Everyday Working Life Research Articles

The Role of Physicians in Digitalizing Health Care Provision: Web-Based Survey Study.

BackgroundDigitalization affects all areas of society, including the health care sector. However, the digitalization of health care provision is progressing slowly compared to other sectors. In the professional and political literature, physicians are partially portrayed as digitalization sceptics. Thus, the role of physicians in this process requires further investigation. The theory of “digital natives” suggests a lower hurdle for younger generations to engage with digital technologies.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to investigate the role of physicians in the process of digitalizing health care provision in Germany and to assess the age factor.MethodsWe conducted a large-scale study to assess the role of this professional group in the progress of the digital transformation of the German health care sector. Therefore, in an anonymous online survey, we inquired about the current digital penetration of the personal working environment, expectations, attitude toward, and concerns regarding digitalization. Based on these data, we studied associations with the nominal variable age and variations across 2 age groups.ResultsThe 1274 participants included in the study generally showed a high affinity towards digitalization with a mean of 3.88 on a 5-point Likert scale; 723 respondents (56.75%) stated they personally use mobile apps in their everyday working life, with a weak tendency to be associated with the respondents’ age (η=0.26). Participants saw the most noticeable existing benefits through digitalization in data quality and readability (882/1274, 69.23%) and the least in patient engagement (213/1274, 16.72%). Medical practitioners preponderantly expect further improvements through increased digitalization across almost all queried areas but the most in access to medical knowledge (1136/1274, 89.17%), treatment of orphan diseases (1016/1274, 79.75%), and medical research (1023/1274, 80.30%).ConclusionsRespondents defined their role in the digitalization of health care provision as ambivalent: “scrutinizing” on the one hand but “active” and “open” on the other. A gap between willingness to participate and digital sovereignty was indicated. Thus, education on digitalization as a means to support health care provision should not only be included in the course of study but also in the continuing process of further and advanced training.

Challenges in the Digitization of Apprenticeships during the Coronavirus Pandemic: Who Needs Special Assistance?

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all areas of life, including everyday working life. Apprentices are often affected two-fold by the lockdown—school closures make it difficult to learn the theoretical content, while restrictions in the company affect practical work. This article reports the findings of an online mixed-method survey among 167 apprentices on the impacts of the pandemic on dual vocational training in Germany. In the survey, Likert scales were presented visually in a way that was particularly suitable for adolescents. The results show that the schools have had gaps in terms of equipment and online instruction. There was little or no online teaching, and the apprentices had hardly any contact with teachers and were left to work on the material on their own. The majority of apprentices expected their school performance to deteriorate as a consequence of the pandemic. The individual comments in response to open-ended questions also suggest that the digital offerings of vocational schools were inadequate during the first lockdown. At the same time, there were major differences in individual hardware equipment, such as computers, and in the apprentices’ Internet access. The gender differences are particularly interesting, as women tended to be at a disadvantage.

A Systematic Literature Review on Extended Reality: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality in Working Life

Extended reality (XR), here jointly referring to virtual, augmented, and mixed (VR, AR, MR) reality, is becoming more common in everyday working life. This paper presents a systematic literature review of academic publications on XR indicating changes in practical organization of work. We analyse both application areas of XR and theoretical and methodological approaches of XR research. The review process followed the PRISMA statement. Design, remote collaboration, and training were the main application areas of XR. XR enabled overcoming of obstacles set by time and space, safety, and resources by mediating experience of space. Research on XR applications in actual working life settings is yet relatively rare and covers primarily three areas: collaboration, evaluation of knowledge transfer, and work practices. Virtual reality was the most common form of applied XR, although the hardware used varied case by case. We identified four research areas regarding XR: collaboration, work practices, and evaluation of knowledge transfer, which somewhat followed the application areas. We did not find XR-specific methodologies in the reviewed articles, only few recent studies used novel ways of collecting research material, such as recording the movement in virtual reality. For now, XR still holds significant potential rather than clearly confirmed general advantages in working life.

Perceived challenges at work and need for professional support among people with inflammatory arthritis – A qualitative interview study

Background People with inflammatory arthritis (IA) often experience low work ability, and up to 38% lose their jobs during the initial years after the diagnosis of IA. Aim We explore the perceived challenges at work and identify the need for professional support among Danish people with IA. Materials/methods Individual explorative interviews based on a hermeneutic approach. We used Graneheim and Lundman’s qualitative content analysis. Results Eleven women and four men with IA (aged 36–68 years) who worked full or part time, or were on short-term sick leave, participated. The analysis revealed one main theme, Balancing work as part of everyday life, and four sub-themes: 1) Working despite challenges, 2) Prioritising energy for work, 3) Fatigue leading to lack of control, and 4) Need for flexibility and recognition. Conclusions People with IA prioritise staying at work despite experiencing challenges with fatigue and balancing their work and energy in everyday life. They need recognition, support and flexibility at work to be able to continue in their jobs. Significance The study highlights the need to be aware of occupational balance and, thus, to include other aspects in life apart from just work. It points at occupational therapists as relevant partners in vocational rehabilitation.

Interprofessional survey on communication skills in veterinary and veterinary-related education in Germany

BackgroundCommunication is an indispensable skill in the everyday working life of a veterinary team. In German higher educational institutions, communication skills training is explicitly mentioned in the curricula of veterinary assistants, including veterinary nurses and veterinary technicians, and of animal keepers, but not for undergraduate veterinary medicine. Little is known about interprofessional education in veterinary medicine and related professions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to describe and explore the current interprofessional state of knowledge regarding communication skills of the aforementioned groups in Germany.MethodsTo explore the perception, assess the knowledge and identify the attitude regarding communication skills and interprofessional training, an online survey was distributed. The survey was sent to all five veterinary higher educational institutions, 38 schools for veterinary assistants and 15 schools for animal keepers throughout Germany.ResultsIn total, 294 veterinary students, 111 veterinary assistant trainees and 62 animal keeper trainees participated. The majority of participants (98.07%, n = 458) perceived communication skills as highly important for their everyday work. In total, 413 participants (88.44%) felt that their communication skills needed improvement and more than half admitted having difficulties in effective communication (59.31%; n = 277). In addition, 62.74% of respondents (n = 293) were not sufficiently informed about the training content of their future colleagues. Most were convinced that training could positively influence on their communication with clients (95.72%; n = 447) and the team (92.29%; n = 431), and 76.45% of respondents (n = 357) wished to participate in an interprofessional training.ConclusionsResults of this study confirm that communication skills are perceived as highly important for professional life. Students and trainees show a great interest in communication skills and interprofessional training. The findings indicate that appropriate adjustments to existing curricula are necessary in Germany.

#farming365 – Exploring farmers’ social media use and the (re)presentation of farming lives

Rural studies now has a well-established corpus of work exploring how rural spaces and practices become (re)presented within various media and how these representations serve to perpetuate the ‘cultural fantasy’ of the rural idyll. To date, however, there has been a dearth of studies which have considered the role that social media may play within representing rural spaces and activities. The following paper attends to this omission through a consideration of farmers' use of social media and an exploration of how it may be used to document and (re)present their everyday working lives and practices. Drawing on the communicative practice of “working out loud” (WOL) and through analysing 5000 farming tweets, the paper shows how social media may offer a more broadly sourced, grassroots, depiction of rural farming life and examines how farmers assemble a range of sources – including the non-human – in (re)presenting the countryside and revealing the nature of their work. The paper notes how social media might enable farmers to reveal the often-hidden aspects of farm work, share and document practices as well as express and reflect their perspectives in communicating to (and with) farming and non-farming audiences, and how such communicative practices might serve to (re)construct their farming identities.

Designing Consumer Health Information Technology to Support Biform and Articulation Work: A Qualitative Study of Diet and Nutrition Management as Patient Work.

BackgroundDiet and nutrition management is an integral component of Crohn disease (CD) management. This type of management is highly variable and individualized and, thus, requires personalized approaches. Consumer health information technology (CHIT) designed to support CD management has typically supported this task as everyday life work and, not necessarily, as illness work. Moreover, CHIT has rarely supported the ways in which diet and nutrition management requires coordination between multiple forms of patient work.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to investigate diet and nutrition management as biform work, identify components of articulation work, and provide guidance on how to design CHIT to support this work.MethodsWe performed a qualitative study in which we recruited participants from CD-related Facebook pages and groups.ResultsSemistructured interviews with 21 individuals showed that diet and nutrition management strategies were highly individualized and variable. Four themes emerged from the data, emphasizing the interactions of diet and nutrition with physical, emotional, information, and technology-enabled management.ConclusionsThis study shows that the extent to which diet and nutrition management is biform work fluctuates over time and that articulation work can be continuous and unplanned. The design guidance specifies the need for patient-facing technologies to support interactions among diet and nutrition and other management activities such as medication intake, stress reduction, and information seeking, as well as to respond to the ways in which diet and nutrition management needs change over time.

Exploring Well-being at Work-An Interview Study on How IT Professionals Perceive Their Workplace.

The workplace is particularly important for promoting well-being at work and general life satisfaction, as performing a professional activity can be perceived as satisfying and motivating. In addition, employment opens up opportunities for individual development that employees may be perceived as fulfilling. By conducting an interview study with IT professionals of a German medium-sized company, we investigate which factors of the individual work environment are perceived as conducive to the performance of everyday job duties and thus increase well-being at work. Furthermore, we analyze the extent to which participants are satisfied with the implementation of the factors that are important to them, whether socio-demographic differences are relevant, and whether the perception of the work environment has an effect on employees' commitment. Results show that interpersonal factors in particular are considered to be important in everyday working life. About individual factors, a mixed picture emerged, whereby sociodemographic differences play only a minor role. Furthermore, there are indications of a positive relationship between the perception of the work environment and the IT professionals' commitment. In-depth analysis of the employee statements helps to determine which aspects of the work environment should be implemented, developed, or promoted. In the long term, this can support individual learning and development paths and generates a work environment that sustainably promotes employees' well-being at work and fosters long-term employment relationships.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Conditions, Employment, Career Development and Well-Being of Refugee Researchers

The ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ of the past years has led to the migration of refugee researchers (RRs) to European countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, RRs often had to work from home and/or to continue their social, cultural and economic integration process under new conditions. An online survey carried out to explore the impact of the pandemic on the refugee researchers showed that RRs found it difficult to adapt their everyday working life to the ‘home’ setting. The majority have had neither a suitable work environment at home nor the appropriate technology. Although they stated that they are rather pleased with the measures taken by the public authorities, they expressed concern about their vulnerability due to their precarious contracts and the bureaucratic asylum procedures, as the pandemic has had a negative impact on these major issues. The majority of RRs working in academia seem not to have been affected at all as far as their income is concerned, while the majority of those employed in other sectors became unemployed during the pandemic (58%). Recommendations are provided to the public authorities and policy makers to assist RRs to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic on their life.

Keeping institutional logics in arm’s length: emerging of rogue practices in a gray zone of everyday work life in healthcare

AbstractWe set out to explore the practice-level cognitive structures and associated practices characterizing the daily routine work of physicians by conducting a qualitative study in the Turkish healthcare field, in which a recent government-led healthcare reform was implemented causing logic multiplicity. Contrary to the accumulated knowledge in institutional logics literature, a bulk of which suggests that actors craft and enact various practices in managing plural and at times conflicting institutional templates strictly within the confines of higher order societal logics, this study shows that while ground level actors may not exercise complete freedom and maneuverability in relation to pre-established social structures, they do incorporate unconventional schemas of action; namely rogue practices, into their embodied practical activity, which over time become routinized in their day-to-day work lives. Unraveling the dynamics of micro-level practices of highly professionalized ground level actors as they pertain to atypical logical orientations substantially advances our understanding of the unknown or unseen side of how and under which conditions certain or various combinations of institutional logics are employed during day-to-day activities.

Translation in the making: how older people engaged in a randomised controlled trial on lifestyle changes apply medical knowledge in their everyday lives

A recurring discussion in recent health studies relates to knowledge translation (KT), which deals with the questions of how to ensure and measure the uptake of knowledge from one medical situation to another and of how to move the right form of knowledge from one situation to another. Recently, however, this way of understanding KT has received criticism for presenting too basic an understanding of knowledge and not fully grasping the potential of the term translation. Based on qualitative material from a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and a follow-up study, this article takes the current discussion of KT one step further, focussing on how KT happens among healthy citizens participating in a lifestyle intervention. The overall argument is that even current critical understandings of KT often ignore the fact that the translation of medical knowledge does not stop at the clinical encounter but extends into the everyday health practices of the population. A more nuanced understanding of how and in which forms medical knowledge is adopted by people in their everyday health practices will give new insights into the complex mechanisms of KT and the encounter between medical knowledge and practice and everyday life. Hence, this article discuss how knowledge from a clinical trial—focussing on muscular training and increased protein intake—is translated into meaningful health practices. The article concludes the following points: First, constant, and often precarious, work is required to maintain the content of ‘medical knowledge’ in a complex social order. Second, focussing on translation work in everyday life emphasises that KT is an open-ended process, wherein the medical object of knowledge is contested and renegotiated and needs alliances with other objects of knowledge in order to remain relevant. Last, from an everyday life perspective, medical knowledge is just one rationale making up the fabric of people’s health practices; other rationales, such as time, feasibility, logistics and social relations, are just as relevant in determining how and why people pursue healthy living or comply with a medical regimen. CALM trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02034760. Registered on 10 January 2014; ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02115698. Registered on 14 April 2014; Danish regional committee of the Capital Region H-4-2013-070. Registered on 4 July 2013; Danish Data Protection Agency 2012-58-0004–BBH-2015-001 I-Suite 03432. Registered on 9 January 2015.

Agile Approach in Human Resource Management: Focus on Generation Y

The paper aims to provide an overview of human resource management’s characteristic features in agile companies and identify the attributes preferred by Generation Y representatives in everyday work life. Detailed literature review of general agile attributes and specifics of agile HR management has shown that the phenomenon is not sufficiently examined. There is a gap in the literature research related to the agile approach applied to Generation Y. Based on a literature review and primary data analysis, the authors identified the attributes of agile organisations that correspond to Generation Y preferences in the field of working conditions. In this way, the authors have opened a discussion on the possibilities of applying the preferred agile approaches to attract Generation Y representatives, increase their work motivation and satisfaction. The paper’s findings support the information base used by HR professionals and companies to ensure that factors such as flexibility, informality, continuous learning, etc, are known by managers and companies. It realises the importance of agile principles in the working environment created for Generation Y to produce a greater added value. The literary part of the paper provides an introduction to the general agile management approach, specifics of agile HR practices and indicates key factors influencing work and supporting effective cooperation with Generation Y. Key findings of the detailed literature review were applied to empirical findings of the sample of Generation Y representatives in the Czech Republic and used for discussion and recommendations. This article aims to contribute to the debate on agile management approaches with regard to Generation Y and its leadership. The paper contributes to a gap in the literature, as key findings confirm that Generation Y is open to adopting an agile approach and prefers some of the agile factors in corporate and human resource management over traditional systems.

The Vital Life of Kitchens in Higher Education Institutional Workspaces

In higher education institutions (HEI), whose primary functions are oriented to the activities of learning, teaching and research workspace kitchens are disregarded spaces. Yet kitchens do vital but unnoticed work in everyday institutional life. This article develops a post-human, post-disciplinary and post-methodological analytical framing to give kitchens, and the confederation of connections they produce, the attention they deserve. The article draws on a post-qualitative data bricolage of mobile phone snaps, assemblage ethnography, vox pop and memory story to analyze the posthuman matterings within and of HEI kitchens. Theoretically, the article is grounded in a post-disciplinary approach which draws conceptual resources from sociology, human geography, anthropology, material culture and education. It explores the HE workspace kitchen as a productive site for the enactment of a multitude of material, affective and micro-political institutional practices. The article argues that kitchens matter as important liminal spaces for the materialization of institutional rules, values, norms, belonging and community.

Digital implications for human resource management in surgical departments.

BackgroundChanges in demographics and dynamics of our society are affecting the healthcare system, leading to an intensified “war for talents,” especially for surgical departments. Also with regard to the current COVID-19 pandemic, the present work analyzes the potential of digitalization for human resource management of surgical departments in hospitals.MethodsPubMed and Google Scholar were searched to identify articles referring to the specific subject of human resource management and its digital support in hospitals and surgical departments in particular.ResultsThe main topics include the digital affinity of young physicians and surgeons in terms of staff recruiting, digital support for everyday working life in surgical departments, and the potential of digital approaches for surgical training. These topics are put into the context of company strategies, and their future potential is identified accordingly.ConclusionDigital programs, digital structures, and digital tools can today be used by human resources departments to advertise the hospital and to make the recruitment of future candidates increasingly attractive. In addition, by making digital tools available, the employees’ satisfaction can be raised with the potential of a strong employer branding. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital personnel strategies and training formats have to be regarded a contemporary offering.

\u201cMagic through many minor measures\u201d: How introducing a flowline production mode in six steps enables journalist team autonomy in local news organizations

While facing cuts, downsizing and revenue losses, media organizations experience paradoxical demands in being organized for print or linear production with daily deadlines and simultaneously striving to be ‘digital first’ and produce and publish stories online on a continuous basis throughout the day. In this paper, we describe efforts applied when introducing the metaphor flowline in a medium-sized newspaper organization in Norway with the aim of aligning their production and publishing processes to readers’ consumption of online news. Both the production volume of journalistic content, reader consumption and the newsroom workers’ experience of mastering their everyday work life increased dramatically in a very short time. The involvement of a temporary autonomous team in the planning and designing of a test pilot aiming to make flowline “as practice”, was integral to the digital transformation success, allowing for participative action across newsroom boundaries. Based on the empirical findings from the local newspaper organization and drawing on theories on liminality (Turner 1982, 1986) and metaphorical work (Schön 1993), this article presents a set of six interrelated steps incorporating a structure for autonomous teams and their role in enabling lasting change in organizations facing digital transformation.

Organizing workers and machine learning tools for a less oppressive workplace

Machine learning tools are increasingly infiltrating everyday work life with implications for workers. By looking at machine learning tools as part of a sociotechnical system, we explore how machine learning tools enforce oppression of workers. We theorize, normatively, that with reorganizing processes in place, oppressive characteristics could be converted to emancipatory characteristics. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s critical theory of emancipatory pedagogy, we outline similarities between the characteristics Freire saw in oppressive societies and the characteristics of currently designed partnerships between humans and machine learning tools. Freire’s theory offers a way forward in reorganizing humans and machine learning tools in the workplace. Rather than advocating human control or the decoupling of workers and machines, we follow Freire’s theory in proposing four processes for emancipatory organizing of human and machine learning partnership: 1) awakening of a critical consciousness, 2) enabling role freedom, 3) instituting incentives and sanctions for accountability, and 4) identifying alternative emancipatory futures. Theoretical and practical implications of this emancipatory organizing theory are drawn.

The marketisation of life: entangling social reproduction theory and regimes of patriarchy through women’s work in post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Despite the important International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship on the impact of neoliberal marketisation on women in the Global South, the linkages with reproductive and informal work are often neglected, as is its interaction with multi-level varieties of patriarchy. Developing a theoretical framework merging social reproduction theory and varieties of gender regimes, this article examines how women navigate market and non-market pressures during the ongoing processes of Uzbek agrarian marketisation. By applying the concept of domestic and public patriarchy to analyse the gendered practices of food production and reproduction in Uzbekistan, the article unpacks the household-led and state-led forms of dispossession and exploitation of women's work in everyday life and investigates why women's position has not improved as a result of marketisation. The paper contributes to feminist IPE in two ways. By bringing together two strands of gender theories, it explores the link between the institutional and cultural connotation and the economic ‘valuation’ of women's work. Along these lines, it examines the weaknesses of the policy solutions proposed by the neoliberal development governance in the Global South.

Schmerzrehabilitation beim CRPS

Zur Behandlung des komplexen regionalen Schmerzsyndroms (CRPS) gibt es verschiedene therapeutische und medikamentöse Möglichkeiten der Schmerzrehabilitation. Schwerpunkte sind die phasengerechte Physio- und Ergotherapie, unterstützt von physikalischen Maßnahmen. Eine frühe Diagnosestellung ist entscheidend für die Prognose. Bei komplexeren und schwereren Verläufen sollte die Behandlung spezialisierten Ambulanzen und Kliniken vorbehalten bleiben.

Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.

Curriculum and coronavirus: New approaches to curriculum in the age of uncertainty.

The coronavirus crisis has appeared like some vast, cruel sociological experiment. It has confined people to their homes, radically disturbed their taken-for-granted knowledge and beliefs, and forced them to alter behaviors once casually, even unthinkingly, employed in their everyday personal, working, and social lives. What has been learned? How might this experience stimulate a reimagining of the curriculum? More fundamentally, how might it lead to the development of a knowledgeable, intelligent, effective public, able to engage freely and equally in decision-making at all levels of social, cultural, political, and economic life, as a condition for personal freedom? This article explores the implications of “lockdown” or “confinement” to homes, which has suspended freedom of movement, limited the freedom to associate with others, and established rituals of hygiene regarding surfaces. These experiences of physical confinement and limitation of ordinary freedoms raise the central question of how to return to “normal” and, indeed, what will count as normal. In exploring the issues posed by these questions, this article offers an approach to pedagogical and curriculum practice that seeks to embed democratic practice at all levels of organization and interaction between individuals.