Clifton Scott

Cracking Jokes and Crafting Selves: Sensemaking and Identity Management Among Human Service Workers

Using interview and participant-observation data gathered among correctional officers, 911 call-takers, and firefighters, this study explores how humor enables human service workers to manage identity and make sense of their work in relation to preferred notions of self. In the face of trying job duties, humor serves employee identity needs through differentiation, superiority, role distance, and relief. Moreover, humor serves as a sensemaking vehicle through which employees select, maintain, reproduce, and reify preferred interpretations of work. The analysis characterizes humor as an unfolding, collaborative, and interactional practice that can play a key part in socializing newcomers, building knowledge, and constituting the organizing process.

The Socialization of Emotion: Learning Emotion Management at the Fire Station

In a variety of fields, particularly human service occupations, the management of emotion is a precondition of employee and client well being. Based on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews, this study examines how firefighters are socialized to manage feelings and emotional displays. It concludes that firefighters recognized a need to manage their own emotions and those of their clients in order to deliver adequate service. Veteran firefighters facilitated the use of emotion labor techniques among newcomers by considering the emotion management knowledge and capabilities of job candidates during employee selection processes, providing habituated emotional events, and reinforcing customer service expectations. Newcomers actively participated in their own socialization to local emotion expectations through observational information seeking, retrospective surveillance, and performance of a normative newcomer role demeanor. The article concludes by offering practical and theoretical implications.

Organizational Discourse and the Appraisal of Occupational Hazards: Interpretive Repertoires, Heedful Interrelating, and Identity at Work

Scholars and practitioners have often conceptualized hazards as external to discursive processes, focusing instead on the role of strategic communication in representing pre-organized vulnerabilities to stakeholders rather than on the capacity of mundane discourse practices to shape how hazards emerge. In this study of risk discourse in one high reliability organization, a municipal fire department, we demonstrate how hazard appraisals emerged as intersubjective products of organizational discourse. Specifically, we explore how the interpretive repertoires firefighters used to make sense of hazards were medium and outcome of discursive identity formations. Firefighters employed preferred identity terms to amplify identity-enhancing dangers and attenuate vulnerabilities that were threatening to a preferred sense of self.

Ambiguity and Freedom of Dissent in Post- Incident Discussion

The after-action review (AAR) is a discussion technique some high-reliability organizations employ to encourage learning via collective retrospection. AARs are an effective communication tool for promoting reliability if they are held regularly. One way to encourage frequent AARs is to increase participants’ satisfaction with these meetings. This study examined the impact of post-incident, pre-discussion ambiguity and freedom of dissent on participant satisfaction with AARs. Firefighters (N = 119) completed a survey on their most recent AAR. As predicted, the level of post-incident, pre-discussion ambiguity was negatively related to AAR satisfaction. Freedom of dissent, however, attenuated the negative influence of ambiguity on AAR satisfaction.

Lateness to meetings: Examination of an unexplored temporal phenomenon

Meetings are salient sites of temporal behaviour in organizations. They consume large amounts of time, punctuate and interrupt the temporal flow of work, provide venues of time coordination and allocation, and mark time in organizations (e.g., the weekly staff meeting). In this article, we seek to answer the question, “Should organizational scientists and temporality scholars care about meeting lateness?” Across two studies, we find that meeting lateness is a high base rate and seemingly consequential workplace event, with both objective and subjective elements, and potential implications for individuals, relationships, groups, and the organization more broadly. Meeting lateness correlates include job satisfaction, intent to quit, satisfaction with meetings in general, age, and conscientiousness. In light of the frequency, consequences, and conceptual complexity of meeting lateness, along with the dearth of extant research on the topic, it is a phenomenon primed for further study.

Quantity and quality: Increasing safety norms through after action reviews

Workplace safety is a concern for both scholars and practitioners alike because accidents and injuries can result in time away from work and lost organizational resources. This study focuses on how one type of post-incident discussion can be effectively used to promote positive safety norms. It adds to the growing body of research on after action review meetings, one type of post-incident discussion intervention commonly used in high reliability organizations to increase future workplace safety behaviors. This study also extends the sensemaking and high reliability literatures by examining a three-way interaction between perceived frequency of after action review meetings, ambiguity reduction and psychological safety. Survey data were obtained from 330 firefighters. Results from the three-way interaction showed that safety norms were highest when perceived after action review frequency, ambiguity reduction and psychological safety were simultaneously high, and safety norms were lowest when perceived after action review frequency, ambiguity reduction and psychological safety were simultaneously low. By examining both the perceived quantity and quality of after action review meetings, this study provides insight into which after action review facilitation objectives are most likely to increase positive safety norms and ultimately create a shared understanding of how to behave safely in future workplace events in high reliability organizational contexts.