Working at the edge: Emotional labour in the spectre of violence

Working the Edge: The Emotional Experiences of Commissioning and Funding Arrangements for Service Leaders in the Sexual Violence Voluntary Sector

The specialist voluntary sector plays a crucial role in supporting survivors of sexual violence. However, in England, short-term funding underpins the sector's financial stability. This article examines sector leaders' ways of coping, resisting and being affected by funding practices. Using the concept of edgework, we show how funding and commissioning dynamics push individuals to the edge of service sustainability, job satisfaction, and emotional well-being. We examine how these edges are "worked," for example, by circumventing and remolding the edge. We offer an original way to theorize participants, make visible the emotional toll of service precarity and offer suggestions for support.

"It's Like Being a Parent at Work": Antiviolence Frontline Work, Boundaries, and Intimacy During COVID-19

COVID-19 profoundly shaped how service providers in the antiviolence sector interact with clients, coworkers, and community stakeholders. In addition to stressors inherent in antiviolence work, service providers negotiated new, challenging social distancing and remote communication strategies. In this paper, we analyze interviews with 23 antiviolence workers in the US Great Plains region, focusing on participants' descriptions of workplace boundaries and intimacy. We demonstrate how COVID-19 both expanded and contracted public/private boundaries and formal/informal connections in antiviolence workers' daily experiences. Pandemic conditions revealed the pressing need for frontline workers to exercise discretion over levels of intimate engagement with coworkers and clients.

Extreme work environment and career commitment of nurses: empirical evidence from Egypt and Peru

Purpose

This paper aim to analyse the motives behind the commitment of nurses to their profession despite their intense job duties during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The empirical sample comprises of 35 semi-structured interviews with public sector hospital nurses in under-researched contexts of Egypt and Peru.

Findings

Three types of motives were found to play a critical role in nurses’ commitment to their profession despite the difficulties associated with extreme work conditions. These factors include cultural (religious values, governmental coercion), contextual (limited education, organisational support) and personal (good nurse identity, submissive nature) dimensions.

Originality/value

This paper is one of the pioneering works to link existing literature streams on career commitment, extreme jobs, extreme context and management under disruptions (particularly COVID-19) by analysing these aspects in the under-researched Peruvian and Egyptian contexts.

Immersion, drowning, dispersion and resurfacing: Coping with the emotions of ethnographic management learning

While organisational researchers have had a long-standing commitment to ensuring the well-being of others, relatively little attention has been paid to the care of fieldworkers themselves, particularly in emotional terms. Drawing on personal experiences of ethnographic research with UK charity Samaritans, this paper considers the ways in which embedding oneself in the culture of another organisation can expose researchers to pain which, if not recognised or ameliorated, can be become toxic. The paper questions whether such pain is an inevitable consequence of certain forms of qualitative research and, if so, how we might learn to cope with its effects. In answer, the paper describes a journey through immersion, drowning and eventually resurfacing, where the latter is facilitated by a process defined as emotional dispersion. The paper contributes to our understanding of (i) the necessarily painful nature of certain immersive modes of ethnographic and qualitative research, (ii) the conceptualisation of emotional dispersion and its practical implications for coping with emotional pain, burnout and toxicity as a relational practice and (iii) the relative balance of institutional and individual duties when it comes to a care of the self in emotional terms.