Charlotte Baarts

Collective individualism: the informal and emergent dynamics of practising safety in a high‐risk work environment

Safety knowledge appears to be ‘a doing’. In construction work safety is practised in the complex interrelationship between the individual, pair and gang. Thus the aim is to explore the nature and scope of individualist and collectivist preferences pertaining to the practice of safety at a construction site. An ethnographic fieldwork, in which the researcher worked as an apprentice, will provide detailed and experience‐near insights into the complexity of these processes. Findings show that individualist and collectivist preferences influence the amount of risk the individual worker will assume and expose workmates to. Aspects such as self‐regulation, self‐confidence and independence are acceptable values only to the extent that they do not pose a threat to the solidarity of the community or safety of other workers. The informal practice of safety is a tight‐rope act that involves balancing the form and scope of these preferences.

School meal sociality or lunch pack individualism? Using an intervention study to compare the social impacts of school meals and packed lunches from home:

The present article specifies and broadens our understanding of the concept of commensality by investigating what it means to ‘share a meal’. The study utilizes a school meal intervention carried out in Denmark in 2011/2012. It shows how different types of school meal arrangement influence the social life of a school class, and how these arrangements involve strategies of both inclusion and exclusion. Two types of school meals are compared in the intervention study: a hot meal based on Nordic ingredients and the normal Danish school meal arrangement in which children bring lunch packs to school. The study discusses commensality by examining and comparing lunchtime interactions within the same group of children in the two contrasting meal situations. The results fail to confirm the conventional view that shared meals have greater social impacts and benefits than eating individualized foods. The article argues that the social entrepreneurship involved in sharing individual lunch packs might even outweigh some of the benefits of shared meals where everyone is served the same food.

Smoking cessation advice in consultations with health problems not related to smoking? Relevance criteria in Danish general practice consultations.

Abstract Objective. To identify frames of interaction that allow smoking cessation advice in general practice consultations. Design. Qualitative study based on individual in-depth interviews with GPs and their patients. Each of the GPs’ consultations were observed during a three-day period. Interviews primarily addressed the consultations that had been observed. The concept of “frames” described by Goffman was deployed as an analytic tool. Setting. Danish general practice. Subjects. Six GPs and 11 of their patients. Results. Both GPs and patients evaluated potential issues to be included during consultations by relevance criteria. Relevance criteria served the purpose of limiting the number of issues in individual consultations. Issues could be included if they connected to something already communicated in a consultation. Smoking cessation advice was subject to these relevance criteria and was primarily discussed if it posed a particular risk to a particular patient. Smoking cessation advice also occurred in conversations addressing the patients well-being. If occurring without any other readable frame, smoking cessation advice was apt to be perceived by patients as part of a public campaign. Conclusions. Relevance criteria in the shape of communication of particular risks to particular patients and small-talk about well-being reflect the concept of “frames” by Goffman. Criteria of relevance limit the number of issues in individual consultations. Relevance criteria may explain why smoking cessation advice has not yet been implemented in many more consultations.

Killing ourselves with laughter … mapping the interplay of organizational teasing and workplace bullying in hospital work life

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the interplay of organisational humorous teasing and workplace bullying in hospital work life in order to investigate how workplace bullying can emerge from doctors and nurses experiences of what at first appears as ‘innocent’ humorous interactions. Design/methodology/approach Based on an ethnographic field study among doctors and nurses at Rigshospitalet (University Hospital of Copenhagen, Denmark) field notes, transcriptions from two focus groups and six in-depth interviews were analysed using a cross- sectional thematic analysis. Findings This study demonstrates how bullying may emerge out of a distinctive joking practice, in which doctors and nurses continually relate to one another with a pronounced degree of derogatory teasing. The all-encompassing and omnipresent teasing entails that the positions of perpetrator and target persistently change, thereby excluding the position of bystander. Doctors and nurses report that they experience the humiliating t...

Shaping of ‘Embodied Expertise’ in Alternative Medicine

By exploring ‘embodied expertise’ in alternative treatments, this chapter endeavours to help us to account for the popularity of alternative medicine. Embodied expertise has been a much-neglected area in healthcare research for alternative medicine compared with ‘negative’ explanations such as studies of practitioners’ (lack of) education, treatment effects and effectiveness, or users’ dissatisfaction with conventional healthcare. Drawing on a concept of expertise different from ‘expert’ and ‘profession’ allows us to identify dimensions such as skills, knowledge, and spatiality developed not only by practitioners but also in the practitioner-user encounter. Based on a study of three of the most popular forms of alternative medicine in Denmark, we demonstrate how these dimensions are central to developing relationships between (1) expert and lay, (2) experience and evidence-based knowledge, and (3) clinic and home. We argue that such relationships develop the embodied expertise of practitioners, as well as that of users of alternative medicine.

Contrasting Approaches to Food Education and School Meals

Abstract This study builds on a fieldwork in a Danish school class, where pupils were observed while preparing and eating school meals. It shows that the children encounter conflicting approaches to food education depending on the context. While eating, an authoritarian approach to food education dominates and food is ascribed instrumental value. While preparing the school meal, a democratic approach dominates and food is ascribed intrinsic value. The aim is to show how these conflicting approaches reflect not only different social and cultural expectations to eating and preparing meals, respectively, but also a conflict between food educational ideals and actual school meal practices. To illustrate this an analytic model is introduced, the Integrated Food Pedagogy Model, and the ways in which this model could help promote better food education among schoolchildren are discussed.