Jordan J McKenzie

• PhD Flinders University
• Lecturer at University of Wollongong

This book offers an original account of the good life in late modernity through a uniquely sociological lens. It considers the various ways that social and cultural factors can encourage or impede genuine efforts to live a good life by deconstructing the concepts of happiness and contentment within cultural narratives of the good life. While empiri...

Despite the enormous growth in happiness research in recent decades, there remains a lack of consistency in the use of the terms happiness, satisfaction, contentment and well-being. In this article I argue for a sociologically grounded distinction between happiness and contentment that defines the former as positive affect and the latter as positiv...

This article will argue that a decentering process occurs in the intersubjective connections between individuals, and that through the acknowledgement of this process researchers can better understand the potential for distortions to occur in the development of self-understanding. The concept of decentered intersubjectivity discussed in this articl...

Daniel Bell’s multidimensional view of modern social life as a disjunction of differing realms provides an effective example of a sociological analysis that defies typical notions of Left/Right and radical/conservative. Within this framework, Bell moves between traditional alliances, and his unwillingness to take sides makes it difficult to place h...

This chapter highlights the impacts of social media on contemporary future thinking, offering the concept of mass emotional events to advance the concept of emotional contagions in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. It sets out this new conceptual framework in contrast to earlier models for thinking about emotional climates and landscapes. It also...

This chapter reviews a constellation of critiques, challenges, examinations, and projections regarding emotions in dark futures. As dystopian realities materialize and unfold through the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, terrorism, and radical political populism, it hopes to create a diverse space for researchers to engage with forecasts of emotio...

This study examines the enactment of early career teachers’ (ECTs) adaptability and resilience within Australian secondary schools. Conceptual underpinnings are explained by empirical studies on adaptability and relationship-cultural theory. Semi-structured interviews with teachers found that ECTs’ teaching experiences require cognitive, behavioura...

Aim To explore newly graduated nurse’s understandings and practices of adaptability and resilience in clinical environments. Background The everyday practice of nursing work involves managing emotional and practical everyday demands related to the role. Adaptability and resilience are two critical attributes that equip nurses for this by enabling...

Introduction Recent work on theories of collective emotions has recognized emotions as phenomena that spread between individuals and groups to form collective emotional moods, landscapes and climates (Bar-Tal et al, 2007; Von Scheve and Salmela, 2014). Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused sudden and dramatic shifts in social interaction t...

Introduction It seems opportune to end this book reflecting on the media see-sawing between utopian and dystopian depictions towards the end of the tumultuous year which was 2020. One brief snippet says much: in the week in which this chapter was drafted, the media was dominated by images of people representing half the population of the US dancing...

As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety. This book challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities...

The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring p...

Current research on emotions represents a broad church of methodological approaches. The essays in this special issue will investigate how social emotions inform research across numerous disciplinary fields and methodological approaches. This introduction will set out the social dimensions of emotions like shame, anger, anxiety, empathy and pity fr...

The teaching profession offers meaningful, stimulating work that accords with teachers’ sense of professional pride and identity, but is also synonymous with high levels of stress, conflict (and associated emotions such as anger and shame) and ultimately, attrition. The degree to which teachers within a national population ‘up-manage’ the former or...

This systematic search and review of international literature (1979–2017) finds links between emotion management and gender (in 1/2 the studies), and teaching attrition outcomes (1/3). Results contextualise these connections, suggesting female teachers use deep acting strategies, though experience more emotional exhaustion and unpleasant emotions....

This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: * Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience o...

Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along soc...

Attrition of teachers within the first five years in the profession is an internationally recognized problem (e.g., Ingersoll, Merrill and Stuckey, 2014) that often gains media attention, as illustrated from the above newspaper quote. Emotions such as fear, worthlessness and being sick in the stomach are not uncommon and some teachers have begun co...

This article develops a model of relational happiness that challenges popular individualized definitions and emphasizes how it can enhance the sociological analysis of inequality. Many studies of happiness suggest that social inequalities are closely associated with distributions of happiness at the national level, but happiness research continues...

STEM education disciplines are facing a dilemma internationally. There is high demand for qualified high quality teachers in science, technology and mathematics subjects in schools and a trend towards high attrition rates of teachers in the early years. Teacher attrition has been associated with, in part, the high demand for emotion work required o...

Based in a novel ‘meta-reflexive’ review of sociology of emotions (SoE) articles, we suggest that there are two primary SoE theoretical traditions that function within geographic silos: the USA is distinctly social psychological, while in the UK and Australia, SoE is more aligned with the humanities. In both traditions, parallel calls are emerging...

While the pursuit of happiness in the present pervades popular narratives of happiness and the good life, the work of Adorno and Arendt casts doubt on the possibility of this lucrative goal. For Adorno, happiness occurs only in memory, while Arendt is sceptical about the possibility of experience between past and future and uses happiness to demons...

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermas...

Sociological approaches to friendship and happiness focus on how broader social and cultural conditions influence friendship and happiness. Long-standing debates about the ‘good life’ on which sociological theory draws, include some attention to friendship as an important intimate relationship in promoting well-being. Sociologists note that friends...

This article explores the introductory course ‘The Sociology of Everyday Life’ at Flinders University, where the students engage in the sociological understanding of the ‘taken for granted’ through research. In doing so, students shift between researchers and subjects, and illuminate the sociological meanings latent in the survey data collated. In...

Autobiographical note: The authors taught the introductory course 'The Sociology of Everyday Life' together in Semester 1, 2013, in which the teaching methods discussed in the paper were developed. The authors range from senior academic staff, to recent doctoral graduates, to doctoral candidates. Their interests vary from cultural and aesthetic soc...