Positioning Emotional Frictions within Socially Complicit Barriers to Social Change

Paul Henry

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2024, vol. 9, issue 4, 441 - 451

Abstract: Social movements face significant barriers to desired change. These barriers are often attributed to powerful adversaries with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. This article focuses in on a distributed form of power that can be characterized as a social complicity woven throughout society. To this end, Bourdieu’s theory of social practice is employed to illuminate the clash of tacitly understood expectations and moral beliefs that stem from everyday interactions between people with differently configured habitus(es). Contravention of tacit understandings evokes—emotional frictions—feelings of discomfort, anger, and disdain for violators. The emotional impact of these clashes is illustrated using reader comments made in response to newspaper articles about #MeToo. This suggests a more nuanced understanding of power, offering fresh perspectives on previous social movement studies by theorizing links between individual interactions that generate emotional frictions with sociostructural arrangements.

Date: 2024
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