Secondary Emotional Labor: How Nurses Respond to the Contradictions of Caring

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 5. Emotional Labor in Healthcare Delivery

Abstract

This article integrates the emotional labor of caring by medical-surgical nurses with Hochschild’s sociological theory of emotional labor. Prior research suggests that caring has become incompatible with a financially-incentivized, technologically-driven healthcare system. Despite these structurally-imposed barriers to caring, an implicit expectation remains that nurses will provide caring as emotional labor. We found that nurses blamed themselves, felt hopeless, became angry, and had mental and physical health problems due to the dissonance generated from these contradictory expectations. This research introduces the concept of secondary emotional labor to describe the (superimposed) emotional labor demands that are secondary to the structural interference with caring emotional labor. We contribute to Hochschild’s emotional labor theory by redirecting the site of remedial action from concepts such as burnout and compassion fatigue in the individual nurse and redirect the focus on the structurally-imposed exploitation and alienation of nurses as the legitimate site of change at the institutional level.

Authors

• Beverly Kay Hogan, UAB

• Patricia Drentea, University of Alabama-Birmingham