How Affective Orientations Map Our Organizational and Institutional Worlds

Abstract

People create, transform, and destroy the organizations and institutions that comprise what sociologists call, respectively, the meso and macro levels of society. In the constant work they do to maneuver, interpret, and take advantage of the social and political structures they perceive, people rely heavily on emotions as well as cognition, or indeed a fusion or intermingling of the two. Affective orientations-longstanding feelings of admiration, comfort, love, trust, respect, and so on, plus their negative counterparts-are more or less stabilized through symbols and other cognitive work, and do much of the cultural work of constructing institutions and social structure. These imagined and felt entities then inspire and constrain further emotions, including both short-term reflex emotions and long-term moral and affective orientations. Sometimes these affective orientations operate consciously and explicitly; more often they function as background for other types of emotion. The meso level of organizations and groups is where these emotional commitments tend to be articulated and debated, with continual conflicts over their definitions, applications, and implications. But when we search for the meso level, we actually see individuals interacting with one another-that is, the micro level. Social movements have proven a good laboratory for examining the creation and application of affective orientations such as collective identities.