roles that people
enact require emotion work. For instance, Jennifer Pierce (1996
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR58>)
studied women lawyers and focused on the aggressive “rambo litigator” style
that women have to adopt to be considered serious lawyers. Recently, Bolton
and Boyd (2003
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR10>),
using comparable data to those of Hochschild, found that airline cabin crew
attendants are skillful emotion managers, not only playing out the emotion
rules set by their organizations, but able to juggle and synthesize
different types of emotion work, depending on context and their individual
motivations.
Hence, from the emotion management perspective, emotions matter for
economic action because they are part-and-parcel of occupational (economic)
role performance. The focus is on managing emotional reactions and
expressions to feel and manifest as closely as possible those emotions that
one is supposed to have (or not have) in any particular economic setting.
A third strand of research on emotions and economy focuses on how emotions
aid economic decision-making. Jocelyn Pixley (2000) argues that finance
organizations routinely use emotions in formulating expectations. She
states that “emotions are prevalent all the time” and “necessarily play
some part in actually fostering ‘rational’ decision-making in finance
organizations” (2000: 42) because they enable economic actors to formulate
expectations, and hence make rational decisions.
Indeed, for any particular decision, the number of goals that is logically
possible is virtually unlimited, and the number of possible strategies to
reach these goals is orders of magnitude larger. Moreover, the number of
consequences of any one strategy is enormous, so that unless some drastic
pre-selection happens, the number of things to consider is so vast and the
action problem is so complex that no action would result. As Matthews and
Wells (1994
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-009-9088-2#ref-CR50>)
point out, emotions serve as one of the chief mechanisms to constrain and
direct our attention, and hence frame our decisions. Emotions define what
shall be considered as relevant for any particular action problem. In
addition, during the process of selecting optimal means for desired goals,
emotions help us narrow down the range of plausible alternatives and help
us rank these alternatives. In all these ways, emotions are very important
to rational economic action.
(Damasio, A. (1994). *Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human
brain*. New York: Harper Collins.) KR IRS 18821
On Wed, 18 Aug 2021 at 07:34, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> --
> *Mar*Emotional Cost-Vs-Monetary Cost
>
>
>
> Nature constituted us as macro persons feeling and responding to the
> emotion flows, resulting from breathing, smelling, sensing and perceiving.
> Emotions are the automatic responses to smell messages. Exhalations are
> smell responses.
>
> Cost must mean the sacrifice in terms of emotions. Actually the emotions
> were carried as the inhalation of messages and responding exhalation of
> messages, in free and lush nature, as smells. Every life form participates
> in this emotion communication, confirming the membership of the organism in
> the Biosphere. The continuous emotional activity is simply breathing. There
> is a gigantic Economy of the Biosphere as a whole, where emotion is the
> currency.
>
> Thanks to science, the basic foundation of life, of understanding and
> interaction with nature is dubbed as bias. When you continuously inhale
> smell messages and automatically exhale your smell responses, then you are
> very actively participating in the macro activity of the Biosphere. Every
> life form becomes your emotional complement. One’s day today life was the
> economic life of the Biosphere as a whole. Today the emotional cost of
> destruction is borne by every life form, including the human fool.
>
> We must remember that life means living and feeling emotions, not the
> insensitive mechanical rutting. Mathematics fails completely, in
> quantifying every emotion and there can be no quantification of the macro
> emotional costs now happening. When barter based on love, affection, sense
> of belonging was economics... then costs meant one’s inability to
> contribute, the inability to feel the happiness of giving, of contributing.
> There were no costs but only contributions based on emotional bonding.
>
> Today, the human has created a separate and divorced to nature path of
> life. While every organism other than the human, is still trying to live
> emotionally and not mechanically, the human fool is trying to live
> non-emotionally and mechanically, where the economy of the humans is sought
> to be converted into a gigantic machine. This economic machine has
> components, the humans, who are trying to be mechanical but who cannot
> avoid emotions.A weird creature, the economic machine with emotional
> components is sought to be made true as fact.
>
> In the economic machine, emotions are contaminations. One must obey the
> cost curves, the revenue curves, the demand curve, the supply curve, the
> employment curve etc.Money is the currency that has removed emotions or
> breathing, inhaling emotionalized information and exhaling the
> emotionalized responses,completely,but the economic man, is not even
> understandable as a machine but only as a lunatic. The economic man suffers
> from pent up emotions, or to be exact anxieties. Monetary costs in reality
> or costs in terms of anxiety.
>
> YM
>
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