Feeling Stressed and Burned Out: A Feminist Reading and Re-Visioning of Stress-based Emotions Within Medicine and Organization Science

Abstract

This article is written in the spirit of resistance, as a challenge and alternative to what are accepted as neutral, unbiased conceptualizations of stress and burnout within traditional and popular discourse. Findings reported in a previous study suggest that the ways we conceptualize and experience stress and burnout are not inherently neutral, but are shaped by culture and a particular set of dominant themes prevalent in organizational and professional discourse. This article exposes the processes by which some forms of organizational experience and knowledge related to stress and burnout have become dominant, whereas “other” forms have become marginal and suppressed. Through a postmodern feminist reading of stress and burnout as expressed within the medical and organizational discourses, the author reveals how gender acts as an axis of power and meaning that helps sustain dominant and seemingly neutral conceptualizations within the discourses. Building from the feminist reading, she develops a radical reconstruction of the ways organizational participants and theorists could interpret and experience stress related emotions, and discusses the cultural conditions that could produce and sustain such a revision. The reading and revision reveal ways in which experiences of stress and burnout have been shaped and constrained by the dominant discourse and suggest ways social scientists might rewrite those experiences toward more humane ends. Insofar as stress and burnout are among the most common and well-researched topics (and emotions) within the field of organizational behavior, this paper has far-reaching theoretical, epistemological, and practical implications. More generally, the feminist reading and revision open new spaces for other ways of theorizing and argues against the limitations of knowledge and experience imposed by traditional organizational theory and medical discourse.