Summary
Contents
Subject index
This highly original book explains the sweeping changes to twentieth-century regimes of manners and self. Broad in scope and deep in analytic reach, it provides a wealth of empirical evidence to demonstrate how changes in the code of manners and emotions in four countries (Germany, Netherlands, England and the US) have undergone increasing informalization. From the growing taboo toward the displays of superiority and inferiority and diminishing social and psychological distance between people, it reveals an 'emancipation of emotions' and the new representation of emotion at the centre of personality. This thought-provoking book traces:" The increasing permissiveness in public and private manners, such as introductions, the use of personal pronouns, social kissing, dancing, and dating " The ascent and integration of a wide variety of groups - including the working classes, women, youth and immigrants - and the sweeping changes this has imposed on relations of social inferiority and superiority" The shifts in self-regulation that require manners to seem 'natural', at ease and authentic " Rising external social constraints towards being reflexive, showing presence of mind, considerateness, role-taking, and the ability to tolerate and control conflicts, to compromise" Growing interdependence and social integration, declining power differences and the diminishing social and psychic distance between peopleContinuing the analysis of Sex and Manners, this book is a dazzling work of historical sociology and a fascinating read.
Social Mixing and Status Anxieties
Social Mixing and Status Anxieties
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, large groups with ‘new money’ were expanding and rising, creating strong pressures on ‘old-money’ establishments to open themselves up. In the twentieth century, this process was continued in succeeding waves of emancipation. Increasing numbers of people were absorbed and assimilated within larger and increasingly dense networks of interdependence. Power differences between social groups diminished and ever more of them came to be represented in the centres of power and their good societies. In this process of social integration, more and more groups of people came to direct themselves by the same codes, which thus increasingly became national codes. These processes implied a diminishing of institutionalized as well as internalized ...
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