Emotional economies of late capitalism
2025-11-15
This essay, based on the 2024 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Presidential Address, interrogates the role of emotions in economies of late capitalism. Scholars of the interplay between economy and society have recently been preoccupied with the study of economization of life. I argue that we have largely missed how these processes interact with what I call emotionalization of life, or developments that have made emotions our compass to understand who we are, how to think and act, and how to see others. I connect emotionalization to the rise in scholarly attention to affect as well as therapeutic and self-help culture in society that has been capitalized, evermore so in the platform economy. While commonly we codify the emotional and the economic as distinct, even hostile to each other, the marriage of emotionalization and economization thrives because they are both rooted in central ideas of human capital investment, and an increasingly tacit understanding that economic action should be geared around not only monetary but psychic income, or emotional economy. I end by outlining some empirical manifestations of emotional economies and research considerations.