Relational Work Research Articles

The Interpretive and Relational Work of Financial Innovation: a Resemblance of Assurance in Islamic Finance

The Interpretive and Relational Work of Financial Innovation: a Resemblance of Assurance in Islamic Finance

Caring masculinities at work in later life: Exploring relational care work in retirement

AbstractThe paper reports on research that investigates older men's care practices and how their caring for others opens new ways of exploring the intersections of aging, gender, and care work. Using the concept caring masculinities as a sensitizing concept, the onus is on exploring patterns of power, interdependence, and relationality within men's care practices. Aging masculinities often remain constructed around paid‐for occupational work (in opposition to unpaid care work) despite the transition into retirement. Little work exists on how caring is at work in later life potentially transforming gender relations and enacted masculinities. Moreover, much of the research on aging masculinities have not considered the expansiveness of retirement and the discourses as well as subjective expectations around the activity in later life that create an uncertain terrain of socioculturally structured mandates to be navigated. This paper draws on data from two qualitative interview studies conducted with retired men in England and Germany, in which the role of caregiving emerged as an inductive theme in their narratives. The paper makes a specific contribution to developing empirical and theoretical knowledge of caring masculinities and power relations by providing insights on men's trajectories into caring, and how they make sense of their caring for and about others.

Tears from stone: relational being and doing in instructional coaching work

ABSTRACT Instructional coaching in schools has historically operated as both a professional role and as a strategy used to support teachers. While the work of instructional coaching was already shifting in response to educational trends and political pressures, the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic brought additional challenges and opportunities. The purpose of this self-study of teacher education practice (S-STEP) was to learn about the relational work of two instructional coaches and a university supervisor of those coaches’ graduate work. The findings of this study emerged from our collaborative learning where we used the Greek myth of Niobe to think about the relational work of serving individual teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We end this paper with implications for preparing instructional coaches to support teachers and suggestions for future research.

Negotiating Unequal Exchange: Relational Work in Cross‐Class Sibling Relationships1

Based on 60 in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews, this article examines exchanges of support in cross‐class adult sibling relationships. Whereas previous studies of family exchange have largely focused on parent–child support and patterns of inequality across families, this study addresses a gap in the literature by focusing on sibling exchanges and within‐family inequality. How is support exchanged when expectations of peer equality are violated—when there is an economic difference between adult siblings? I find that cross‐class siblings engage in relational work to shape and reframe exchanges in ways that are more indirect, often involving third parties. I identify four types of indirect economic support—proxy support, dependent support, compensatory support, and shared resources—which contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of sibling exchange, and point to ways in which inequality can be interactionally managed.

Crowdfunding a life: how relationships shape requests for financial assistance

Abstract How do relationships shape requests for financial assistance? I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1666 US-based GoFundMe campaigns for patients with colorectal cancer. I identify three types of campaign organizers—self-funders, financially bonded campaigners and financially independent campaigners—who draw on different narratives of deservingness depending on their relationship to medical costs. I find that organizers use stories to create good matches, which vary depending on the organizer’s financial relationship with the patient. Financially independent campaigners, who do not experience the burden of medical bills, tell stories that counter dominant cultural beliefs about dependency. Self-funders and financially bonded campaigners both told stories that managed the stigma of dependency, where the former connects self-sufficiency to employment and the latter argues that medical prices make it impossible to prepare. These findings provide novel insights into theories of relational work and how financial relationships shape narratives of debt, dependency and deservingness.

The proceduralization of relational work: the case of French public psychiatry

L’objectif de cet article est de faire, sur la base d’enquêtes empiriques, un état des lieux de la procéduralisation du travail de soin dans les services psychiatriques pour adultes en France. Les processus de rationalisation procédurale de l’activité se développent en psychiatrie comme dans l’ensemble du travail de relation, depuis les années 1980, mais de manière spécifique, tardivement et en suscitant des polémiques. À partir d’enquêtes qualitatives dans plusieurs pôles de psychiatrie publique, et à l’aide d’une grille de niveaux de procéduralisation, les pratiques les plus touchées par la rationalisation procédurale sont décrites, les facteurs d’acceptation ou de résistance sont identifiés. Des hypothèses peuvent en être inférées pour l’ensemble des métiers relationnels.

Social reproduction, labour and austerity: Carrying the future

For many young adults in the UK, austerity has restricted capacities to access secure housing, employment and social welfare, with sharp implications for reproduction and reproductive futures. Exploring these lived reproductive experiences, this article develops a conceptual framework that brings together social reproduction, emotional labour and relational work in new ways, specifically through the concept of ‘carrying’. Carrying, I argue, beholds a range of embodied, emotional and laborious qualities that are required for contemporary social reproduction. To demonstrate, I draw on research based in the North East of England, as an area that has seen detrimental cuts in the name of austerity and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the UK. Empirical examples come from 12 in-depth Oral History and Future interviews, a technique specifically developed to explore present-day narratives about (not) having any or more children. It is argued that the emotional, embodied and relational labour of carrying is key to understanding the experience of reproduction in this context, particularly regarding (1) carrying possibilities, (2) carrying bodies and (3) carrying instabilities. These forms of labour often go unnoticed and unchecked and yet can shed new light on reproduction. To close, I argue that because the labour of reproduction is carried forward into the life-course, reproductive futures are yet another way in which social inequalities can widen further under austerity.

‘It’s really good medicine, Séliš (Salish)’: partnering to prioritise language and allyship in Indigenous education policy implementation

ABSTRACT In the United States, state-level Indigenous education policies represent common political tools that generally aim to move extant schooling systems toward increased inclusiveness. Montana’s state law (Indian Education for All (IEFA)) is relatively robust, yet actual implementation is ad hoc and uneven. In this study, we examine a collaborative effort focused on language, namely Séliš (Salish), which has always been systematically excluded from this district. A Séliš language instructor guided a class of non-Indigenous second-grade students through lessons over Zoom while the classroom teacher mediated and co-facilitated the learning activities. A university-based education professor supported the partnership relationally and conceptually. This qualitative study was guided by Indigenous education frameworks and draws upon interviews, emails, and objects/photos as data sources. We investigated educators’ perspectives on the partnership-building process as well as impact. Our findings highlight how the educators came together around intersecting goals, developed curricular experiences, and engaged in complex relational work. Educators reflected on students’ growth in: Séliš proficiency, interest in Indigenous culture, and commitment to learning Séliš as a civic action. Notably, they also experienced joy–relishing in the language alongside peers and educators. This study highlights key school-community-university collaborative practices and curricula that can foster deeper policy implementation.

Composite relations: Democratic firms balancing the general and the particular

This paper focuses on a central coordinative tension in alternative, democratic organizations: They need to maintain formal equality and democratic governance, but they also have to support their members in their autonomy and be sensitive toward their particularities. Based on an empirical study of two democratic-collectivist firms, this paper combines insights from Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagement, and Zelizer’s notion of relational work to analyze how firms can establish “composite relations” that enable to balance the general and the particular. The paper offers two main contributions to the literature on alternative organizations: First, it describes possibilities for compositions between particular, personal relations, which are often of high importance in alternative organizations, and general, standardized relations, which are centrally important for all modern organizations. Second, while influential work on alternative organization assumes, that the tension between social values and business is quasi-equal to a tension between informal and formalized coordination in organizations, this paper develops a more nuanced perspective on the interrelation between morality and coordination in alternative organizations.

Using Body Maps to Understand Elementary Teacher Candidates’ Embodied Understanding of Care Related to Intersectional Marginalization during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Teacher educators need to thoroughly understand of teacher candidates’ (TCs) experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to support TCs’ development and practice of care in the post-pandemic era. Here, I examine how TCs identified body discourses, and examine how those TCs understood and enacted critically oriented caring practices during the pandemic in online asynchronous courses in the Southeastern U.S. I used body mapping as a pedagogical tool for TCs to identify, critically reflect on, and respond to body discourses that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in their process of understanding and enacting caring practices. I find that TCs conceptualized their care toward students, families, and colleagues in three overlapping yet distinct ways: (a) care as a motherly presence; (b) care as relational work; and (c) care as the promotion of critical consciousness. This study contributes to current teacher education scholarship by showing that a deeper understanding of TC’s embodied experiences is critical for supporting TCs’ understanding and practice of care. In addition, this work highlights how body mapping activities can be used in practice, in order to scaffold teachers’ critically oriented care work.

Relational Work in the Family: The Gendered Microfoundation of Parents’ Economic Decisions

How do parents decide what goods, experiences, and activities they can afford for their children during times of economic insecurity? This article draws on 72 in-depth interviews with U.S. professional middle-class families in which one parent is unemployed. Extending the concept of relational work, this study illuminates how the microfoundation of economic decisions is gendered. Families where fathers are unemployed take the approach of relational preservation: they seek to maintain a high threshold of expenditures on children and view curtailing child-related spending as a threat to their class status. These families see reducing expenditures on children as a parental, and especially paternal, failure. Families where mothers are unemployed take an approach of relational downscaling, lowering the threshold for essential expenditures on children. These families are reluctant to spend less on children’s education, but they do not view decreasing spending on other items, such as consumer goods, as threatening their class status. Gendering relational work reveals how inequalities within families are reproduced through meaning-making around expenditures on children, and it clarifies a key source of variation in parental economic decision-making.

Strategies for supporting the implementation of a task-shared psychological intervention in South Africa’s chronic disease services: qualitative insights from health managers’ experiences of project MIND

ABSTRACT Background Although evidence indicates that task-shared psychological interventions can reduce mental health treatment gaps in resource-constrained settings, systemic barriers have limited their widespread implementation. Evidence on how to sustain and scale such approaches is scant. This study responds to this gap by examining the experiences of South African health managers involved in the implementation of a task-shared counselling service for Project MIND. Objectives To qualitatively describe managers’ experiences of implementing the MIND programme and their insights into potential strategies for supporting sustained implementation. Methods Two focus group discussions (FGDs) and eight in-depth interviews (IDIs) were conducted with managers of urban and rural primary care facilities in the Western Cape province. All managers were female and 30–50 years old. FGDs and IDIs used an identical semi-structured topic guide to explore the experiences of the MIND programme and perceived barriers to sustained implementation. Normalisation process theory (NPT) guided the thematic analysis. Results Four themes emerged that mapped onto the NPT constructs. First, managers noted that their relational work with staff to promote support for the intervention and reduce resistance was key to facilitating implementation. Second, managers emphasised the need for staff reorientation and upskilling to foster openness to mental health practice and for adequate time for quality counselling. Third, managers underscored the importance of strengthening linkages between the health and social service sectors to facilitate delivery of comprehensive mental health services. Finally, managers recommended ongoing monitoring of the service and communication about its impacts as strategies for supporting integration into routine practice. Conclusions Findings contribute to the emerging literature on strategies to support implementation of task-shared interventions in low- and middle-income countries. The findings highlight the leadership role of managers in identifying and actioning these strategies. Investing in managers’ capacity to support implementation of psychological interventions is critical for scale-up of these mental health innovations.

Assembling humanitarianism in the Cold War: The role of the Red Cross in the Bay of Pigs prisoner exchange

This paper examines humanitarian relations between Cuba and the US at the height of Cold War conflict. After the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to overthrow the Cuban government had resulted in a memorable defeat for the United States of America, an unusual humanitarian operation in 1962-63 secured the release of the prisoners of war in exchange for food and medical supplies. Framing the Prisoner Exchange Project (PEP) as an assemblage helps to understand how humanitarian interventions can succeed in situations where diplomatic relations are severed, and without involving international organisations as mediators. I analyse how the project brought diverse non-state actors together under the banner of humanitarianism, as well as non-human elements including supplies, ships, aircrafts, documents, and affective elements such as desire and hospitality. The national Red Cross Societies of America and Cuba managed to successfully carry out the exchange through constant relational work and mechanisms to render the project technical. This case study offers important lessons about the entanglement of humanitarian and development work, and how the involvement of Red Cross Societies unsettled hierarchies between donors and recipients and traditional geographies of humanitarianism.

Politic offering behaviour among Saudi females: Is there any place for quantitative analysis in discursive politeness?

Although discursive scholars emphasize that norms of appropriate behaviour play a vital role in politeness evaluations, the relational work framework has yet to provide analytic tools that capture these norms or identify patterns of politic use in corpora. This study explored offering interactions in Saudi female friendship groups and proposed a new means to investigate politeness, in particular, politic behaviour in such encounters. A quantitative analysis of some concepts of discourse, principally the exchange unit, helped detecting politic patterns in spontaneous/naturally occurring offers between ten participants. After careful analysis of three naturally occurring encounters, 143 offer exchanges were identified in the corpus. Results showed that many offers were non-verbal and reoffering may not constitute a dominant practice in Saudi friends’ interactions, which indicated that politeness norms in these friends’ interactions may have deviated from the stereotypes of the Saudi culture. Quantitative analysis may allow researchers to examine the dominant norms and the politic patterns in offers because for a behaviour to be politic, it needs to occur frequently in order for it to be perceived as expected in a given social situation. However, quantitative analysis cannot be used alone because exploring the evaluative reactions is fundamental in discursive approaches.

Practitioners' Views on Enabling People With Dementia to Remain in Their Homes During and After Crisis.

One way of supporting people living with dementia is assisting them to live in their homes (as opposed to being admitted to hospital or other facility) and providing them with a specialist service that responds to crises. This makes it important to understand how best to organize such crisis response services. This study examines practitioners' actions to reduce inpatient admissions among this population. Through interviews with healthcare practitioners, we find that practitioners negotiate a complex intersection between (1) what constitutes a crisis in relation to the patient and/or the carer, (2) the demands of building a working relationship with both the patient and their family carers, and (3) ensuring effective communications with social services responsible for long-term community support. Findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing admissions should be based on a model of care that more closely maps practitioners' relational and bio-medical work in these services.

Relational Risk: How Relationships Shape Personal Assessments of Risk and Mitigation

Objects of risk mitigation are typically viewed as neutral items that limit exposure to an established hazard. However, people may refuse to adopt such tools, even when they feel vulnerable. This article explores how people assess their personal risk and mitigation options by examining PrEP use for HIV prevention. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 Black and Latino gay, bisexual, and queer men, I argue PrEP uptake is a socially contextualized decision influenced by relational concerns. I develop the concept of relational inoculation, wherein individuals enact a sense of protection against harm through relational work. As individuals consider PrEP, they also contemplate how it may bolster or undermine intimacy they value for reducing interpersonal HIV exposure, as well as dispelling stigmatized notions of riskiness held by their intersecting ethno-racial and sexual minority communities. I develop testable propositions about how respondents’ HIV risk assessments and PrEP use are enmeshed in a societal context of surveillance, in ongoing relations with intimate partners and socially significant others, and in navigation of community belonging within this milieu of risk. This article contributes to sociological research at the nexus of race, sexuality, and health, and offers health policy insight.

A Resistance Framework for Racially Minoritized Youth Behaviors During the Transition to Adulthood.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a challenging time marked by rapid changes in relational connections, housing status, and academic or work trajectories. We emphasize how structural inequality shapes racially minoritized youth behaviors and center the potential for resistance, arguing that a resistance lens allows us to deepen our understanding of the transition to adulthood for racially minoritized youth. Throughout the paper, we include research on how racially minoritized youth experience marginalizing institutional structures concurrently across multiple systems and their resulting behaviors. We end with the clinical and research implications of a resistance framework to illuminate resistance‐informed responses such as rethinking risk and creating spaces for youth‐led self‐making, youth–adult partnerships to scaffold transitions, and cultivating youth activism.

Women leaders' work-caused trauma: vulnerability, reflexivity and emotional challenges for the researcher

PurposeThis paper advances what is known about emotional experiences and challenges when researching work-caused trauma in organisations and illustrates learning for researchers of work-related trauma. Viewing vulnerability as strength could be conceived as an oxymoron. The paper explains how vulnerability can lead to strength for researchers/participants and focuses on researcher reflexivity in relation to one interview with a woman leader in a small-scale qualitative study.Design/methodology/approachThe research protocols of the qualitative study are outlined: pre-interview briefings, participant journaling and semi-structured interviews. Researcher reflexivity, following Hibbert's (2021) four levels of reflexive practice (embodied, emotional, rational and relational), is applied to an interview with a woman leader.FindingsThe paper illustrates how research design and recognising vulnerability as strength facilitates considerable relational work and emotional experiences. Researcher reflexivity conveys impact of work-caused trauma on participants and researchers. The paper advances understandings of vulnerability as strength in practice, emotional experiences and challenges of work-caused trauma research.Research limitations/implicationsIn this paper, a single case of researcher reflexivity is considered.Practical implicationsThere are practical implications for researcher relationships with participants; demonstrating emotional awareness; responding to traumatic stories, participant distress and impact on the researcher; issues of vicarious/secondary traumatic stress; having safe psychological systems; scaffolding a process which recognises vulnerability as strength and becoming personally and methodologically vulnerable; risk of embodied and emotional impact; commitment to reflexivity and levels of reflexive practice.Originality/valueThere is lack of researcher reflexive accounts of practice when studying trauma. Few scholars suggest ways to support researchers in challenging and difficult research. There is silence in research exploring leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma. This paper provides a reflexive account in practice from a unique study of women leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma.

A Relational Work Perspective on the Gig Economy: Doing Creative Work on Digital Labour Platforms

Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven labour market forces, is also infused in relational infrastructures whose upkeep, solidity and durability depends on the emotional efforts undertaken by workers to match economic transactions and their media of exchange to meaningful client relations. By applying a relational work perspective from economic sociology to the study of platform-mediated gig work, the article elucidates the micro-foundations of creative work in the digital gig economy, including how labour inequalities are produced and reproduced within and around micro-level interpersonal interactions.

Kelly Needs a New Coat: Views on Compensating Altruistic Surrogacy in Aotearoa New Zealand

There is little research documenting the experience of surrogate mothers in Aotearoa New Zealand, and no published studies to date have asked surrogates about the significance of financial benefit or compensation for their moral decision-making. In this article, we draw on qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 20 traditional and gestational surrogates, 20 intended parents, and 46 experts in the field of assisted reproduction about their views and experiences of surrogacy both within the national boundaries of the New Zealand fertility clinic setting and offshore. While altruistic procurement of reproductive materials and services is legally mandated in New Zealand, compensation and payment is prohibited. To support our analysis, we draw on the concept of bio-intimacy to discuss the production and management of relational work involved in altruistic surrogacy arrangements. We conclude that the economic circumstances for surrogates, where compensation for direct and indirect costs is absent or insufficient, need to be reconsidered.