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Article
Publication date: 12 November 2020

Beata Segercrantz, Annamari Tuori and Charlotta Niemistö

Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus…

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Abstract

Purpose

Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus of the study is on health promotion in a context of illness and/or decline, which form the core of the studied organizational activities. The paper addresses the following question: how do care workers working in elderly care and mental health care organizations accomplish health promotion in the context of illness and/or decline?

Design/methodology/approach

The article develops a performative approach and analyses material-discursive practices in health promoting care work. The empirical material includes 36 semi-structured interviews with care workers, observations and organizational documents.

Findings

Two central material-discursive health promoting practices in care work are identified: confirming that celebrates service users as residents and the organizations as a home, and balancing at the limits of health promotion. The practices of balancing make the limitations of health promotion discernible and involve reconciling health promotion with that which does not neatly fit into it (illness, unachievable care aims, the institution and certain organizing). In sum, the study shows how health promotion can structure processes in care homes where illness and decline often are particularly palpable.

Originality/value

The paper explores health promotion in a context rarely explored in organization studies. Previous organization studies have to some extent explored health promotion and care work, but typically separately. Further, the few studies that have adopted a performative approach to material-discursive practices in the context of care work have typically primarily focused on IT. We extend previous organization studies literature by producing new insights: (1) from an important organizational context of health promotion and (2) of under-researched entanglements of human and non-human actors in care work providing a performative theory of reconciling organizational tensions.

Details

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, vol. 16 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-5648

Keywords

Available. Open Access. Open Access
Article
Publication date: 14 July 2020

Charlotta Niemistö, Jeff Hearn, Mira Karjalainen and Annamari Tuori

Privilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and…

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Abstract

Purpose

Privilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and silence for relatively privileged professionals in high-intensity knowledge businesses (KIBs).

Design/methodology/approach

This paper draws on 112 interviews in two rounds of interviews using the collaborative interactive action research method. The analysis focuses on processes of recruitment, careers and negotiation of boundaries between work and nonwork in these KIBs. The authors study how relative privilege within social inequalities connects with silences in multiple ways, and how the invisibility of privilege operates at different levels: individual identities and interpersonal actions of privilege (micro), as organizational level phenomena (meso) or as societally constructed (macro).

Findings

At each level, privilege is reproduced in part through silence. The authors also examine how processes connecting silence, privilege and social inequalities operate differently in relation to both disadvantage and the disadvantaged, and privilege and the privileged.

Originality/value

This study is relevant for organization studies, especially in the kinds of “multi-privileged” contexts where inequalities, disadvantages and subordination may remain hidden and silenced, and, thus, are continuously reproduced.

Details

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, vol. 15 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-5648

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Article
Publication date: 24 August 2018

Amanda Michiko Shigihara

The purpose of this paper is to examine restaurant employees’ engagement in identity work to manage occupational stigma consciousness.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine restaurant employees’ engagement in identity work to manage occupational stigma consciousness.

Design/methodology/approach

Research methods included ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews.

Findings

Widespread societal stigma attached to food service work disturbed participants’ sense of coherence. Therefore, they undertook harmonizing their present and envisioned selves with “forever talk,” a form of identity work whereby people discursively construct desired, favorable and positive identities and self-concepts by discussing what they view themselves engaged and not engaged in forever. Participants employed three forever talk strategies: conceptualizing work durations, framing legitimate careers and managing feelings about employment. Consequently, their talk simultaneously resisted and reproduced restaurant work stigmatization. Findings elucidated occupational stigma consciousness, ambivalence about jobs considered “bad,” “dirty” and “not real,” discursive tools for negotiating laudable identities, and costs of equivocal work appraisals.

Originality/value

This study provides a valuable conceptual and theoretical contribution by developing a more comprehensive understanding of occupational stigma consciousness. Moreover, an identity work framework helps explain how and why people shape identities congruent with and supportive of self-concepts. Forever talk operates as a temporal “protect and preserve” reconciliation tool whereby people are able to construct positive self-concepts while holding marginalized, stereotyped and stigmatized jobs. This paper offers a unique empirical case of the ways in which people talk about possible future selves when their employment runs counter to professions normatively evaluated as esteemed and lifelong. Notably, research findings are germane for analyzing any identities (work and non-work related) that pose incoherence between extant and desired selves.

Details

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, vol. 13 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-5648

Keywords

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