Institutionalized (Social) Pain

• In Event: Neuroscience, Cognition, and Sociology

Abstract

Sociologists have typically ignored the role pain plays in myriad social processes or have thought of it metaphorically. Recent efforts to incorporate neuroscientific insights into social pain, or the neuropysiological process by which rejection, isolation, or separation hurt, into sociology offers one promising path to remedying this gap. As part of this project, this paper examines a small thread in Merton's Sociology of Science in which he observed how little sociologists took seriously the use of pain (and adjacent phenomena like public humiliation) as a means of socializing people in institutional fields. Drawing on a diverse range of sociologists who also touch on pain, a I theorize how and why pain works both as a means of generating cohesion and commitment to a field as well as draw deep distinctions between members.

Author

• Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia