Emotions in a Time of Radical Change: Untangling Narratives of Pride and Achievements in Post-1989/1991 Lithuania and East Germany

Abstract

In times of major change, people reassess what is a valuable and, therefore, prideful achievement in the context of a new societal structure and culture. Our article challenges the traditional view of achievements and pride as purely individual experiences, arguing that pride has social and cultural sources and modes of articulation, which may shift dramatically during radical change. We find that people express pride in their achievements when they align with social structures of worth and when societal feeling rules confirm that pride is appropriate and justified. We demonstrate this by analysing four biographical interviews from two research projects with a similar methodology on the post-socialist transformation in Lithuania and in East Germany. By examining how people construe accounts of pride, we find that they express this emotion in recurrent narratives of hard work, notions of resourcefulness and agility, images of restructuring corporate structures, and constructions of ethnic belonging. Our findings reveal that while achievements often lead to pride, not all achievements are narrated with a sense of pride. Our contribution offers a novel, context-sensitive approach to this emotion by bringing together frameworks from cultural sociology and the sociology of emotions.