Emotions and Society • vol 1 • no 1 • 45–50

© Bristol University Press 2019 • Print ISSN 2631-6897 • Online ISSN 2631-6900
https://doi.org/10.1332/263168919X15580836411823

ARTICLE

Emotional micro bases of social inequality:

emotional energy, emotional domination and
charismatic solidarity
Randall Collins, collinsr@sas.upenn.edu
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Key words emotional energy • emotional domination • charisma • inequality

To cite this article: Collins, R. (2019) Emotional micro bases of social inequality:
emotional energy, emotional domination and charismatic solidarity, Emotions and Society,
vol 1 no 1, 45–50, DOI: 10.1332/263168919X15580836411823

Social class hierarchy, race, gender, inequality – all appear to be big immutable
structures, but they exist only in strings of behaviour. Emotions between individuals are
central in all of them. Emotions provide the glue of group solidarity and the dynamics
of change. Thus focusing on the micro-level processes of social emotions gives a more
fluid picture of stratification than arrays of abstract statistical categories. Focusing on
emotional processes also gives a more optimistic view on mitigating inequality.
I will summarise four theoretical points. First, people are stratified by, among
other reasons, the amount of emotional energy (EE) they have accumulated over
time. Second, besides long-term EE, short-time situational stratification comes from
emotional domination, a coercive type of interaction ritual. Third, a charismatic
leader exerts an unthreatening form of domination by pumping up followers with
EE. Fourth, there are limits to all three kinds of emotional stratification; they have
volatile dynamics. For this reason, inequalities are more changeable at the micro level
than they appear to be at the level of huge structures.
This is a theoretical summary and not a review of the relevant literature. Throughout,
I draw on evidence presented in Collins (2004, 2008) where not otherwise cited.

Emotional energy is a variable quantity

At the high end of the continuum, high EE consists in having a great deal confidence,
initiative and enthusiasm. At the low end of the continuum, individuals are depressed,
withdrawn and passive. This generates stratification because high-EE individuals tend to
succeed, while low-EE individuals tend to fail. In the ‘emotional middle class’ between
the extremes, people with more EE tend to succeed better than those with less EE.
Sociologists generally attribute success to accumulated advantages, such as the
habitus of the higher classes, money, better network contacts and self-reinforcing spirals

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of reputation. These processes exist, but the micromechanism that makes them happen
largely operates through generating higher EE, or negatively by reducing one’s EE.
Higher or lower EE is the result of successful or unsuccessful interaction rituals (IRs).
Every situation of social interaction in everyday life can be analysed into ingredients
that produce IR success or failure. Favourable ingredients are: assembling people
face-to-face; focusing their attention on the same thing, so that they become aware
of their mutual awareness; and feeling the same emotion. If these micro-processes
reach a threshold, they feed back and intensify into rhythmic entrainment of voices
and bodies that Durkheim ([1912] 1964) called ‘collective effervescence’. People
who go through this kind of experience feel solidarity and shared social identity.
Successful rituals produce big macro effects – religious belief and political
commitment, as Durkheim ([1912] 1964) pointed out. Goffman (1967) showed the
same mechanism operating in the minor encounters of everyday life.
But the most important stratifying point is that rituals fail as well as succeed, so
that individuals vary as to whether they have a string of successful rituals or mostly
failed IRs. For most of us, the results are somewhere in between, depending on
how well we match up with the people we encounter in the kinds of things they
focus on – what comes under the category of habitus and social capital – and
whether we can muster the emotions that get us into the shared feelings that make
a successful IR.
The most important outcome for stratification is what I have labelled emotional
energy (EE). A successful IR makes you energised. You feel stronger, more confident,
more active mentally and physically. You have a trajectory and you pursue it enjoyably,
or even obsessively. At the opposite end of the continuum, low EE is a feeling of not
wanting to do anything at all, just to get away from situations that bring you down.
Some situations are energy gainers, others are energy drainers.
One’s life can become a self-reinforcing spiral, either positively or negatively: a
chain of successful IRs that pump you up, make you feel like a group members, that
give you the social habitus and cultural capital circulating in your networks, and
which you can confidently play back in your future encounters. Or you can fail to
get into the shared rhythm of the interaction – through lack of subjects to talk about,
lack of emotional attunement, lack of micro habits that play well in that network
– and accordingly you feel drained, alienated and depressed.
For most people in the middle ranges of emotional stratification, the solution to a
failed encounter is to leave, to avoid that network where you ‘don’t click’ and stick
to the networks where you feel comfortable. This is how most of the little cliques
and idiocultures of everyday life (Fine, 2012) sustain themselves.
Macro structures such as social classes or ethnic groups or sexual preference groups,
are constructed on the micro level: shaped by successful IRs among some people, by
moderate shades of attraction among other people, by outright feelings of rejection
and failure with others. The term ‘micro-aggressions’ refers to IRs from the point
of view of the people who fail in them.
Persons with high EE make their way into the top levels of organisations, in business
and finance, in politics and political and religious movements. Election campaigns
tend to be about the EE levels of the candidates; boards of directors appoint executives
who impress them with their EE. Stratification by EE also operates in intellectual
and cultural worlds, where people who are most energised by their work as cultural
producers get themselves into the centre of attention and reputation.

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Further down are people who have enough EE to stay in the action; others find
a routine area where modest amounts of EE will make do. Still others have crises of
confidence, mini-scandals of local alienation, incidents of failed network ties, which
leave them among the depressed dropouts of social life. Money, power and status
flow through successful IRs at the top end, and their lack of money, power, and status is
correlated with the proportion of failed IRs in one’s life.
Another complexity: people who are alienated by failures in conventional IRs do
not necessarily fall to the bottom; some of them become good at the IRs specific
to criminal worlds, where they may make a career, depending on the amount of
criminal EE one has relative to rivals and victims. It is insufficiently recognised that
the criminal world does not consist entirely of educational failures and those who lack
emotional self-control. Stratification exists inside the criminal world (well-illustrated
by leaders and followers in gangs; Jankowski, 1991) where a distinctive type of EE for
criminal goals is found. Still another branch of specialised EE trajectory are political
rebels, who succeed to the extent that they find networks of other rebels who can
generate rebellious EE together.
IR theory proposes that an individual’s EE is determined by success or failure in
IRs, with a time-carryover as individuals retain some EE residue of past interactions
(probably not more than a few days or weeks – a question that needs further research).
There is also the possibility of multiple causes of high or low EE coming from non-
social sources, such as genetic bases of depression or one’s diet. But such physiological
propensities are filtered through social interactions; the relative influences of the social
and non-social causes of EE are still to be determined. My bet is on the preponderant
influence of IR success or failure in any given interaction, especially in interactions of
high intensity. Genetic depression may manifest itself chiefly when individuals are alone.

Emotional domination
Let us move now to the level of situational stratification. EE rises and falls in micro-
situations, but the stratification of EE one sees in business, political and other
hierarchies is long term. Zooming in the sociological microscope, we see two ways in
which individuals can dominate situations. One is emotional domination (EDOM);
the other is charisma.
EDOM is an empirically based concept. Analysing recorded conversations, we find
patterns where one individual sets the rhythm of the talk, and others follow; where
one person seizes the speaking turns and sets the topics and even the unconscious
tones of voice. This is a variant on the basic mechanism of successful IRs, where
individuals get into rhythmic entrainment that they all share and which energises all
of them. EDOM is a further mechanism by which some individuals dominate the
situation, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.
Some of the best evidence comes from videos of violent situations. Armed
robbers rely more on dominating the rhythm of interaction than on actually using
their weapons; threat works by the techniques of EDOM (Nassauer, 2018). Fights
often stalemate, or fail to get beyond blustering at each other; when someone wins
a fight, it is chiefly when one seizes the initiative and pushes the other emotionally
into a passive position. Evidence on rape – particularly party rape or fraternity rape
– shows this pattern, where energised groups of rapists and their avid audience find
an isolated and emotionally dominated victim (Sanday, 2007).

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I cite evidence on violent EDOM because researchers have looked at it closely; but
EDOM is crucial in other kinds of careers. Aggressive confrontations can be similar
to violent threats (if more restrained), but EDOM can succeed without implying
the possibility of violence. Success in business and financial careers also shows the
pattern: people who build business empires cultivate networks in which their targets
often have more money and assets but lack EE. Villette and Vuillermot (2009) call
them predators of the business world. They lurk in networks of their business rivals,
waiting for moments of crisis when someone with more assets can be manipulated
– conned by a rescue offer, subjected to a ruthless law suit, or a stone-wall tactic of
walking away from failed projects and leaving someone else holding the debt. (The
businessman who rode his career to the White House in 2016 is an example, but not the
only one who practised such tactics on the way up.)
EDOM may well be characteristic mainly of males; but bear in mind that not
everyone can have EDOM simultaneously, so these are necessarily a minority of men.
EDOM is not a culturally preferred female style, although it may be contextual; family
research indicates that women are often dominant in the home or with their children.
Women with EDOM are sometimes found in politics (Margaret Thatcher, Angela
Merkel), under conditions yet to be specified. These are fruitful areas for research.
Business success does not simply consist of the accumulated advantage of money
to make money. EDOM in the networks where the money circulates is the key to
large fortunes. This is just beginning to be recognised in studies of management and
entrepreneurs.

Microsociology of charisma
A charismatic leader pumps up followers with EE; they admire their leader and follow
willingly in his or her trajectory. EDOM is a different mechanism because it operates
by hogging the EE. Charisma works by including people within the interactional
rhythm rather than excluding them. Durkheim would say that the charismatic leader
becomes the sacred object for the group; I would say he or she is the focus of attention
that sets the trajectory of the group, filling followers with enthusiasm that they will
accomplish something great together.
A few brief examples: Joan of Arc led French troops to assault English fortresses, not
because she was a great fighter but because she carried the banner at the front, and her
followers would swarm up after her because they believed she could not fail. In quieter
moments, she would display her humility as an agent of God and her personal saints,
by weeping in church, so expressively that everyone else would be weeping along with
her (Michelet [1853] 1967; Collins 2017). It is no exaggeration to say that she led a
procession across France of crowds weeping, and rushing behind her into battle. The
shared emotion of weeping – a bodily process that sweeps one out of control – was
the emotional mechanism that generated the sense of religious-plus-political trajectory.
Jesus, like most charismatic leaders, was a good observer of people; he knew who
could be moved to join him, and who had something else on their mind. (All recorded
instances where Jesus interacted with a specific individual are analysed in Collins, 2015.)
Jesus always seized control of the interaction by the second conversational turn: instead of
replying to what someone else said, he intuited what they meant and challenged them on
it. He could turn the tables even on hostile enemies by controlling the rhythm and letting
embarrassing silences work against them, then seizing the moment to make his point.

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Consider the example of Steve Jobs (1955–2011), co-founder of Apple Inc. and dominant
business entrepreneur (Isaacson, 2011; Kocienda, 2018). Jobs was not an engineer or a
designer, but he had excellent judgement as to who were the most creative people to
hire. He recruited them by touting the revolutionary things they would invent and
offering generous shares of the profits. Above all, he challenged them to do things
that they thought were impossible; his EDOM in arguing with his technical staff was
so strong that they jokingly said Steve had a reality-distortion field.
The way it worked was by an extremely intense IR in the workplace. Jobs would
visit the most advanced work group, look at what they had done and start criticizing
it. His comments were crude, obscene and insulting. We might think his high-tech
experts would not have stood for this, that they would have quit or rebelled. But Jobs
was not the kind of boss who walked in, shouted at his workers, threatened them if
they failed to do better, then slammed the door and left. He would insult them until
they were really angry, then he would stay and argue with them. His persistence was
incredible; he would argue with them for hours. He was famous for dropping in on
people and staying up all night, arguing and expounding his vision.
Obviously Jobs had a lot of EE to be able to do this: he showed the familiar pattern
of the charismatic leader who does not need to sleep, a single-minded workaholic
who never takes a break. This high level of EE is the result of constantly being in the
centre of successful IRs. But the most energising IRs are not mere EDOM, wherein
everyone else’s EE is crushed. Jobs wanted energised workers who shared his vision,
technical experts who pushed beyond the limits of what they had thought was possible.
The crucial pattern is in the time sequence. Jobs enters, and forcefully seizes the
emotional centre of attention. He uses negative emotions to begin with; he gets
everyone seething with the same emotion, even if it is anger directed towards him.
He gets them into an intense argument about how the thing they are inventing can
or cannot be changed in ways no one has thought of before. Let us say, roughly, ten
minutes of insulting, then hours of heated argument. Over those hours, the emotions
settle down; they are no longer focused on Jobs and his insults, but about a vision of
the piece of computer equipment in front of them, and where they can go with it.
Jobs did not always win these arguments; if something turned out to be genuinely
impossible, he would tacitly accept it, provided they had figured out a workaround
that would get them into the territory they were aiming for.
One could say that Steve Jobs was extremely egotistical; but his ego was in his
products and these were very much the products of a team, which in itself was as cutting-
edge as he could assemble. His core team became so convinced that Jobs could do
anything that they stuck with him, even in the dark days when he was forced out
of Apple by the marketing and financial managers he had brought in to handle the
non-technical side. It would be superficial to say that Jobs achieved success by abusing
his employees. He used very confrontational tactics to stir up emotions, but his secret
was that he never walked away from them: he always saw the argument through to
a shared resolution. He was an expert at provoking intense IRs.
This is what charisma is like in action: it energises members of a group along a
trajectory that they believe will be a glorious success.
We should also recognise the limits of charisma as local interaction. Charismatically
generated solidarity and enthusiasm extends mainly to those people in its local orbit,
and can simultaneously draw boundaries against outsiders. This is typical of most
religious and political charisma. It is unclear how this works in business leadership.

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All forms of emotional stratification have limits

If you have less EE than others, you might avoid being outshone by avoiding them. If
you are one of the high-energy elite, your trajectory will not inevitably be upwards.
Opportunities narrow towards the top, and competition among rivals intensifies.
There are plenty of once-dominant individuals around.
People who control every encounter by EDOM are obnoxious to deal with,
although in highly enclosed societies they are unavoidable. Such individuals make
many enemies, but how long it takes for them to fall remains an empirical question.
More effective leaders are those who are charismatic, generating EE and spreading it
within groups who share enthusiastic trajectories. Nevertheless, historically the careers
of very charismatic individuals have not lasted for many years, often being subjected to
periods of defeat, being overthrown or assassination. One of the limits for charismatic
power is that it usually energises one group but creates plenty of opponents. (The fates
of Julius Caesar, Jesus, Napoleon, Lincoln, Hitler and Gorbachev are among the many
examples.) Charisma is not just unstable in the intergenerational succession, as Weber
argued (Weber, 1922/1968); it is unstable in its own, usually rather meteoric, lifetime.
Emotional stratification underlies most forms of social inequality. The fact that it
is volatile means much comparative research will be needed to show its dynamics
across time. These are the patterns through which emotions drive social change.

Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

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