Sarah J. Tracy

Qualitative Quality: Eight “Big-Tent” Criteria for Excellent Qualitative Research:

This article presents a model for quality in qualitative research that is uniquely expansive, yet flexible, in that it makes distinctions among qualitative research’s means (methods and practices) and its ends. The article first provides a contextualization and rationale for the conceptualization. Then the author presents and explores eight key markers of quality in qualitative research including (a) worthy topic, (b) rich rigor, (c) sincerity, (d) credibility, (e) resonance, (f) significant contribution, (g) ethics, and (h) meaningful coherence. This eight-point conceptualization offers a useful pedagogical model and provides a common language of qualitative best practices that can be recognized as integral by a variety of audiences. While making a case for these markers of quality, the article leaves space for dialogue, imagination, growth, and improvisation.

Burned by Bullying in the American Workplace: Prevalence, Perception, Degree and Impact

This study assesses the prevalence of workplace bullying in a sample of US workers, using a standardized measure of workplace bullying (Negative Acts Questionnaire, NAQ), and compares the current studys prevalence rates with those from other bullying and aggression studies. The article opens by defining bullying as a persistent, enduring form of abuse at work and contrasting it with other negative workplace actions and interactions. Through a review of the current literature, we propose and test hypotheses regarding bullying prevalence and dynamics relative to a sample of US workers. After discussing research methods, we report on the rates of bullying in a US sample, compare these to similar studies, and analyse the negative acts that might lead to perceptions of being bullied. Based upon past conceptualizations, as well as research that suggests bullying is a phenomenon that occurs in gradations, we introduce and provide statistical evidence for the construct and impact of bullying degree. Finally, the study explores the impact of bullying on persons who witnessed but did not directly experience bullying in their jobs.

Becoming a character for commerce: Emotion Labor, Self-Subordination, and Discursive Construction of Identity in a Total Institution

This study of cruise ship activities’ directors analyzes emotion labor, self-subordination, and discursive construction of identity in the context of a total institution. It opens with a review of social theories of emotion and emotion work and Foucauldian concepts of power and identity. The case, based on fieldnotes, documents, and interview data, analyzes (a) the arbitrary nature of emotion rules; (b) the dispersion of emotion control among supervisors, passengers, peers, and the self; (c) employee self-subordination and privatization of burnout; and (d) identity as coconstituted through resistance and consent to emotion labor norms. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications.

Nightmares, Demons, and Slaves Exploring the Painful Metaphors of Workplace Bullying

Although considerable research has linked workplace bullying with psychosocial and physical costs, the stories and conceptualizations of mistreatment by those targeted are largely untold. This study uses metaphor analysis to articulate and explore the emotional pain of workplace bullying and, in doing so, helps to translate its devastation and encourage change. Based on qualitative data gathered from focus groups, narrative interviews, and target drawings, the analysis describes how bullying can feel like a battle, water torture, nightmare, or noxious substance. Abused workers frame bullies as narcissistic dictators, two-faced actors, and devil figures. Employees targeted with workplace bullying liken themselves to vulnerable children, slaves, prisoners, animals, and heartbroken lovers. These metaphors highlight and delimit possibilities for agency and action. Furthermore, they may serve as diagnostic cues, providing shorthand necessary for early intervention.

Dialectic, contradiction, or double bind? Analyzing and theorizing employee reactions to organizational tension

Drawing from qualitative data gathered at two correctional facilities, this paper empirically illustrates employee reactions to organizational contradictions in a total institution and advances a theoretical model positing that organizational tensions may be framed as complementary dialectics, simple contradictions, or pragmatic paradoxes—each accompanied by attendant organizational and personal ramifications. The analysis suggests that organizations can create structures in which employees are more likely to make sense of organizational contradictions in healthy ways and avoid the debilitating reactions associated with double binds. Specifically, through metacommunication about organizational tensions (for instance, manifest in role play enactment of contradictory occupational goals), employees are better able to understand the paradoxes that mark work life and make sense of them in emotionally healthy ways.

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.

Emotion labor at 911: A case study and theoretical critique

Abstract This study of 911 call‐takers describes the different ways human feeling is understood, expressed and managed in the emotionally‐charged atmosphere of an emergency 911 communications center. After reviewing past work on emotion labor and organizational burnout, we describe the data, qualitative methods, and the role of call‐takers at Citywest Emergency Center. The heart of the paper is a description of the emotional landscape at 911, the organizations emotion rules, and the communicative devices call‐takers use to manage their emotion. Based upon this 911 case, we critique several assumptions made in past emotion labor and organizational burnout studies. The paper concludes with implications for emergency communications call‐taking.

Locking Up Emotion: Moving Beyond Dissonance for Understanding Emotion Labor Discomfort The paper uses data from the author's dissertation, expertly advised by Dr. Stanley Deetz at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Earlier versions were presented at the annual meeting of the Western States Communication Association, 2004 and the International Communication Association, 2001.

Using qualitative data gathered among correctional officers and a post-structuralist theoretical lens, this study suggests that emotion labor—the instrumental use and suppression of emotion—is more difficult when societal discourses and organizational processes limit employees’ ability to maintain preferred understandings of identity. The paper provides rich description of the complex web of emotion norms faced by correctional officers and then makes the case that identity, power, hidden transcripts, role distancing behaviors, strategic interaction, and organizational identification affect the ease of emotion work. The analysis moves beyond extant researchs focus on emotive dissonance, or a clash between “true” feeling and “false” emotional display, to highlight the roles of macro discourses and everyday organizational practices in understanding the discomfort of emotion labor.

The construction of correctional officers: Layers of emotionality behind bars

This “layered account,” based on qualitative research gathered at a county jail and state women’s prison, illustrates the ways in which organizational discourses and micropractices encourage emotional constructions such as withdrawal, paranoia, detachment, and an “us-them” mentality among correctional officers. Using philosophies from Michele Foucault, the analysis extends theoretical notions of emotion labor, illustrates the harnessed yet pervasive nature of sexuality in a total institution, and sheds light on the emotional challenges faced by a troubled, hidden, and stigmatized employee group. The text jumps among theoretical arguments, notes about methodology and writing, and creative nonfiction vignettes and in doing so, attempts to embody the emotional and jarring nature of the correctional environment.

Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Practice

This article introduces a qualitative research method called discourse tracing. Discourse tracing draws from contributions made by ethnographers, discourse critics, case study scholars, and process tracers. The approach offers new insights and an attendant language about how we engage in research designed specifically for the critical-interpretive and applied analysis of discourse. More specifically, discourse tracing analyzes the formation, interpretation, and appropriation of discursive practices across micro, meso, and macro levels. In doing so, the method provides a language for studying social processes, including the facilitation of change and the institution of new routines. The article describes the current theoretical and political landscape of qualitative methods and how discourse tracing can provide a particularly helpful methodological tool at this time. Then, drawing from a qualitative study on of school lunch policy, the authors explain how to practice discourse tracing in a step-by-step manner.