Boundary Work among Groups, Occupations, and Organizations: From Cartography to Process

Abstract

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Caring or Not Caring for Coworkers? An Empirical Exploration of the Dilemma of Care Allocation in the Workplace

“…Based on the two organizations we studied, we examined how specific allocations of care were maintained. We found that employees coped with the dilemma of care allocation through recurrent boundary work (Langley et al, 2019), which led to them explicitly or implicitly allocating or denying care to coworkers. This boundary work constituted a purposeful individual and collective effort to demarcate, enact, and re-enact what was worthy of attention while at work.…”

“…However, the problem of care allocation with limited resources (Liedtka, 1996;Tronto, 1993) remains largely ignored, preventing us from fully understanding how an ethics of care materializes in practice. This research suggests that such neglect may reflect suppression of the care dilemma in the workplace, cultivated through the boundary work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002;Langley et al, 2019) involved in demarcating personal and professional selves.…”

“…We thus focused our analysis on how COMMS employees worked to create and maintain this invisible symbolic boundary between professional and personal selves, which in turn delimited the acceptable allocation of care for coworkers as opposed to for work. To do so, we consulted the boundary work literature (e.g., Hobson-West, 2012; Kantola & Kuusela, 2019;Lamont & Molnár, 2002;Langley et al, 2019;Peifer, 2015) and found great resonance with our data. Boundary work is defined as the "purposeful individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material or temporal boundaries, demarcations and distinctions affecting groups, occupations and organizations" (Langley et al, 2019: 3-4).…”

“…We conducted an in-depth qualitative study of two contrasting cases in order to understand how employees may maintain allocations of care specific to their organization. We identified the role of "boundary work"-the effort to construct, dismantle, or maintain symbolic and social distinctions and demarcations (e.g., Lamont & Molnár, 2002;Langley, Lindberg, Mørk, Nicolini, Raviola, & Walter, 2019)-through which employees negotiated the boundary of their caring responsibilities towards work vis-à-vis their coworkers in everyday organizational practices. In Fanny's workplace, a communications agency (COMMS), the care allocation dilemma was actively suppressed.…”

“…While showing how the dilemma of caring for coworkers and maintaining commitment to the work underlies relations at work, we also observe that it may be repressed or upheld. We explain the role of boundary work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002;Langley et al, 2019) in this process by demonstrating how either demarcating or uniting personal and professional selves conditions the possibility of caring for each other in the workplace. We argue that this practice has political implications for determining what and who are worthy of care in the workplace.…”