Energizing through Visuals: How Social Entrepreneurs Use Emotion-Symbolic Work for Social Change
研究社会企业家如何通过视觉和语言互动引发目标对象的负面情绪，再将其转化为推动社会变革的情感能量，揭示了情感符号工作的过程。
Little is known about how social entrepreneurs try to induce enactment of their cause, especially when this cause is difficult to embrace. Through a longitudinal study, we analyze how anti-plastic pollution social entrepreneurs use multimodal (visual and verbal) interactions to influence their targets and promote their cause. Our findings reveal that these social entrepreneurs use what we call “emotion-symbolic work,” which involves using visuals and words to elicit negative emotions through moral shock, and then transforming those emotions into emotional energy for enactment. The emotional transformation process entails connecting target actors to a cause, a collective identity, and the social entrepreneurs themselves. Our exploration of emotion-symbolic work offers new ways of seeing by emphasizing the use of multimodal interactions to affect emotions in efforts to influence target actors to enact a cause.