Emotions as Property and Context for Negotiation

Negotiating the role of expert carers on an adult hospital ward

“…Furthermore, I suspect that owing to her`squeamishness', she also feared that the feeding tube would make it difficult for her to care for him at home again. However, what was interesting ± and distressing ± about this case, was that although the ward staff were oriented to Mrs Durham's`emotion standpoint' (Sugrue 1982) at no point were these emotions explicitly discussed. Rather, inter-action between staff and expert carer was constituted at the surface level as a dispute over expertise.…”

“…Thus, for at least three of the families in the study, negotiation of the caring division of labour was taking place against the backdrop of the emotional labour involved in having to face up to the decision to`let go'. Although these emotions were rarely made explicit, they formed a crucial part of the wider context against which care was negotiated (Strauss 1978, Sugrue 1982. Almost all of the incidents of conflict and difficulty I observed at the boundary between formal and informal carers were in relation to these particular cases.…”

Bending the rules of "professional" display: emotional improvisation in caregiver performances

“…The second theme of social influence research reveals how health care professionals' expressions of neutrality may be a way to influence patients to show a similar "detached" approach to their conditions. Sugrue (1982) told the story of how doctors and nurses attempted to persuade a patient to become more detached from her body and her feelings by telling her to relax, stop exaggerating, and not to concern herself so much with what the staff was doing to her. This form of emotional control can be a form of social control (Lupton, 1996;Shott, 1979).…”

“…Because the nurse negotiated the emotion rule of keeping a "professional distance" (Lupton, 1994) to show personal concern for the patient, the patient had license to show more emotion, with perhaps less fear of feeling embarrassed or judged (Goffman, 1963). Just as caregivers are constrained by the rule of detachment, patients are similarly bounded to the script of nonemotionality, if they wish to be well received by the practitioner audience (James, 1993;Sugrue, 1982). Therefore, in this specific scene, the nurse temporarily altered the emotional order of detachment and, in turn, cleared the way for the patient to perform emotion according to the newly revised script.…”

Negotiated Orders and Organizational Cultures

“…Sugrue (1982) presented a fascinating, if pathetic, example of a hospital staff's inability to teach a patient the norms of negotiation, an inability that led to the subsequent breakdown of civility between patient and staff, and perhaps contributed to an abnormally slow recovery. Prisoners and hospital patients provide dramatic examples of forced socialization.…”