Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Secondary emotional labor: How female nurses respond to the contradictions of caring

Secondary emotional labor: How female nurses respond to the contradictions of caring Prior research suggests that caring is in tension with a financially incentivized, technologically-driven healthcare system. Nevertheless, employers, the public, and nurses expect nurses to be caring when providing care to patients and families. This article focuses on nurses’ emotional labor strategies when managing emotions related to organizationally imposed interference with caring. We analyzed 27 semi-structured interviews with nurses and found that the unsuccessful performance of emotional labor spills over into the women’s relationships at and outside of work. We apply Di-Cicco-Bloom and DiCicco-Bloom’s concept of secondary emotional labor to examine our findings and how secondary emotional labor further develops the alienation and exploitation concepts of Hochschild’s emotional labor theory. We suggest a structural change in nurses’ job design that remedies contradictory caring expectations and supports their emotional labor to prioritize a climate of caring for patients. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png "Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine" SAGE

Secondary emotional labor: How female nurses respond to the contradictions of caring

Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/secondary-emotional-labor-how-female-nurses-respond-to-the-anjsJAlJK2

References (44)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022
ISSN
1363-4593
eISSN
1461-7196
DOI
10.1177/13634593221075952
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Prior research suggests that caring is in tension with a financially incentivized, technologically-driven healthcare system. Nevertheless, employers, the public, and nurses expect nurses to be caring when providing care to patients and families. This article focuses on nurses’ emotional labor strategies when managing emotions related to organizationally imposed interference with caring. We analyzed 27 semi-structured interviews with nurses and found that the unsuccessful performance of emotional labor spills over into the women’s relationships at and outside of work. We apply Di-Cicco-Bloom and DiCicco-Bloom’s concept of secondary emotional labor to examine our findings and how secondary emotional labor further develops the alienation and exploitation concepts of Hochschild’s emotional labor theory. We suggest a structural change in nurses’ job design that remedies contradictory caring expectations and supports their emotional labor to prioritize a climate of caring for patients.

Journal

"Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine" – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2022

There are no references for this article.