T OWARD A C RITICAL T HEORY OF U NTIDY G EOGRAPHIES: T HE S PATIALITY OF E MOTIONS IN C ONSUMPTION AND P RODUCTION Nancy Ettlinger ABSTRACT This paper offers a non-essentialist, normative view of the spatiality of emotions in consumption and production, underscoring issues of difference in everyday life. As people interweave thoughts and feelings across spheres of life, over time, economic and noneconomic logics become blurred, leading to multiple, often conflicting sentiments. Cognitive dissonance is not necessarily resolved and man- ifests in incoherent consumer practices. Understanding individuals’ often covert disarticulation from communities can help proactively uncover avenues for ex- pressing agency within structures of constraint. The geographies of multiple lo- gics also clarify behavior in production regarding thoughts and feelings emanating from outside the workplace. Managers can use this knowledge to achieve competitiveness by accommodating workers’ needs and nurturing colla- boration, tapping overlapping social networks across time and space. Thinking normatively about the spatiality of emotions requires analytical fluidity to relate context-specific and mobile, mutable processes. The process-oriented framework developed here is intended to complement, not replace, pattern-oriented analysis. KEYWORDS Critical theory, non-essentialism, spatiality, emotions, epistemology, normative thought JEL Codes: B59, D8, Z1 PROBLEM This paper develops a conceptual framework to place emotion in the economy, specifically in the daily life of consumer society and in production, with an eye towards using this understanding to bring about positive, inclusive change. As I will elaborate, the framework I develop here lies at the interstices of different, sometimes overlapping bodies of literature. I begin with two brief fictitious anecdotes to highlight common daily-life issues often neglected by people engaged in social interaction as well as by academicians who study such contexts. Feminist Economics 10(3), November 2004, 21 – 54 Feminist Economics ISSN 1354-5701 print/ISSN 1466-4372 online # 2004 IAFFE http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1354570042000267617