Everyday resistance in psychiatry through harbouring strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study emotion management by focusing on emotion labour in relation to organisational resistance in psychiatry. Drawing on focus group interviews and individual interviews with 11 therapists in psychiatry, and on theories of emotion management and harbouring work (i.e. managing emotion work and renewing energy in a team), we argue that individual workers in psychiatry have to create strategies on their own. The main findings show that emotions are harboured alone and resistance strategies created in solitude can be characterised as everyday resistance and organisational misbehaviour, performed in deep backstage spaces such as the bathroom.

Keywords:

• Emotion work
• healthcare workers
• containing
• harbouring
• everyday resistance

Notes

1. Emotion rules and display rules are norms and rules guiding what we are allowed to feel on specific occasions, and what and how we are allowed to show our feelings (Hochschild 1983).

2. Surface-acting can be defined as pretending to feel the emotions that are required at work, while deep-acting means that one actively tries to really feel the emotions inside themselves.

3. Health care workers get emotions from working with the patients. They accommodate emotions of the patients (and occasionally emotions of colleagues), which results in a containing function for both their own feelings and for the feelings of the patients/colleagues.