Ellen Annandale, Sarah Nettleton, Daryl Martin, Christina Buse, Siân Beynon-Jones
Architects’ practice is characterized by a narrative of progressive unease about lack of autonomy coupled with a recent steer from professional figureheads towards the benefits of connected ways of working with other occupations, such as contractors and developers, rather than boundary protection. We explore this through a study of UK architects working on residential facilities for later life, involving semi-structured interviews with architects and ethnographic fieldwork of two building projects followed over time. We show that architects experience key stakeholders in their intersection on two axes: as ‘virtual-embodied’ and ‘individual(s)-collective(s)’. Facility end-users (residents, staff) are encountered more commonly in virtual (abstract) than in embodied (tangible, visible) form, and as collectives rather than as individuals (as ‘virtual collectives’). In juxtaposition, they tend to encounter clients (facility owners, developers), building contractors, and planners in embodied rather than virtual form and as individuals rather than as collectives (as ‘embodied individuals’). We explore the consequences for architects’ ‘practice modalities’, broadly defined as how something happens, is done, or is experienced. We show that ‘embodied individuals’ foster a practice modality of ‘dependency and contingency’ where stakeholders tend to have more sway, whereas ‘virtual communities’ enable a practice modality of ‘autonomy and personal artistry’. However, ‘embodied individuals’ and ‘virtual collectives’ are mutually informing rather than independent sets of relationships; that is, they bear on each other during the architect’s work, sometimes in challenging, even conflicting, ways. An analysis of how architects navigate this helps to understand how a build evolves as it does from architects’ perspectives.
{"title":"The constellations of design: Architects’ practice modalities when working with embodied individuals and virtual collectives in later life facilities in the UK","authors":"Ellen Annandale, Sarah Nettleton, Daryl Martin, Christina Buse, Siân Beynon-Jones","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae013","url":null,"abstract":"Architects’ practice is characterized by a narrative of progressive unease about lack of autonomy coupled with a recent steer from professional figureheads towards the benefits of connected ways of working with other occupations, such as contractors and developers, rather than boundary protection. We explore this through a study of UK architects working on residential facilities for later life, involving semi-structured interviews with architects and ethnographic fieldwork of two building projects followed over time. We show that architects experience key stakeholders in their intersection on two axes: as ‘virtual-embodied’ and ‘individual(s)-collective(s)’. Facility end-users (residents, staff) are encountered more commonly in virtual (abstract) than in embodied (tangible, visible) form, and as collectives rather than as individuals (as ‘virtual collectives’). In juxtaposition, they tend to encounter clients (facility owners, developers), building contractors, and planners in embodied rather than virtual form and as individuals rather than as collectives (as ‘embodied individuals’). We explore the consequences for architects’ ‘practice modalities’, broadly defined as how something happens, is done, or is experienced. We show that ‘embodied individuals’ foster a practice modality of ‘dependency and contingency’ where stakeholders tend to have more sway, whereas ‘virtual communities’ enable a practice modality of ‘autonomy and personal artistry’. However, ‘embodied individuals’ and ‘virtual collectives’ are mutually informing rather than independent sets of relationships; that is, they bear on each other during the architect’s work, sometimes in challenging, even conflicting, ways. An analysis of how architects navigate this helps to understand how a build evolves as it does from architects’ perspectives.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142248721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sociological studies on elite lawyers working in large law firms have recently extended to non-Western countries. Based on a quantitative dataset comprising 1,303 lawyers from 106 Turkish law firms, this article aims to be the first empirical investigation of the social profile of lawyers in the rising large law firms in Türkiye. The analysis focuses on how characteristics of Turkish elite lawyers, in terms of educational capital, gender, and status are distributed. The objective of the analysis is to discover to what extent the expansion of legal education and rise of the private universities are reflected in the structure of elite law firms. To discover the relationships between university type, gender, and position at job, chi-square, and logistic regression analyses are conducted. Main findings are that the Turkish elite lawyers constitute a stratum where the most advantageous educational capital is concentrated compared to the profession in general, the lawyers working in the employee position are relatively young and have mostly private university degrees, and the increased feminization of the profession is closely intertwined with the status hierarchies.
{"title":"Elite lawyers in Türkiye: Educational capital, status hierarchies, and feminization","authors":"Elyesa Koytak","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae006","url":null,"abstract":"Sociological studies on elite lawyers working in large law firms have recently extended to non-Western countries. Based on a quantitative dataset comprising 1,303 lawyers from 106 Turkish law firms, this article aims to be the first empirical investigation of the social profile of lawyers in the rising large law firms in Türkiye. The analysis focuses on how characteristics of Turkish elite lawyers, in terms of educational capital, gender, and status are distributed. The objective of the analysis is to discover to what extent the expansion of legal education and rise of the private universities are reflected in the structure of elite law firms. To discover the relationships between university type, gender, and position at job, chi-square, and logistic regression analyses are conducted. Main findings are that the Turkish elite lawyers constitute a stratum where the most advantageous educational capital is concentrated compared to the profession in general, the lawyers working in the employee position are relatively young and have mostly private university degrees, and the increased feminization of the profession is closely intertwined with the status hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140612609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on resource dependence and new institutional theories, this article examines the impact of corporate clients on the representation of women among associates and partners of large US law firms. We investigate the influence of women in corporate executive positions, women corporate chief legal officers, and clients who join in collective efforts to advocate for law firm diversity, as well as the role of power and dependence in client–firm relationships. We use longitudinal data on 665 law offices from the 2005 and 2010 editions of the NALP Directory of Legal Employers and incorporate client characteristics from the 2005 National Law Journal client list. We find that women executives among a firm’s corporate clients are linked to greater representation of women among law firm associates, but we observe no effects among partners, and scant effects of client participation in a key collective advocacy effort. Firm independence from client power is negatively linked to gender diversity among associates, while client independence from firm power is positively associated with women’s representation at both the associate and partner levels. In addition, firm independence from client power weakens the influence of female and activist corporate leaders on gender diversity in the case of associates but strengthens their influence in the case of partners.
{"title":"The customer is always right? Corporate client influence and women’s attainment in large US law firms","authors":"Fiona M Kay, Elizabeth H Gorman","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae005","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on resource dependence and new institutional theories, this article examines the impact of corporate clients on the representation of women among associates and partners of large US law firms. We investigate the influence of women in corporate executive positions, women corporate chief legal officers, and clients who join in collective efforts to advocate for law firm diversity, as well as the role of power and dependence in client–firm relationships. We use longitudinal data on 665 law offices from the 2005 and 2010 editions of the NALP Directory of Legal Employers and incorporate client characteristics from the 2005 National Law Journal client list. We find that women executives among a firm’s corporate clients are linked to greater representation of women among law firm associates, but we observe no effects among partners, and scant effects of client participation in a key collective advocacy effort. Firm independence from client power is negatively linked to gender diversity among associates, while client independence from firm power is positively associated with women’s representation at both the associate and partner levels. In addition, firm independence from client power weakens the influence of female and activist corporate leaders on gender diversity in the case of associates but strengthens their influence in the case of partners.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140562797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates how the identities of frontline professionals are (re)constructed in their talk about their everyday work activities. Based on a study of a mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, we illustrate that when talking about acting in accordance with their organizational policies, the social workers’ identities are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing the practices of documentation and regular meetings with their supervisors that constitute the routine processes of organizing. However, when discussing instances where they override the organizationally sanctioned rules, their identities are disciplined by the aspiration of fabricating a client-centred caregiver identity adopted from the dominant discourse in their profession. We, therefore, counterbalance the understanding that professionals’ identity work related to their deliberate micro-emancipation acts are merely an expression of agency and argue that their preferred resistant identities pertaining to their self-declared apparent deviation from the organizational order are also made within frameworks of disciplinary power. By delineating that both discursive conformity and resistance cut across the boundaries between acting in alignment with and against organizational guidelines, we unveil an underexplored complexity of conducting professional identity work associated with the interrelationships between practices of talk and action that has largely been overlooked in prior scholarship. We, therefore, offer an action-related analysis of discursive identity work that extends beyond the context of this study and informs future research.
{"title":"Discipline, caregiving, and identity work of frontline professionals: Talking about the acts of compliance and resistance in the everyday practices of social workers","authors":"Farshid Shams, Kathy Sanderson","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates how the identities of frontline professionals are (re)constructed in their talk about their everyday work activities. Based on a study of a mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, we illustrate that when talking about acting in accordance with their organizational policies, the social workers’ identities are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing the practices of documentation and regular meetings with their supervisors that constitute the routine processes of organizing. However, when discussing instances where they override the organizationally sanctioned rules, their identities are disciplined by the aspiration of fabricating a client-centred caregiver identity adopted from the dominant discourse in their profession. We, therefore, counterbalance the understanding that professionals’ identity work related to their deliberate micro-emancipation acts are merely an expression of agency and argue that their preferred resistant identities pertaining to their self-declared apparent deviation from the organizational order are also made within frameworks of disciplinary power. By delineating that both discursive conformity and resistance cut across the boundaries between acting in alignment with and against organizational guidelines, we unveil an underexplored complexity of conducting professional identity work associated with the interrelationships between practices of talk and action that has largely been overlooked in prior scholarship. We, therefore, offer an action-related analysis of discursive identity work that extends beyond the context of this study and informs future research.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140379071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Karolina Parding, Mihajla Gavin, Rachel Wilson, Scott Fitzgerald, Mats Jakobsson, Susan McGrath-Champ
Intra-professional collaboration is essential as it enables professionals to learn, develop, and define the terms of the profession in their own way. Yet conditions for collaboration are shaped by how work is organized and governed. This article examines how conditions for intra-professional collaboration, where work takes place with colleagues within the same profession in same or similar roles, are perceived by teachers, in relation to how work is organized, by drawing on empirical insights from a study on teachers working in education systems defined by market-driven reforms. Our findings nuance ideas of professional connectedness by showing how the organization of work, affected by ‘entangled institutional logics’ (Blomgren and Waks 2015; Alvehus and Andersson 2018) and market-based governance reforms, shapes intra-professional collaboration. Our contribution is thus to take departure from established understandings of connectivity, that is, ‘related to others and outsiders’ (Noordegraaf 2020) by examining connectivity within professions, showing how there continues to be a struggle between the profession, organization, and market which shapes conditions for intra-professional work within the teaching profession. Our analysis of intra-professional collaboration holds significance for emergent understandings of connectivity (see Adams et al. 2020a; Alvehus, Avoon and Oliver 2021: 201; Kanon and Andersson 2023) by underscoring how the contemporary organization and management of work shape the conditions that enable, or augment, inwards connectivity and the ability for professionals to collaborate in meaningful ways.
{"title":"Intra-professional collaboration and organization of work among teachers: How entangled institutional logics shape connectivity","authors":"Karolina Parding, Mihajla Gavin, Rachel Wilson, Scott Fitzgerald, Mats Jakobsson, Susan McGrath-Champ","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae003","url":null,"abstract":"Intra-professional collaboration is essential as it enables professionals to learn, develop, and define the terms of the profession in their own way. Yet conditions for collaboration are shaped by how work is organized and governed. This article examines how conditions for intra-professional collaboration, where work takes place with colleagues within the same profession in same or similar roles, are perceived by teachers, in relation to how work is organized, by drawing on empirical insights from a study on teachers working in education systems defined by market-driven reforms. Our findings nuance ideas of professional connectedness by showing how the organization of work, affected by ‘entangled institutional logics’ (Blomgren and Waks 2015; Alvehus and Andersson 2018) and market-based governance reforms, shapes intra-professional collaboration. Our contribution is thus to take departure from established understandings of connectivity, that is, ‘related to others and outsiders’ (Noordegraaf 2020) by examining connectivity within professions, showing how there continues to be a struggle between the profession, organization, and market which shapes conditions for intra-professional work within the teaching profession. Our analysis of intra-professional collaboration holds significance for emergent understandings of connectivity (see Adams et al. 2020a; Alvehus, Avoon and Oliver 2021: 201; Kanon and Andersson 2023) by underscoring how the contemporary organization and management of work shape the conditions that enable, or augment, inwards connectivity and the ability for professionals to collaborate in meaningful ways.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140073601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a startup incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization.
{"title":"The importance of being privileged: Digital entrepreneurship as a class project","authors":"Grant Murray, Chris Carter, Crawford Spence","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joae001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joae001","url":null,"abstract":"Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a startup incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139680256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas Nielsen Hald, Mickael Bech, Ulrika Enemark, Jay Shaw, Viola Burau
There is a growing interest in understanding when and why interprofessional collaborations are well functioning, especially within healthcare systems. However, more knowledge is needed about how professionals affect and contribute to these collaborations when they engage in them. To address this shortcoming, this study aims to contribute to professional and organizational studies of interprofessional collaboration by providing novel insights into how professionals engage in and contribute to interprofessional collaborations. It builds on a theoretical perspective of examining professionals’ everyday collaboration practices through the interplay between temporal-oriented agency and institutional work. It applies this perspective to a case study of interprofessional collaboration between personal workers (PWs), nurses, and therapists in the home care sector in Denmark. Overall, the findings show that the professionals engaged in and contributed to the interprofessional collaboration by ‘trying to patch a broken system’. All three professional groups did this primarily by ‘adopting new practices to deal with inept institutionalized practices’ to maintain collaboration. Additionally, some PWs ‘failed to enact institutionalized practices’ to disrupt the collaboration, and some nurses and therapists ‘invented and established mechanisms’ to create new arrangements for the collaboration. Based on the findings, the study demonstrates that certain dimensions of agency are associated with certain types of institutional work. Furthermore, the study suggests that the interplay between agency and institutional work varies between professional groups, influenced by their relative autonomy.
{"title":"‘Trying to patch a broken system’: Exploring institutional work among care professions for interprofessional collaboration","authors":"Andreas Nielsen Hald, Mickael Bech, Ulrika Enemark, Jay Shaw, Viola Burau","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joad027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad027","url":null,"abstract":"There is a growing interest in understanding when and why interprofessional collaborations are well functioning, especially within healthcare systems. However, more knowledge is needed about how professionals affect and contribute to these collaborations when they engage in them. To address this shortcoming, this study aims to contribute to professional and organizational studies of interprofessional collaboration by providing novel insights into how professionals engage in and contribute to interprofessional collaborations. It builds on a theoretical perspective of examining professionals’ everyday collaboration practices through the interplay between temporal-oriented agency and institutional work. It applies this perspective to a case study of interprofessional collaboration between personal workers (PWs), nurses, and therapists in the home care sector in Denmark. Overall, the findings show that the professionals engaged in and contributed to the interprofessional collaboration by ‘trying to patch a broken system’. All three professional groups did this primarily by ‘adopting new practices to deal with inept institutionalized practices’ to maintain collaboration. Additionally, some PWs ‘failed to enact institutionalized practices’ to disrupt the collaboration, and some nurses and therapists ‘invented and established mechanisms’ to create new arrangements for the collaboration. Based on the findings, the study demonstrates that certain dimensions of agency are associated with certain types of institutional work. Furthermore, the study suggests that the interplay between agency and institutional work varies between professional groups, influenced by their relative autonomy.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139514782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay marks, reviews, and celebrates the first decade of the Journal of Professions and Organization. It begins with a brief review of the journal’s founding, initial scope, and objectives. This is followed by an analysis of all the articles published in the first decade (2014–23) of the journal’s existence. Finally, turning to the future, we consider at topics and initiatives that are becoming relevant as we approach JPO’s second decade.
{"title":"Quality, diversity, and impact: (The first) 10 years of the Journal of Professions and Organization","authors":"David M Brock","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joad023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad023","url":null,"abstract":"This essay marks, reviews, and celebrates the first decade of the Journal of Professions and Organization. It begins with a brief review of the journal’s founding, initial scope, and objectives. This is followed by an analysis of all the articles published in the first decade (2014–23) of the journal’s existence. Finally, turning to the future, we consider at topics and initiatives that are becoming relevant as we approach JPO’s second decade.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138580310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Professionalism has been widely criticized for its biased standards modeled around dominant identities while excluding minoritized groups. Nevertheless, it remains a powerful social discourse, adopted widely by workers and organizations, and frontline workers—who became particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic—are no different, even as they are mainly Black and Brown. Our exploratory study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 Black frontline workers, examines how they use discourses of professionalism to navigate everyday tensions stemming from both their minoritized racial identity and the precarious nature of frontline work. Participants described three intersecting communicative practices—bottling their emotions, striving for (elusive) excellence, and navigating (in)visibility. Our research thus addresses the communicative practice of professionalism among an important yet undeserved category of workers, showing how it is both hegemonic and exclusionary, but may nevertheless be subverted strategically by precarious workers.
{"title":"Black frontline workers navigating everyday workplace tensions through professionalism","authors":"Christine Nyawaga, Rahul Mitra","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joad022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad022","url":null,"abstract":"Professionalism has been widely criticized for its biased standards modeled around dominant identities while excluding minoritized groups. Nevertheless, it remains a powerful social discourse, adopted widely by workers and organizations, and frontline workers—who became particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic—are no different, even as they are mainly Black and Brown. Our exploratory study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 Black frontline workers, examines how they use discourses of professionalism to navigate everyday tensions stemming from both their minoritized racial identity and the precarious nature of frontline work. Participants described three intersecting communicative practices—bottling their emotions, striving for (elusive) excellence, and navigating (in)visibility. Our research thus addresses the communicative practice of professionalism among an important yet undeserved category of workers, showing how it is both hegemonic and exclusionary, but may nevertheless be subverted strategically by precarious workers.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138525840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract As an employee population, correctional officers (COs) perform a stressful, dangerous, and extreme job that has significant consequences for their health and well-being. Yet, COs are often reluctant to focus on their own mental health concerns. In this study, we explore how US COs communicatively engage and avoid discussing mental health in relation to their work. Using a phronetic iterative approach, we analyze how a discourse of professionalism promotes COs (1) practicing emotion suppression and impersonalization to protect themselves from inmates and mental health challenges and (2) constructing mental health as an inmate problem in ways that may limit COs’ abilities to address their own mental health concerns. We assess how professional ideals thus serve as both a protective resource and a constraint, with dehumanizing consequences for COs and those they serve. We then consider theoretical implications for studying professionalism in working class occupations and stigma management communication. We also outline possibilities for disrupting and reconstructing mental health in correctional work.
{"title":"Extreme work, professionalism, and the construction of mental health in correctional work","authors":"Jaclyn K Brandhorst, Rebecca Meisenbach","doi":"10.1093/jpo/joad018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joad018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As an employee population, correctional officers (COs) perform a stressful, dangerous, and extreme job that has significant consequences for their health and well-being. Yet, COs are often reluctant to focus on their own mental health concerns. In this study, we explore how US COs communicatively engage and avoid discussing mental health in relation to their work. Using a phronetic iterative approach, we analyze how a discourse of professionalism promotes COs (1) practicing emotion suppression and impersonalization to protect themselves from inmates and mental health challenges and (2) constructing mental health as an inmate problem in ways that may limit COs’ abilities to address their own mental health concerns. We assess how professional ideals thus serve as both a protective resource and a constraint, with dehumanizing consequences for COs and those they serve. We then consider theoretical implications for studying professionalism in working class occupations and stigma management communication. We also outline possibilities for disrupting and reconstructing mental health in correctional work.","PeriodicalId":45650,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Professions and Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134991471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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