This book gives a comprehensive account of emotions, beginning with general sociological principles, moving over important theory construction of social formation and applying this to a detailed and unified 'grand' theory of human emotions.
The issues covered in this book are built around a conceptual framework that views social reality as unfolding at three levels:
1. the micro level of face-to-face encounters,
2. the meso level of corporate units revealing a division of labor in pursuit of goals (e.g., organizations, communities, and groups) and categoric units revolving around the distinctions made by members of a society (e.g., classes, ethnicity, gender, age)
3. the macro level composed of institutional domains (e.g., economy, polity, kinship, religion, etc.), stratification systems (classes and class-factions), whole societies, and inter-societal systems.
The book is presents a unified view of the emotions in the social universe. The book explores the relationships between; emotions, social structure, and culture. Turner hypotheses how social structure and culture affect emotional arousal in humans, and vice versa.
