Ways Of Working Research Articles

Professional caring in affective services: the ambivalence of emotional nurture in practice

ABSTRACT Emotional nurturance is a fundamental feature of all forms of professional caring. As well as delivering expert social, health, education, practical or personal services, good caregivers possess an other-centred disposition, are emotionally intelligent and relationally skilled, and morally caring. Despite this, the value, role, and status of emotional nurturance in professional care is ambivalent. Drawing on feminist care theory, Hochchild’s emotional labour theory, and Bourdieusian social reproduction theory, as well as diverse empirical studies, this paper identifies how emotion is marginalised and misrecognised and calls for the reappraisal of emotion in professional care work in ways that appreciate tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas in practice.

Getting everyone to the table: exploring everyday and everynight work to consider \u2018latent social threats\u2019 through interprofessional tabletop simulation

In this methodological intersection article, we describe how we developed a new variation of the established tabletop simulation modality, inspired by institutional ethnography (IE)-informed principles. We aimed to design and conduct pilot implementations of this innovative tabletop simulation modality, which focused uniquely on everyday and everynight work, along with the factors that govern that work. In so doing, we aimed to develop a modality and preliminary findings that researchers and educators can use to simulate healthcare practices across longer episodes of care (i.e., time scales of hours or an entire day) and to detect the ‘latent social threats’ that can emerge during interprofessional clinical care.An interprofessional team designed tabletop simulation scenarios of interprofessional challenges during transfers of care on a labour and delivery (L&D) unit. Within each scenario, participants provided real-time explanations for their work and associated drivers, both independently and as a team. Thus, we combined ‘think-aloud’ and simulation principles to design tabletop simulation scenarios to elicit healthcare professionals’ descriptions of how they collaborate in their work on the L&D unit. We completed a total of five tabletop simulations with eight participants (obstetricians, N = 2; midwives, N = 2; nurses, N = 5).The conversations stimulated by the tabletop simulation scenarios and debriefs allowed us to generate a preliminary understanding of the texts that govern and organize clinicians’ everyday work processes. We generated data about longitudinal, multi-hour work processes in a condensed timeline, with opportunities to pause and probe, and with reduced focus on individual practitioner’s competence.We believe our innovative tabletop simulation approach allowed us to examine clinical work in ways no other simulation permits. Participants described how the scenarios opened a productive dialogue between professional groups and suggested this simulation-based approach might contribute to enhanced interprofessional understanding and cultural change. We suggest that others can adapt our low-resource approach to understand clinicians’ everyday work and to map how this work is governed by documents, like policies, with the end goal of facilitating system change and managing latent social threats.

The experience of isolated practice for Indigenous mental health and addictions workers

Background In Australia, the gap in mental health and addictions outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is well documented. The integration of Indigenous mental health and addictions (IMHA) workers into mainstream mental health services has been adopted to provide more culturally appropriate services, and address health disparities. However, processes for utilizing the role and strategies for supporting this workforce are unclear. This study aimed to understand the experiences of IMHA workers in two Metropolitan Hospital and Health Services (HHSs) to assist in the development of policy and workforce support strategies. Methodology In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with IMHA workers (n = 17) and analyzed thematically. Results The IMHA workforce is extremely valuable, but complex, and confronted by challenging systemic barriers. Experiences of isolation, lack of cultural safety, and limits on practice are common. This situation creates difficulty for the IMHA workers and undermines their effectiveness to work in ways preferred by the IMHA workers. Conclusion Enhancing cultural safety for the IMHA workforce is a crucial precursor to achieving culturally appropriate service provision for Indigenous consumers. The interaction of cultural safety for IMHA workers with consumer outcomes and experiences is an important area for future research.

The New Industrial Commons: Worker‐Owners and Factory Space

AbstractStrikes are no longer the only way for workers to put their case. Writer, curator, consultant and educator Nina Rappaport charts the continuing rise of worker empowerment, whether through ‘expropriation’, workers’ collectives or similar employee‐owned businesses, giving varied examples of where such approaches have occurred around the world. The catalyst for these moves has often been where the prevailing capitalist model has left spaces vacant and derelict, due to its relentless search for efficiency and economies of scale.

Desperate times call for desperate measures: The Effect of the COvid-19 pandemic on evaluations

The COVID-19 pandemic upended how people interact and work in ways that increased social isolation and, in turn, possibly changed how team members evaluate each other’s contributions. We investigate this possibility by extending the reflective-impulsive model. More specifically, the reflective-impulsive model suggests that, because team members’ resources have been depleted by the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals will use their reflective process less thereby creating less accurate impressions of their teammates’ task abilities and reducing the weight they put on their perceptions of task abilities in evaluations. The reflective-impulsive model further suggests that, because restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic have made it difficult for many people to meet their need for relatedness, members will use their impulsive process to positively evaluate those who are higher on relatedness. Data from virtual and in-person teams from before and during the pandemic support our model. Supplemental analysis also suggests that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, members can increase their relatedness thereby improving their evaluations by being influential. Our findings provide insights into how individuals make evaluations during a crisis and suggest practical implications for how members can be more positively evaluated and more accurately evaluate others during the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Challenging stories about child domestic work: evidence from South-West Nigeria

This paper answers some salient questions about poverty and child domestic work (CDW) and discusses other reasons for working in domestic service beyond absolute deprivation. Drawing from findings from an ethnographic study, I argue that working in domestic service remains a viable option for many households in a society without a functioning social welfare system. While the focus on harm has dominated discussions on and campaigns against CDW, it has not significantly reduced its prevalence. From the standpoint of child domestic workers and/or their families, the consideration of certain benefits underlies their involvement in this type of work. I argue for the need to retell stories about child domestic work in ways that recognise the complexities involved in the arrangements without denying its exploitative tendencies.

Beyond Knowledge Capitalism’s Happy Labour Subject

This article unravels the workings of happiness as integral to knowledge capitalism’s ‘emotionality of rule’ from the perspectives of two cohorts of ‘knowledge workers’: digital creatives and academics. It analyses the ways in which the study participants make work a site of personal fulfilment and happiness as they strive to become ‘happy’ labour subjects. Despite their different worklife trajectories, both cohorts appeal to the promise of happy entrepreneurial productivism. This promise attaches workers to the privileges of knowledge work in ways that downplay its costs. However, the dominance of knowledge capitalism’s happy labour subject is challenged by the backgrounded significance of work’s social benefits in their accounts. As such, this article argues that the individualised depoliticisation of contemporary ‘knowledge work’ can be challenged by re-valorising work’s social contributions.

Intentions versus Outcomes: Cooperation and Fairness in a Sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma with Nature

This paper investigates the importance of concerns about intentions and outcomes in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma game with nature. In the game, there is a chance that the first mover’s choice is reversed. This allows the separation of intended actions from the resulting outcomes. Equilibrium predictions from theoretical models of fairness are tested experimentally by varying the chance the first mover’s choice is reversed and whether the second mover observes the first mover’s choice. The results show that second mover cooperation is higher when the first mover has little control over their choice and when the second mover is not told what the first mover chose. While subject behavior is consistent with concerns for both intentions and outcomes, the results indicate that these concerns work in ways not predicted by current theoretical models. In addition, I find that psychometric measures of empathic concern and perspective taking are correlated with second mover cooperation and provide potential explanations for the experimental results.

Tracking towards care: Relational affordances of self-tracking in gym culture.

In the past few years, self-tracking technologies have been celebrated for the possibilities they offer to 'optimize' fitness and wellbeing, yet also criticized for being rigid and isolating. In this article, we identify complex tracking arrangements that consist of a variety of data and multiple modalities of tracking emplaced within arrangements of actors and objects (digital/analog tracking devices and data output). We inquire into how these arrangements afford care. Based on our ethnographic research of gym culture in Denmark, we find that individuals make the technologies 'work' for them in ways that shield them from bodily or emotional distress. Fitness practitioners combine digital tracking technologies with analog methods and enrol other human actors in recording, interpreting, questioning and tinkering with their data; in other words, they perform data work in ways that mend or prevent ruptures and brokenness and thus afford 'care'. We highlight the role of the personal trainer, who often complements or salvages the outputs of digital technologies. We argue that tracking has the capacity to afford care and wellness when it is emplaced within socialities and when actors are able to exercise their capacities and knowledge in ways that mitigate the data outputs.

Building Statistics and Data Science Capacity for Development

Data-driven decision making for sustainable development requires domain expertise to ask the right questions; high-quality, relevant data; appropriate, nuanced statistical analyses; and the power to make and implement a decision. Statistics enables and accelerates all of these aspects. We propose a new model for building statistics and data science capacity to engage in data-driven development. Statisticians and data scientists must be able to understand the data and projects they are working with on both a deep and broad level and be able to communicate the results of statistical methods and analytical work in ways that provide actionable evidence to those who can use it to positively impact society. Our model for building statistics and data science capacity is to create statistics and data science collaboration laboratories (“stat labs”) that work in the intersections of data-driven development by collaborating with data producers and data decision makers to transform evidence into action. We present lessons learned from the LISA 2020 Network, which has leveraged the collective experiences of more than 30 newly created stat labs in developing countries to build such statistics and data science capacity by focusing on the intersections of data-driven development.

Examining the Responding Component of Teacher Noticing: A Case of One Teacher’s Pedagogical Responses to Students’ Thinking in Classroom Artifacts

In this study, we investigated how an experienced fourth-grade teacher responded to her students’ thinking as part of her teacher noticing practice in a formative assessment context. Our primary purpose in doing this work was to decompose the responding component of teacher noticing and use our findings to present an emerging framework characterizing the multidimensional nature of this practice. We present two key outcomes based on the findings of this work. First, we show how a formative assessment context situated outside of instruction can engage teachers in practice-based noticing. Second, we present an emerging framework of the responding component of teacher noticing and discuss how it can be used by teacher educators to engage teachers in analytic work in ways that reveal the relationships between what teachers see in students’ thinking and how, when, and toward whom they respond.

Following Dutch healthcare professionals’ experiences during COVID-19: Tensions in everyday practices and policies amid shifting uncertainties

While the limits of rational-calculative approaches for healthcare decision-making, alongside institutional forms of ritual, routines and hope employed to deal with these limits, were already described in the 1950s, healthcare professionals’ syncretism of rational and non-rational approaches in their everyday work remains a neglected topic in Northern Europe. Using COVID-19 as an urgent problem for healthcare policy and practice, and a natural ‘breaching experiment’ which disrupts everyday work in ways which help professionals to critically reflect, this article explores how a small, purposive sample of young healthcare professionals in the Netherlands dealt with the uncertainties and risks posed by continued healthcare work amid the pandemic. Analysing qualitative data, collected via longitudinal online interviews among healthcare professionals, the analysis pays particular attention to: concerns, anxieties and risks faced by professionals; understandings and ways of working with(out) protocols; different logics for handling uncertainty in different situations; how different logics (rational, non-rational and ‘in between’ rationalities) are combined in different aspects of their work. A key feature of the analysis is the tensions which emerged within these combined strategies and how these relate to broader tensions in terms of the limits of rationality, economic scarcity, work-life experiences, and evidence versus emotions.

A new era: improving use of sociodemographic constructs in the analysis of pediatric cohort study data.

Given the diversity of sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic position (SEP) in children across the US, it is incumbent upon pediatric and epidemiologic researchers to conduct their work in ways that promote inclusivity, understanding and reduction in inequities. Current child health research often utilizes an approach of “convenience” in how data related to these constructs are collected, categorized and included in models; the field needs to be more systematic and thoughtful in its approach to understand how sociodemographics affect child health. We offer suggestions for improving the discourse around sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity and SEP in child health research. We explain how analytic models should be driven by a conceptual framework grounding the choices of variables that are included in analyses, without the automatic “adjusting for” all sociodemographic constructs. We propose to leverage newly available data from large multi-cohort consortia as unique opportunities to improve the current standards for analyzing and reporting core sociodemographic constructs. Improving the characterization and interpretation of child health studies with regards to core sociodemographic constructs is critical for optimizing child health and reducing inequities in the health and well-being of all children across the US.

Who's ‘Taking’ From Whom? The Supreme Court's Real Target - Farmworkers' Organising Rights

10 | International Union Rights | 28/2 FOCUS | A CHANGING POST-PANDEMIC WORLD FOR LABOUR Who’s ‘Taking’ From Whom? The Supreme Court’s Real Target - Farmworkers’ Organising Rights Most of the media coverage of the recent Supreme Court decision about the farmworker access rule took for granted the way growers, and the court, defined this regulation. Jess Bravin in the Wall Street Journal called it ‘a regulation giving union organisers the right to visit farmworkers’. The first line of the rightwing majority’s opinion1 called it ‘A California regulation [which] grants labour organisations a ‘right to take access’ to an agricultural employer’s property’. The court, and the growers, deliberately confuse the mechanism of the rule with rights, calling it a right of organisers or organisations. It is not. The right the rule implements is simple. When workers are protesting and organising a union in the fields, they have a right to talk to union representatives at work. It’s a right of workers, rather than a right of union representatives. Rolling back this right, and the ability of farmworkers to organise against their endemic poverty, is the main target of the Supreme Court’s attack. At Cedar Point Nursery, the grower that filed the case heard by the court, the stakes were clear. Cedar Point is a nursery growing rootstock for commercial strawberry growers in Dorris, a remote town in northern California near the Oregon border. Hundreds of workers migrate here from their homes in central and southern California every year to harvest, trim and pack the plants. In 2015 Cedar Point labourers walked out to protest conditions that included, according to worker Jessica Rodriguez2, low wages, dirty bathrooms, and harassment from supervisors. They called the United Farm Workers, which sent organisers and implemented the access rule to talk with them on the property. The strike lasted for just a day, and after the strikers returned to their jobs, the organising effort fizzled out. No election was ever held to begin the process of trying to get a contract. What happened at Cedar Point is not unusual. The following spring in McFarland, in the densely farmed San Joaquin Valley, hundreds of workers struck the blueberry fields of Gourmet Trading over similar issues. Support for the organising was overwhelming. They called the UFW after they’d struck. Once they returned to work the union filed for access, and workers held meetings after work at the ranch. They voted for the union a few days later, and today they work under a union contract. In 1996, during a huge campaign to organise the strawberry industry in Watsonville3, UFW organisers visited picking crews in dozens of fields. They taped butcher paper on the walls of the portapotties during lunchtime meetings. Strawberry workers wrote down their demands for raising some of the lowest wages in agriculture, and planned marches to the company offices to announce them. In all these cases the access rule provided a way for workers to understand the organising process and get help with it. Farmworkers need this because of the nature of the work. They are often migrants, working in a harvest in one area of California although they live in another. Cedar Point’s workers lived hundreds of miles from Dorris, and during the work season slept in motel rooms and temporary housing. At Gourmet Trading some pickers travelled an hour or more to get to the field every day. Those distances make it hard—and sometimes impossible— for people to meet with union organisers at home. According to the Handbook4 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which administers California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, ‘The access regulations ... are meant to insure that farm workers, who often may be contacted only at their work place, have an opportunity to be informed with minimal interruption of working activities’. Organising a union is a collective process. Workers need to talk with each other about it. When the Pacific Legal Foundation argued the Cedar Point case in 20175 before the Ninth District of the U.S. Court of Appeals, and lost, its attorney Wen Fa asserted, ‘All the workers live in houses or hotels. Many have cellphones’. Even if this were...

Addressing Institutional Racism Against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia in Mainstream Health Services: Insights From Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services


 
 
 With long colonial histories, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia experience lower life expectancy and a higher burden of illness. To this day, Indigenous Peoples experience interpersonal, systemic, and institutional racism in the mainstream public health system of Australia, leading to the under- use of mainstream health services and resulting in many Indigenous Australians living in a state of persistent crisis. Extreme and unacceptable levels of institutional racism have been identified in the hospitals and health services of Queensland, Australia, using the Marrie Institutional Racism Matrix (MIRM), an evidence-based assessment tool for identifying, measuring, and monitoring racism in institutional settings. This paper aims to identify ways to address institutional racism against Indigenous Peoples in the health care sector. Specifically, using publicly available documents, a case study analysis of the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health (IUIH), a network of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services, is conducted using the MIRM as a guide. The conclusion is that the IUIH actively works to address institutional racism by (a) including Indigenous people in key decision-making processes and structures; (b) undertaking numerous community engagement strategies; (c) building partnerships within and outside the health sector to address the social determinants of health; and (d) working in ways that align with Indigenous ways of being and doing. It is argued that mainstream health services need to be aware of institutional racism and learn from the approaches of Indigenous-led organizations to create institutions that are inclusive of Indigenous members of society.
 
 

Why Employment During and After COVID-19 Is a Critical Women's Health Issue.

Why Employment During and After COVID-19 Is a Critical Women's Health Issue.

Professional development for inclusive and adaptive education: Lesson Study in a Norwegian context

ABSTRACT This article presents findings from a study examining teacher talk in the early and late phases of a 4-year project in a Norwegian elementary school where Lesson Study was used as a method for professional development. The study focuses on inclusive and adapted education and aims to explore the changing beliefs about student needs and the adaptations teachers made to meet these needs. To this end, the study applies content analysis to audio recordings of teachers planning meetings. Findings show development in how teachers understand themselves and their work in ways that can contribute to education that is more inclusive and adapted: 1) an increased awareness of student needs paired with a growing trust in students’ ability to participate in the lessons; 2) more trust in teachers’ own ability to influence student learning and development and; 3) a growing view of teaching and learning as a social enterprise where the active participation of all students is identified and used as a lesson resource.

Collaborating with health economists to advance implementation science: a qualitative study

BackgroundImplementation research infrequently addresses economic factors, despite the importance of understanding the costs of implementing evidence-based practices (EBPs). Though partnerships with health economists have the potential to increase attention to economic factors within implementation science, barriers to forming these collaborations have been noted. This study investigated the experiences of health economists and implementation researchers who have partnered across disciplines to inform strategies to increase such collaborations.MethodsA purposeful sampling approach was used to identify eight health economists and eight implementation researchers with experience participating in cross-disciplinary research. We used semi-structured interviews to gather information about participants’ experiences with collaborative research. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify core themes related to facilitators and barriers to collaborations.ResultsHealth economists and implementation researchers voiced different perspectives on collaborative research, highlighting the importance of increasing cross-disciplinary understanding. Implementation researchers described a need to measure costs in implementation studies, whereas many health economists described that they seek to collaborate on projects that extend beyond conducting cost analyses. Researchers in both disciplines articulated motivations for collaborative research and identified strategies that promote successful collaboration, with varying degrees of convergence across these themes. Shared motivations included improving methodological rigor of research and making a real-world impact. Strategies to improve collaboration included starting partnerships early in the study design period, having a shared interest, and including health economists in the larger scope of the research.ConclusionsHealth economists and implementation researchers both conduct research with significant policy implications and have the potential to inform one another’s work in ways that might more rapidly advance the uptake of EBPs. Collaborative research between health economists and implementation science has the potential to advance the field; however, researchers will need to work to bridge disciplinary differences. By beginning to develop strong working relationships; increasing their understanding of one another’s disciplinary culture, methodology, and language; and increasing the role economists have within research design and execution, both implementation researchers and health economists can support successful collaborations and robust and informative research.

IMUTube

The lack of large-scale, labeled data sets impedes progress in developing robust and generalized predictive models for on-body sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR). Labeled data in human activity recognition is scarce and hard to come by, as sensor data collection is expensive, and the annotation is time-consuming and error-prone. To address this problem, we introduce IMUTube, an automated processing pipeline that integrates existing computer vision and signal processing techniques to convert videos of human activity into virtual streams of IMU data. These virtual IMU streams represent accelerometry at a wide variety of locations on the human body. We show how the virtually-generated IMU data improves the performance of a variety of models on known HAR datasets. Our initial results are very promising, but the greater promise of this work lies in a collective approach by the computer vision, signal processing, and activity recognition communities to extend this work in ways that we outline. This should lead to on-body, sensor-based HAR becoming yet another success story in large-dataset breakthroughs in recognition.

The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and commodification in the Internet’s cute economy

A popular sentiment is that the Internet is for cute animal photos, but little has explored the visual cultures of pets and social media. The relationship between pets and social media is particularly prominent on Instagram, where pet owners often run Instagram accounts on behalf of their pets. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I discuss three dimensions of pet photos and social media: how individuals use pet Instagram accounts to curate a “fur baby” self-representation, the unspoken politics to sharing pet photographs online, and how individuals hope they provide followers joy. While joy and pet Instagram accounts are not solutions to the Internet’s problems, they do indicate how individuals work in ways to make platforms habitable. However, this joy is far from uncomplicated, as cultural dynamics of the Internet’s cute economy may problematize relationships between people, their pets, and their followers.