XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

1013

Neo-Liberal Emotions: Space, Work, and Social Policies

TG08 Society and Emotions (host committee)

Language: Spanish and English

The current state of “normalized” societies geared towards the enjoyment of consumption calls for critical rethinking of the main features of the so-called neoliberal economies, such as  space management, "new" modalities of work and the central role of social policies.
Although the sociological study of the city and the urban life is more than a hundred years old and has accumulated much specialized knowledge, the city still presents several issues. It is a center of production and reproduction of spatialities, bodies and emotions. It is subject to socio-spatial segregation, the patrimonialization, suburbanization, gentrification – to mention most significant processes, related to the changing patterns of land ownership and consumption. How do these relate to feelings of joy, pride, boredom, stress, humiliation or indignation in urban space?
The complexity of labor world in contemporary societies has motivated a series of interdisciplinary debates about, for example, “global work”, “digital work” and “work 4.0”. Our in interest is in how these transformations of labor have intensified and reconfigured the connections between body, work, subjectivities and social emotions.

The “old social question” called for responses to the conflict between labor and capital. Today it requires reflecting upon how states have responded to a completely re-structured world of work, generating new work-related conflicts. What is the link between the re-structuring, state policies and emotions? The central thesis is that emotions attenuate social conflict and thus help reproduce the new mode of accumulation.