The Institutional Logics of Love: The Order of Passion in an Intimate Field

• In Event: 111 - Regular Session. Sociological Theory

Abstract

Institutional theory, and the institutional logical approach in particular, lacks feeling, the passions and fears that produce and sustain institutional practice (Friedland, 2013; Voronov, 2014; Voronov and Vince, 2012). This in part is due to the adumbrated understanding of the individual in practice and in part due to the cognitive understanding of that practice. Emotion is ready at hand for institutional theory. Emotion is a social state of feeling, as “commotion,” the 16th century origin of the word, a movement of collective excitation, of public disturbance, suggests. There is an increasing recognition that emotion is a powerful device for institutionalization and de-institutionalization (Creed et. al, 2014). In this essay, we will first consider the general question of how emotion has been positioned in institutional theory and how we might position it in an institutional logical approach, and then examine romantic love as an empirical case. In studying romantic love we approach emotion not as a vehicle or medium of institutionalization, but as an institution itself, a discursively constituted structure of feeling tied to conjugal coupling and sexual practice.

Authors

• Roger Friedland, Departments of Sociology and Religious Studies

• John W. Mohr, Univ of California, Santa Barbara

• Henk Roose, Ghent University