A Place for Emotion: How Space Structures Nurse-Parent Interactions in W. African Pediatric Wards

Abstract

A wide range of workers are regularly tasked with managing their own and others' negative emotions. Existing literature provides a number of strategies for doing so, but is based largely on organizational settings that share certain key characteristics. Using observational and interview data from a very different setting, high-mortality pediatric hospital wards in West Africa, I find that despite widely-shared norms to the contrary, nurses are twice as likely to respond to emergencies and patient deaths with public displays of anger and frustration toward the parents of their patients than to comfort or reassure them. Combining literatures on emotion management and on the impact of place and space on social life, I show that two features of these hospital wardsthe absence of private, back stage areas and the presence of visibility without controlshape nurse-parent interactions and influence how nurses express and manage emotions. My findings extends our understanding of emotional labor and workplace emotion management to environments that provide little space for processing emotions behind the scenes, but do provide a place for anger and frustration. Emotions infuse our working lives. From hospitals to restaurants, airplane cabins to police interrogation rooms, a wide range of workers are tasked with managing their own or others' emotions. Though emotional labor can impose a burden on workers (Bono and Vey 2005;

From Face Time to Flex Time: The Role of Physical Space in Worker Temporal Flexibility

“…But what remains undertheorized is how physical space can produce relational consequences in organizations, affecting everyday employee work behaviors (Elsbach and Pratt, 2007;Harvey, 2010). I build on recent relational studies of physical space (Elsbach, 2003;Millward, Haslam, and Postmes, 2007;Kellogg, 2009;Bernstein, 2012;Manning, 2014), illustrating how changes in the configuration of space can disrupt and transform extant social practices in organizations with important consequences for temporal flexibility. This study thus offers additional empirical evidence of a relationship among physical space, social practices, and social cognition.…”

“…First, certain kinds of physical spaces can encourage risk-taking behaviors among employees. Several studies have shown that spaces providing isolation can allow employees to feel comfortable engaging in thick or emotive social interactions (Sundstrom, Burt, and Kamp, 1980; Becker et al, 1983; Carlopio and Gardner, 1992; Manning, 2014), collectively experimenting and learning new techniques (Bernstein, 2012), or covertly mobilizing for organizational change (Kellogg, 2009). Because flexible work policies represent a source of risk for employees’ reputations, it is possible that physical spaces that enable risk-taking might encourage employees to use these policies.…”

Wrong paths to right: defining morality with or without a clear red line

“…For an illustration, we move from the communities of Sierra Leone to the pediatric wards of two government hospitals in West Africa (Manning 2014). Nurses in these hospitals are trained to operate within a specific moral order, with clearly articulated rules and procedures for how to treat patients and interact with their family members.…”