Steven H. Lopez

Emotional Labor and Organized Emotional Care Conceptualizing Nursing Home Care Work

Based on qualitative comparison of three nursing home facilities, the idea of organized emotional care is proposed as a complement to the concept of emotional labor for understanding care work. It is argued that emotional labor and organized emotional care are distinguished primarily by the presence or absence of organizational feeling rules and affective requirements. Care organizations can be plotted on a continuum with emotional labor at the coercive end and organized emotional care at the other. The proposed distinction restores a positive vision of organizational management of emotion to the sociology of work.

Chaos and the Abuse of Power: Workplace Bullying in Organizational and Interactional Context

Bullying is a significant workplace problem—a fact highlighted by a growing body of social science literature. Its causes, however, have received little systematic attention beyond analyses of the personality attributes of bullies. This article explores the roles of relational power and organizational chaos in the emergence of workplace bullying. The analysis of content-coded organizational ethnographies integrates quantitative and qualitative techniques and draws heavily from the ethnographies themselves. Results suggest that the interplay of relational powerlessness and organizational chaos gives rise to bullying. In contrast, where there is a disjuncture between organizational and relational factors, the extent of bullying is determined by underlying, context-specific aspects of power. These results suggest a need for organizations not only to protect the weak, but also to eliminate chaos—chaos that creates openings for the abuse of power.

Supervisory Bullying, Status Inequalities and Organizational Context

Bullying has been increasingly identified as a significant social problem. Although much of this attention has centered on the context of schooling, researchers are now beginning to recognize that workplaces are also arenas rife with abusive, bullying behaviors. Personality attributes of bullies and victims have received attention, but much less research has examined the social and organizational foundations of bullying. In this article, we focus theoretical attention on the importance of status-based power differentials and organizational context for the emergence of supervisory bullying in employment. Our multi-method analyses, which draw from content-coded organizational ethnographies (N = 204), highlight the importance not only of structural and social vulnerability – such as being in a racial minority or of a low occupational position – but also of chaotic and disorganized workplaces. Poor workplace organization, we show, creates positive motivations for supervisory bullying. Workplaces without capable guardians create further vulnerabilities to bullying as a managerial control tactic. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our results for understanding social power, organizational dynamics and the ramifications of abuse in the workplace.

Workers, Managers, and Customers: Triangles of Power in Work Communities

The sociology of service work has blossomed in the 10 years since Work and Occupations first published a special issue on this subject. This introductory essay chronicles developments and new debates around emotional labor, worker–customer relationships in the service triangle, and the nexus of gender and control in service work. Several neglected themes are highlighted, including the relationship between race and the organization of work on the shop floor, as well as a number of themes that were once prominent in industrial sociology but which have fallen into relative neglect in the sociology of service work despite their continuing relevance.

Culture Change Management in Long-Term Care: A Shop-Floor View:

Advocates of culture-change management suggest that the right sort of managerial philosophy can transform nursing homes from impersonal institutions into safe, caring communities. However, participant observation carried out at Heartland Community, a nonprofit culture-change nursing home, suggests that culture change founders on the structural problem of inadequate staffing. Resource limitations imposed by Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates mean that even nonprofit facilities desiring to maximize staffing cannot afford to hire enough staff to live up to basic care standards. Thus, above-average staffing notwithstanding, Heartlands nursing aides could not complete their work on time without compromising the quality of care by breaking important care rules. Resource limitations also forced management to adopt a series of punitive personnel policies that actively undercut the rhetoric and aims of culture change, turning culture change into a rhetorical device for shifting blame for care problems fromstructural resource limitations onto the attitudes of nursing aides.

POWER, STATUS, AND ABUSE AT WORK: General and Sexual Harassment Compared

Workplace harassment can be devastating for employees and damaging for organizations. In this article, we expand the literature by identifying common and distinct processes related to general workplace harassment and workplace sexual harassment. Using both structural equation modeling and in-depth case immersion, we analyze content-coded data from the full population of workplace ethnographies—ethnographies that provide in-depth information on the nature and causes of both general and sexual harassment that would otherwise be difficult to gather. Importantly, both forms of harassment emerge in settings characterized by physically demanding work and minority work groups. In such contexts, both general and sexual harassment enforce formal and informal status hierarchies and social exclusion. Grievance mechanisms and “team models” of workplace organization reduce sexual harassment but have no effect on general harassment. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical, legal, and policy implications for identifying and remedying harassment as a widespread and devastating form of inequality and social exclusion in organizations.

Workplace incivilities: the role of interest conflicts, social closure and organizational chaos

Workplace incivility — that is, negative relational dimensions of employment with consequences for worker integrity and dignity — affects millions every year. In this article, the ‘organizational misbehaviour’ and ‘workplace chaos’ literatures offer building blocks for a conception wherein workplace incivility is viewed as emanating from the joint and sometimes interconnected influence of organizational processes and status-based social closure. The resulting multi-method analyses draw on coded information on incivility, organizational context, and relational and status dynamics from a large population of organizational ethnographies (N=204). Analyses reveal that all forms of incivility except sexual harassment are rooted in organizational chaos. Qualitative re-immersion into these ethnographic accounts provides further insights into how conflicts endemic to paid employment and broader social closure projects surrounding class, race, and gender play a role as well, albeit often in distinct ways.

Rules don’t apply: Kafka’s insights on bureaucracy:

Weber’s ideal typical model of bureaucracy constitutes the starting point for most scholarship on organizations. Much organizational behaviour, however occurs outside this formalized model. It is thus somewhat surprising that behaviours outside the formal-rational model are, more often than not, treated as aberrations. In contrast, the emerging critical literature on ‘inhabited institutions’ has identified such gaps in our theoretical understanding as foundational, warranting a more agentic conception of organizational life—a conception more fully acknowledging of and sensitive to the dynamics of power in organizational life. In this regard, we highlight four prevalent (though seldom theoretically incorporated) features of contemporary bureaucracies—divergent goals, patrimonialism, unwritten rules and chaos. These features, which we contend are no less critical to organizational functioning than those identified by Weber, constitute an organizational logic more compatible with a Kafkan vision of bureaucracy than with a Weberian one. Theorizing such attributes allows us to explore elements of bureaucratic life that the formal-rational model of bureaucracy renders largely invisible and is conceptually and empirically ill equipped to incorporate. An illustrative analysis, drawing on narrative data drawn from the population of organizational ethnographies (n = 162) (1) demonstrates the prominence of such dynamics in organizational life; and (2) highlights their implications for rule breaking as a relatively common yet under-theorized occurrence. A core implication of our analysis and critique is that the social sciences need a fundamentally revised theory of bureaucracy capable of understanding bureaucracy’s power laden and often dystrophic features.

The ascension of Kafkaesque bureaucracy in private sector organizations

Although Weber’s ideal typical model of bureaucracy was developed primarily in relation to the state, studies of private sector organizations typically adhere to its formal-rational conceptions with little adjustment. This is unfortunate since bureaucracy in private sector economic organizations has many elements that are poorly captured by and potentially significantly at odds with Weber’s thinking. Most notable in this regard is the pervasiveness of particularistic and often informal, emergent arrangements − arrangements well documented for many decades by workplace ethnographers. This has significant implications for the conception of modern private sector organizations and indeed offers a picture that is more Kafkaesque than Weberian. Significant support for this point is provided by an analysis of content coded organizational ethnographies. Weberian dimensions of bureaucracy − most notably coordinated and specialized organization and training − are predominant in public institutions; private sector establishments, in contrast, witness significantly more particularism as well as uncertainty and fear as core organizing principles. Importantly, and as delineated in our over-time comparisons, such Kafkaesque elements of bureaucracy and organization appear to be increasingly prevalent.

Culture Change and Shit Work: Empowering and Overpowering the Frail Elderly in Long-Term Care

Drawing on a year of fieldwork in Heartland Community, a “culture-change” nonprofit nursing home, this article investigates dynamics of worker-client power relationships across departments. The analysis raises questions about power and inequality that invert the usual way of thinking about it: Rather than trying to explain why some workers or customers are treated better or worse than others, this article explores why the same people were treated very differently at different times of the day by staff in different departments of the same organization. The divergence in power relations across departments, I contend, flowed from the nursing home’s attempts to manage cross-cutting pressures to humanize care relationships without increasing costs. I suggest that that Heartland’s “solution” to these tensions preserves the routinely inhumane treatment of nursing home residents in the day-to-day activities of the nursing department while presenting a much different face to visitors, family members, policy makers, and the public. The article concludes by suggesting that these ethnographic findings may point not only to a widespread strategy in the nursing home industry but also more generally to the organizational impression management functions served by efforts to “humanize” worker-client relationships.