She argued that the repeated display of emotions that are not authentically felt, when performed for a wage, represents a new form of worker control and intense labor exploitation. Hochschild coined the phrase “emotion work” to signify how we alter our emotions to fit the norms and standards of a given situation. This article extends previous scholarship by analyzing how workers use emotions in novel, creative ways to dignify their work.Īrlie Hochschild’s classic, The Managed Heart (1983), is the most influential recent scholarship to examine the connections between work and emotions. Such research usefully extends our knowledge of the experience of work, but has not given enough attention to the role emotions play in the process. ![]() Recent scholarship has illuminated the various ways in which workers struggle to craft dignity in the context of their work ( Hodson, 2001). About 16% of them lived in a nursing home in 2006, down from 21% in 1985, according to the National Nursing Home Survey.ĭespite the organizational demands that limit the scope and character of emotions, nursing home care workers, like all workers, strive to construct a feeling of dignity and meaning in their work. On the other hand, the percentage of the 85-plus population living in nursing homes has been dropping. Census Bureau reports that the number of individuals over age 85, currently about 5 million people, will double by the year 2030 and increase even faster to about 20 million by 2050. More than half of the 1.5 million people living in nursing homes are over the age of 85. ![]() population is over the age of 65 and this is expected to rise to 20% by the year 2030 ( He et al., 2005). ![]() The aging of the population may exacerbate these trends. Additionally, nursing home ownership by private equity groups is growing, often with complex management structures that obscure ultimate responsibility for residents’ care and safety ( Stevenson and Grabowski, 2008). Trends in recent years have shown a gradual expansion of the for-profit sector and contraction of the market share for nonprofit and state-owned facilities. In 2008, more than two-thirds of the nation’s approximately 16,000 nursing homes operated for profit, and more than half were owned by multifacility organizations ( Harrington et al., 2008). Nursing home care was once a mostly nonprofit enterprise administered by religious organizations and government-owned facilities, but in recent decades it has become a market-driven and highly competitive industry ( Kaffenberger, 2001). The profit motive in nursing home care drives the intensification of work, makes an already challenging job even more demanding, and ultimately constrains and limits the capacity to feel emotional attachments that spring from care work. In nursing homes, these everyday activities-bathing, dressing, and feeding-are transformed into bits of labor to be carried out by low-paid paraprofessionals who often work under difficult conditions that prioritize profit over emotional care. Their work lives are marked by routine acts of intimate care that are usually done alone in the privacy of home. ![]() Emotions are not only generated by organizations and imposed on workers staff themselves produced emotions-sometimes in ways consistent with organizational demands, and sometimes not-and they consistently found in their emotions a resource to manage the strains of their work lives.Ĭare workers in institutional settings such as nursing homes face a unique set of challenges. Emotions created dignity for staff and induced compliance among residents. They felt accomplished when such residents successfully transitioned from life at home to life in institutional care. Surprisingly, some staff members said they particularly appreciated working with residents difficult to control. Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant observation in two nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article analyzes how, despite obstacles, nursing home care workers generated authentic emotional attachments to residents. Previous scholarship has shown how the financial and organizational characteristics of nursing homes shape and constrain emotion work among staff. This article examines how nursing home care workers use emotions to construct dignity at work.
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