Overview
The Business of Emotions is an interdisciplinary study of emotions, focusing on their role in workplaces and marketplaces. An emotion can be defined as “any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental state” (Oxford English Dictionary).
We all have emotions, and we know of their importance in our lives, yet it transpires that
the nature, causes, and consequences of the emotions are among the least understood aspects of human experience. It is easier to express emotions than to describe them and harder, again, to analyze them. Despite their apparent familiarity, emotions are an extremely subtle and complex topic, one that has been neglected by many social scientists and philosophers. (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000, The subtlety of emotions, p. xiii)
We are far less able to analyze and understand feelings than we are to differentiate between complex abstract systems of thought. There are several reasons for this lack of understanding of emotions:
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First, emotions are usually seen as less important than cognitions or rationality. In part, this is due to the Enlightenment’s passion for reason, but it is also due to the politics of gender, which has associated men with reason and women with emotion, and which has seen reason as superior to emotion.
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Second, emotions are remarkably difficult to study “in the field.” You cannot see them or touch them, they usually appear in clusters rather than individually, and they metamorphose—for example, fear grows into anger, love warps into jealousy.
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Third, because emotions pervade both the body and the mind, their study necessitates an interdisciplinary approach combining natural and human sciences, which is difficult to accomplish.
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Fourth, our responses to stimuli are complex. Once we label a response as an emotion, we are committing to all the conscious and unconscious expectations, biases, challenges, and limitations of that label. How we label a response to a stimulus considerably changes our experiences and consequently our lives. This is not something we consider in our day-to-day lives.
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Finally, though we do not believe that inhaling oxygen makes us expert chemists, there is a tendency for lay people to think that their own experience of emotion makes them experts on their own nature. This is not the case.
In this course, we discuss the nature, causes, and impacts of emotions on our lives. The course focuses on the “business” of emotions because it is in the production and marketing of commodities and services that some interesting—and ominous—things are happening in relation to emotions.