Negotiating workplace expressiveness and role identities: Emotional performances in a cardiac care center

In this project, I provide an examination of emotion negotiation in a health care setting. I use a dramaturgical approach to reveal how employee performances of emotion are constructed and maintained along and against organizational emotion rules. Breaks in emotional norms are investigated as sources of emotion negotiation attempts. I work toward locating, naming, and describing the conditions that surround these attempts, the outcomes for the actors involved, and the broader implications for role identity expansion. I attempt to place the emergent themes of the study within a context of ideological tensions surrounding societal notions of what “caregiving” ought to be. I outline a rationale for the project in Chapter I, by first describing the dominant ideology regarding emotional expressiveness in health care. I also discuss the significance of the study, and the merits of using a dramaturgical perspective to analyze emotional performances. In Chapter II, I first consider various issues surrounding organizational emotionality as illustrated by convergent research trends. A review of the literature involves the areas of emotion management in organizations in general, and in health care settings more particularly. Chapter III begins with a discussion of the various assumptions of the interpretive paradigm, particularly as they apply to dramaturgical and ethnographic approaches to analysis. I discuss how the data was collected, arranged around a set of emergent themes, and analyzed within a dramaturgical framework. In Chapter IV, I begin by providing a contextual analysis of the research setting as it pertains to power issues and employee perceptions of their unique environment. The research analysis first involves a discussion of existing emotion rules and how they are managed by employees. I then describe emotion negotiation attempts as performed within the organization and relate them back to the power dimensions of this setting. I offer a close reading of the processes, outcomes, and role implications of successful and failed emotion negotiation attempts. Chapter V represents a summary of themes that emerged in the analysis, and a reflection of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings. I describe limitations of the current study, and suggest directions for future research