Understanding the Sociological Interplay of Emotions

Institutional ethnography (IE), as a mode of inquiry, explores the institutional relationships that pattern and configure people's everyday lives. This sociology has exciting potential for exploring the emotional dimensions of institutionalized relations. IE tries not to study people. The strong emotions people might feel about something in their lives usually provide a starting place, a warrant to investigate the institutional relations giving rise to their experience, rather than the focus for explanation. Informants’ experiences, observed behaviours, and gestures, even the most ordinary ones, indicate how they express what they experience when woven into the fabric of social institutions. At the same time, it is possible to advance the reconstruction of the institution-shaped emotional atmospheres and regimes that affect how we relate to others, observing what products emotions generate in these spaces and how they affect how people line up or group together.

The intertwining of IE with the sociological study of emotions can be useful in investigating which emotions mark encounters in institutional spaces, often impersonal and with unwanted others, and what effects they produce. How might we explore the way emotions arise and work within relations of coordination? What happens to us as ethnographers when we encounter coordinating emotions? What ontological and methodological challenges do we face when analysing and understanding the sociological interplay of emotions?