Suchergebnisse

This article draws upon the emotion at work literature to explore how workers manage their feelings in dealing with death as a routine part of their working lives. It focuses on a specific group of workers, healthcare assistants (HCAs) in a hospital setting, who in delivering direct patient care have a particularly intimate relationship with dying and death. Based upon interview data from HCAs in four English acute hospital trusts, the article argues that the emotional outcomes of patient deaths can be explained by the nature of death as an event – its structure, context and actor circumstances – and by how HCAs appraise that event through the use of cognitive change and attentional deployment.

This article considers whether and how shifts in the division of labour in the context of organizational change lead to the empowerment or degradation of workplace roles. It focuses on the emergence of assistants in the British public services and, in particular, whether this leads to the degradation or empowerment of those who fill the role and the professionals they work with. Concentrating upon assistant roles in education and social care, case study findings suggest that as these roles develop, the assistants themselves and their co-professionals are empowered to some degree both in terms of their work and employment conditions. However, it notes that these consequences are not unambiguously positive for the stakeholders and vary by sub-sector. The article lends support to those who have argued that changes in the division of labour result in blended and potentially contradictory outcomes for the workers involved. It also contributes to a literature which suggests that outcomes are contingent upon context, proposing that sub-sector conditions can be influential.