Me as myself as a tool – emotional work and professional distance Full paper

Ylva Ulfsdotter Eriksson, PhD, and Marita Flisbäck, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract In a research project that studies how employees in occupations with low status relate to the low recognition of their occupation, strategies that aim at counteracting it can be distinguished. Among care workers, the core of this effort consists of the emotional elements in the practice of the occupation. The care workers describe the emotional labour they perform as rewarding and satisfying, and that the coaching to which they have access enables them to reformulate an experience-based practice into more abstract knowledge. They acquire a professional distance that can serve as a status shield protecting them against disparaging perceptions and ultimately constitutes a resource for nullifying the effects of low recognition.

Introduction The sociological interest in occupational prestige and status has mainly been focused on creating rank orders, but also on what gives occupations their prestige (Reiss, 1961; Treiman, 1977). Long education, high salary, power and influence, as well as career opportunities and leadership positions, have proved to be important criteria for the attribution of high status to an occupation (Svalastoga, 1959; Lenski, 1966; Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006). In occupations with high status, symbols are often dealt with and practice is based on abstract, theoretical knowledge. By contrast, in occupations to which low status is ascribed, the work is more concrete and experience-based, the salaries are lower, the education is substantially shorter, and the occupation offers fewer career opportunities. Moreover, gender research has shown that those criteria, associated with high prestige in the research on occupations, are also often described as masculine and are to a greater extent found in occupations with male dominance (England et al., 1994; Eagly, Johannesen-Smitdt, 2003; Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006). This is a consequence of the gender segregation in society: women and men perform different work tasks in different occupations, with the result that both occupations and work tasks are associated with either femininity or masculinity, where higher value is ascribed to male connotations (England et al., 1994; Bourdieu, 2001).

1 Much of the work in welfare and service sectors is performed by women in low positions with relatively low salaries and low educational requirements. Several of the occupations in these sectors are low-status ones such as shop assistants, waitresses, assistant nurses, home-care personnel, secretaries and child-minders (Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006). They also exemplify occupations which, in various ways and degrees, carry out so-called emotional labour, which means dealing with the customer or client on an emotional level in some sense (Hochschild, 1983; Steinberg and Figart, 1999; Bolton 2005).

Creating and controlling feelings in the performance, in order to deal with and approach the customer or client in the “right” manner, has to do with skills (Steinberg and Figart, 1999; Hochschild, 1983). Feministic perspectives, however, have asserted that skills of this type, mainly used in female-dominated occupations, have not been recognized as work-related knowledge or abilities (cf. England et. al., 1994; Steinberg, 1996). Occupations in the care sector are an example of how skills that are traditionally linked with women and their work are accorded low status and not considered as qualified knowledge (Sydie, 1994; England et al., 1994; Widding Isaksen, 1994; Anderson, 2000; Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006). There is also often a one-dimensional image of care work and emotional labour that they drain the individual employee mentally and with risk of exhaustion (Maslash, 1982; Hochschild, 1983; Brotheridge and Granday, 2002).

This article aims at contributing to research on emotionally related work by connecting it to occupational status and professional strivings. The empirical phenomenon that we intend to discuss is how care workers relate to aspects of their occupational practice which concern coping with feelings in work. We will describe how they say that they use themselves as tools in care work where they feel into and adopt diverse authentic roles according to the client’s needs. The article also depicts how care workers are helped by coaching to reflect upon their work, which promotes more analytical attitudes toward their occupational activities. The striving to analyze and critically examine the emotional labour leads to what the care workers call attaining “professional distance”. This is understood partly as a way to counteract exhaustion, and partly as an essential strategy for counteracting low recognition and raising the occupation’s status. In this interpretive context, we emphasize the relationship between concrete, physically close work and abstract, intellectual work. We show how this distinction

2 can be linked with issues of status, recognition, and occupational groups’ professional aspirations.

The article is organized as follows: We begin by presenting the theoretical framework and describe how it fits into our overall research. Next, the empirical materials and method are described. The empirical results are presented thereafter and then we bring out the main conclusions from the analysis in a discussion.

Theoretical framework Occupational prestige as a context Previous studies have shown that there is strong agreement among perceptions of occupational prestige. Regardless of gender, age, nationality, generation or class position, people tend evaluate occupations and tasks in similar ways (Reiss, 1961; Treiman, 1977). Occupational prestige is thus strongly institutionalized and judgmental in regard to perceptions of occupations’ position in society. Occupational practitioners experience in everyday meetings the social status that the public attributes to their activities (Bourdieu, 1979/1989; Anderson, 2000; Rothman, 2002). Thus, the occupational position thus influences not only economical and cultural resources, network, lifestyle and values. Through the occupation, we also receive recognition from the surroundings in the form of social status. Employees in low status occupations may then experience that they do not get the same respect as those in occupations with high status (Rothman, 2002; Svensson, 2003; Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006; Svensson and Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2009). Occupational practice, along with presumed characteristics needed in different occupations, forms a substantial basis for one’s own identity (Bourdieu, 1979/1989; Fine, 1996; Isacson and Silvén, 2002; Svensson, 2003; Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2006; Svensson and Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2009; Karlsson, 2009). Evaluations of occupations and the rewards that result from occupational practice are therefore among the most fundamental instruments of power in social reality (Bourdieu, 1979/1989; Isacson and Silvén, 2002; Svensson, 2003).

In such a perspective it is of interest to investigate groups and individuals who receive low recognition through their occupational belongings, as an attempt to understand how they relate to their own social positions. Traditional research on occupational prestige has mostly been oriented towards studying occupations’ relative status in society on the macro-level and little interest has been devoted to examining how individual inhabitants experience and relate

3 to their occupations’ prestige. This is the background to the research project Experience of occupational prestige. A sociological study of attitudes and strategies towards low status occupations, financed by the Swedish Research Council. The project studies how people in low-status occupations relate to a low-valued social position in term of recognition and respect from others. In the project we study six low-status occupations: service staff, cleaners, stockroom workers, machine operators, guards and care workers. This article focuses on care workers.

Concrete and abstract knowledge Both in the research project and in this article, we depart from theoretical perspectives which assert that occupational practice in Western societies is interpreted in terms of a hierarchical, dualistic model of classification. Work is thus regarded on the one hand as intellectual, abstract, distanced, qualified, and mentally demanding. On the other hand, it is understood as manual, concrete, corporeal, unqualified, and physically demanding. The latter is often considered low-status since it is frequently connected with the closeness that we associate with human needs (Bourdieu, 1979/1989; Smith, 1990; King, 1992; Sydie, 1994).

The categorization of work as either abstract, intellectual, distanced or concrete, manual, corporeal has been described as ideological, because it obscures the fact that all occupational activities have both practical and intellectual aspects (Bourdieu, 1979/1989; Smith, 1990; Sydie, 1994; Liedman, 2002). Since women, individuals from the “Third World”, and people in working-class positions have the most experience of concrete or personally close work, the hierarchy can be said to rest upon structural power relations arising from racialized, ethnic, gender and/or class relations (Sydie, 1994; Smith, 1990; King, 1992; Anderson, 2000; Mohanty, 2003). That relation-based, emotional work is largely assigned low status can be interpreted from the standpoint that the activities have to do with interpersonal closeness, feelings, and fundamental human needs. Even though several male-dominated occupations, such as police and debt-collectors, also include control of emotional expression (Hochschild, 1983; Stenross and Kleinman, 1989), more women than men in general finds themselves in occupations that involve emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983), which can be taken to constitute a further argument for its low recognition.

Several social researchers and cultural theoreticians have indicated that the basis of a dualistic categorization of occupations lies in people’s desire to control feelings and distance

4 themselves from bodily needs. Physical labour is then regarded – unlike disciplined and intellectual work – as something immediate, animalistic, or even “dirty” (Elias, 1939/2000; Douglas, 1966/1991; Widding Isaksen, 1994). A point of departure in this article is that work tasks such as giving care to physically and mentally handicapped individuals are connected with low status because the tasks belong to life’s concrete spheres and therefore handle “dirt”. The repetitive, paid or unpaid, household and care work to which women have traditionally devoted themselves is a clear example of the low reputation entailed by necessary, concrete and emotional work (Sydie, 1994; Widding Isaksen, 1994; Anderson, 2000; Sörensdotter, 2008).

Emotion in labour Ever since Hochschild’s path-breaking study The managed heart – commercialization of human feeling (1983), so-called emotional work has been investigated in many different occupations and organizations (Stenross and Kleinman, 1989; Wharton, 1993; Zapf et al., 1999; Brotheridge and Granday, 2002). Emotional labour is performed chiefly in relation- based occupations, mainly in the service sector, including everything from sales and customer-oriented work to care and nurturing in client and treatment relations. Strictly speaking, Hochschild’s definition of emotional labour refers only to emotional management that is utilized in commercial practices, not the type of emotional work that is performed in the public sector, where the purpose is to do a good humane job (Bolton 2005). To manage emotions in labour is thus a more correct designation in contexts where the work tasks are not of commercial kinds. In the present text, however, we do not make this distinction but use the concept of emotional labour/work, despite the lack of commercial aims in the care occupations we have studied.

Although emotional labour is differentiated according to the type of interpersonal interaction and the logics of specific occupations (cf. Bolton 2005), the common denominator for all emotional work is that it is relation-based (Steinberg and Figart, 1999). Moreover, it means to a great extent that the individual occupational practitioner, within the framework of the organization’s services or the profession’s norms, must create and control her/his feelings so that the customer’s or client’s needs and desires are satisfied in the “right” way (Hochschild, 1983; Steinberg and Figart, 1999). Being expected to fulfil others’ wishes is especially widespread in female-dominated occupations of service and care (Skeggs 1 Steinberg 8; Anderson 2000). Hence, emotional work is connected to a high degree with typical female

5 occupations, femininity and, in certain occupations, also sexuality (Hochschild, 1983; Steinberg and Figart, 1999).

Studies of emotional work have been occupied with the negative consequences and outcomes – such as exhaustion, lack of authentic feelings, and stress (Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 1993; Zapf et al., 1999; Brotheridge and Granday, 2002; Bolton, 2005). Due to an organizational pressure of the worker’s control of her/his feelings there can be a gap between a more authentic personality and a more artificial one displayed in work. This may lead to an alienated state of mind, lack of empathy and absence of feelings in the form of exhaustion or burn-out. Further negative effects of emotional labour have to do with the employee giving more to customers or clients than what she/he gets back. This asymmetric exchange is quite unlike what normally characterizes social relations (Hochschild, 1983).

Unequivocal descriptions of emotional work as something problematic are at risk of reproducing the low status of emotional work. Amy S. Wharton (1993, p. 218) is one of those who have tried to modulate such accounts of misery by maintaining that “[W]orkers who perform emotional labor are no more likely than other workers to suffer from emotional exhaustion”. Wharton also shows empirically that there are positive outcomes for employees in occupations that include emotional work (cf. Stenross and Kleinman, 1989).

Since the conditions differ for different types of emotional labour, a plausible inference is that both the effort and the outcome vary accordingly to occupation studied (Steinberg and Figart, 1999; cf. Zapf et al., 1999; Brotheridge and Granday, 2002; Bolton 2005). In more philanthropic occupational areas, where the effort and expression are engaged and honest, the outcome is expected to be more fulfilling than in commercial contexts where the effort is more instrumental, which may lead to alienation and resistance (Bolton, 2005).

Counteracting low recognition and striving for professionalism The classification of care work as concrete and experience-based can result in that the workers qualifications are misrecognized. Researchers have argued that the need to see emotional work as a desirable skill and competence on the labour market is growing as the service sector expands (Steinberg and Figart, 1999; Hochschild, 1983). The question, though, is what particular groups, not least in low-status occupations, do to assert the value of their knowledge, since these groups – unlike theoretically educated professions – lack a knowledge

6 monopoly and discretion (cf. Abbot, 1988; Svensson 1990). Research on professions has shown that academization is a strategy for increasing an occupational group’s influence in society and promoting specific knowledge capital (Abbott, 1988; Svensson, 1990). Professions often have high occupational status and significant social positions with a possibility to persuasively influence the occupational image (Hughes, 1971/2008; cf. Ulfsdotter Eriksson 2006). Andrew Abbot (1983) has demonstrated how professions develop and hold forth occupational ethical claims in order to strategically augment their influence and social status.

Reflecting upon and analyzing one’s own care practice is interpretable as “bringing about dialogues between practice and research where ‘tacit knowledge’ can acquire a voice and thus be appraised” (Svenaeus, 2009, p.12, our translation; cf. Svensson, 1990), but it can also be compared with professional strivings. Within the care occupations, however, there has been resistance to professional strivings which involve mastering an occupational language through theorization. It has been claimed that the private sphere’s care ethic and life-world are subordinated to the public sphere’s instrumental and distanced logic (Astvik and Aronsson, 2000; cf. Habermas 1987). Arguments for resistance have also asserted that female experience is thus subordinated to male analytical distance. Yet research has shown the value of theorizing and analytical activities, not seldom with the reasoning that a critical distance can counteract feelings of insufficiency and stress in the work (Astvik and Aronsson, 2000). Ulla Holm is one of those who, in Swedish welfare research, has prescribed a so-called professional attitude in work. According to Holm, empathy in relation-based work is not counteracted by professional distance. A professional attitude involves neither cynical distance nor reification, but counteracting projection and immediate action as well as raising awareness of both one’s own needs and the user’s (Holm, 2001; Holm, 2009).

Stenross and Kleinman (1989) show how police detectives balance emotionally challenging work tasks: The victim’s emotional reactions are experienced as difficult and demanding, and the detectives strive to establish distance by letting patrol police deal with victims, thereby creating a buffer between themselves and the difficulty. The detectives protect themselves from criminals’ insults and attacks by both denying their emotion-related expressions and regarding these as false, but also by virtue of the pleasure they find in doing “real police work”, which is mentally and intellectually challenging work with high status. These

7 detectives thus reinterpreted emotional work as mental work and created a so-called status shield.

There is an explored link between status and emotional work which indicates that people in low-status occupations are less protected from the negative consequences of emotional work (Hochschild, 1983; Stenross and Kleinman, 1989). Practitioners of more prestigious occupations have a “status shield” in the form of expert knowledge, power, less closeness to clients and so on, whereas employees in low-status positions lack such barriers. To make certain re-interpretations of the emotional work can be regarded as a strategy for creating a professional distance. We argue that this may also serve as a strategy to enhance the occupation’s prestige.

Method and materials As noted above, six occupations are studied in the research project. We have conducted 13 focus-group interviews, 23 individual conversational interviews and 3 informant interviews with labour union representatives and unit managers with 78 individuals. The article’s empirical basis comprises three focus-group interviews, two individual interviews and an informant interview. Totally 16 persons have been interviewed, of whom 14 are women and two are men. One reported having originated in a different country than Sweden. They s are of diverse ages and their years of employment vary. The interviews, lasting 1-2 hours, were recorded and entirely written out. The occupations have been classified as low-status the Swedish prestige study from 2002 (Svensson and Ulfsdotter Eriksson, 2009; cf. Treiman 1977).1

The interviews have followed a loosely structured interview guide with themes that have concerned what is seen as best and worst about their work such as issues of working environment, salary, working time, and how the interviewees experience being treated by the surroundings both within and outside the work organization. They also described concrete work processes and the challenges, opportunities and obstacles that can arise from the occupational practice. We have analyzed the empirical material by seeking similarity,

1 Occupations such as machine operator and stockroom worker were not among the alternatives assessed by participants in the investigation, but these occupations can still be considered low-status by reason of their salary and qualification levels. They also lie near occupations such as baker, harbour worker, and other industrial occupations that were classified as low-status (Ulfsdotter Eriksson 2006). A further reason is that our interviewees themselves report having experienced that low status is attributed to their occupations (Flisbäck 2008). 8 variation, complexity and contradictions in each interview. Theoretical assumptions have been developed from the delimited data, at the same time as theoretical points of departure have formed a basis for empirical findings and thematizations. It was in such a context that questions about closeness and distance became visible, as did the different strategies which the practitioners used to handle these complications.

The two care occupations under study are attendants of psychiatric care (adults) and attendants of intellectually handicapped children and adolescents. Both of these groups are female-dominated and about 80 percent are women.2 The occupational groups that work in this part of the care sector are educated to secondary school and an assistant nurse education is often the basis of the occupational practice.

Both occupations work with people who have intellectual handicaps or long-term, relatively serious mental illnesses – in each of these cases being unable to take full part in society. Attendants of the handicapped children work mainly by providing support and training. They often work in group residences with an overall goal of “working with hands at the back”, which means training the residents to cope with ever more of the day’s routines alone. The same applies to the attendants of psychiatric care, but they work with clients who live by them selves in their own homes. These individuals must be trained to break the isolation that has arisen from more psychologically caused disruptions, such as long-term depression, burn-out and social phobias. In the empirical sections below, we shall examine how the interviewed care workers describe these activities.

Results The empirical analysis is presented in three themes. The first theme shows how the care workers reason about emotional labour in meetings with clients. The second theme deals with how coaching contributes the workers to becoming a refined tool and to learn methods of creating balance in the occupational practice. The third theme describes the importance of maintaining professional distance to the care work.

The self as a tool

2 In standardized occupational classifications the occupations are grouped in such a way that it is not possible to get detailed information on the fourth skilled level. 9 Research on emotional labour often emphasizes the problem of authenticity in expression of feelings (Hochschild, 1983; cf. Bolton, 2005). Employees who cannot act according to sincere expression are presumed to be alienated from their feelings and to run a greater risk of depersonalization and alienation, losing the sense of who one is and what one feels. The care personnel whom we have interviewed stress the importance of being “honest” and “genuine” in their occupational practice. They considered it very important to be oneself and not playing a role, since a sensitive client can see through such a false attitude:

I’m pretty sure I’m myself. I think that’s my best tool. For these are people [the clients] who see directly if you try to be somebody else. They are almost experts at it. (Woman, psychiatric care3)

There is a conscious assessment of how much of oneself is taken to encounters, which sides of oneself are chosen for display, and on how important honesty is. However, this can entail certain difficulties, as some of the care workers spend time in other people’s homes, which they do not always enjoy. One woman describes that she must sometimes play a role when she goes home to a client who smokes, whereupon the apartment is full of cigarette smoke. But she says that she cannot entirely play a role that is not grounded in herself. The risk is that the client sees through this and experiences her as false, which in turn can lead to that an established and significant trust in the relation is spoiled. So even if an employee has to play a perkier role at times, in order to overlook and get through certain difficulties and situations, the role must be authentic and in some sense anchored in one’s own person. As a care worker describes it, one has an “inner core that feels secure and then I’m myself although if I act a little differently in some cases.”

The attitudes described by the care workers show that they make use of deep acting, guided by their own genuine feelings in order to put themselves in a suitable emotional mood, rather than surface acting in the encounter with the client (Hochschild, 1983). Their emotional labour can thus be defined as philanthropic (Bolton, 2005). In the work with being genuine in the interaction, one’s own experiences also come in handy. The inner core and personal experiences form the basis for the “tool” that care personnel have available for performing emotional labour when noticing the clients’ need for support, so as to adapt their efforts accordingly. This “tool” functions as a scanner to see and understand the client unique needs.

3 In quoting: Psychiatric care = attendants of psychiatric care (adults). Attendants = attendants of intellectually handicapped children and adolescents 10 I think it’s mostly about first listening and feeling into the other personality. “Who is she and where is she?” For it is different depending on who we meet, (Woman, psychiatric care)

A further aspect of genuineness is that the care workers experience, and express, that their work conveys meaning and joy. They tell of “happiness in contact with clients” and that they get a lot in return from both clients and fellow workers. The fact that the work is considered meaningful and rewarding can facilitate genuineness and prevent an experience of their giving as draining and exploitative (cf. Bolton 2005). Or as a female care worker puts it:

Yes, I prefer to work here than to screw a fender on [in an assembly line] – and one earn more at screwing a fender on!! I think it’s a fun job. It rewards me a lot. It rewards me incredibly much. It gives me energy and I don’t know what to say. I get so much back. It isn’t only MYSELF that goes about giving and supporting and fixing – I get an enormous amount back from the clients and also from other personnel, so to speak, but it is MOSTLY from the clients. It’s not a fender that comes and hugs me when I arrive: “Hi, is it you that’s working today!” (Women, attendant)

Common perceptions of employees in care and nurturing occupations are that they choose their jobs on the basis of a calling, an urge to be useful and help others (Widding Isaksen, 1994; Skeggs, 1998; Sörensdotter, 2008). Some of the interviewees in this study express themselves similarly and say that it is very important for them to make a difference for someone else. This can be assumed to contribute to feelings of happiness and meaningfulness in work. Wharton (1993) also found a positive correlation between emotional labour and job satisfaction. Her explanation is that people with a certain personality type are attracted by a certain type of work and therefore feel fulfilled in performing it (i.e. self-selection). The personnel we have interviewed also reflect consciously on their working role and what the real purpose of their work tasks is. No ready manual exists for them to rely on and they emphasize the importance of constantly reminding themselves that they do good and conscious work.

But one has to think: “Why am I here?” “What is my role as personnel here?” One then has to consider, “Of course it’s to give support.” (Woman, attendant)

The care workers are aware of that they are there for the client and that their task is to listen to the client in order to help him or her towards self-help. They say that their main task consists of making themselves “needless” and “working with hands at the back”. Even though 11 expressions about the work include concepts such as “role” and this is something they reflect upon, they also return to the fact that it is they themselves who are the point of departure for the occupational practice.

It comes quite naturally, a kind of understanding. So it’s clear that it’s very difficult. It’s both the professionalism and what one has had in life, quite simply, “life experience”, we can call it. (Woman, attendant)

But in parallel with the care workers’ emphasis on the self as a basis for the work, they also stress that the whole work group’s joint effort with the client, and that it is not up to every individual employee to leave a mark on the work. One’s own person is thus secondary in the actual care for the client. The teamwork is structured with finding common solutions to how they can best proceed in the work where the clients are trained in self-reliance. It is not the individual’s solo performance that advances the development, but the joint strivings and a unity in the method and working approach. Teamwork and joint spirit are related to the group coaching that the personnel do.

Coaching – professional and collegial The work groups deals with different forms of coaching for emotional and practical support. Some of the groups have coaching under the guidance of a certified psychologist every week, which is experienced as both “necessary” and “valuable”. In these sessions of professional coaching, opportunities are given to dig a little deeper into own reactions and how to work with a certain client. In analysing own reactions, a certain therapeutic kind of work is done that leads to increased self-awareness. “I become clearer about myself” (Woman, psychiatric care).

We meet people, who have an inner process themselves, and then… It sometimes creates reactions in oneself that one must look at and be alert to… It tells you something when you, yourself, experience something so that you have to wonder “Why do I react to that?” (Woman, attendant)

The psychologist also gives concrete tips:

Without having met the clients, he knew exactly. Like,”If they behave in this way or that, then you do this or that”. So we get a great number of tools for how different problems or situations should be met or handled. (Woman, attendant)

12 The care workers also carry out coaching in their own team every week. It constitutes a forum where they can reason about how practical matters are to be dealt with, or when an individual employee wants to bring up and discuss some special problem. On a daily basis they also help each other to solve practical and emotion-related problems. In these conversations, too, the employees bring up feelings about the clients, and share advice on how one can get around a situation or state that is experienced as locked.

Yes, we can discuss a client. What one feels for the client. “What’s happening?, Do you have any advice to given me?, I feel frustrated by not getting through, I can’t help, Do you have any other tips that you can give me so that I can get through”. (Man, psychiatric care)

Coaching by a psychologist is perceived by the care workers as relieving, and it gives a feeling of freedom. This is a freedom that probably comes from the “right” to release an overall responsibility – to be guided to a professional distance. One woman, who had experience of access to professional coaching but not at her present place of work, stress the need of getting help with letting go, and connects a lack of this with burn-out. She describes how the psychologists she had had in supervision emphasized distance as a tool for counteracting states of exhaustion.

- “Let the job go when you leave work,” they always say. - Because it breaks you down?” (Interviewer.) - Yes, well ... And one also knows that if one’s to keep working with this for many years, then one mustn’t take it home and lie thinking about it at night. For then one doesn’t need long to get sick oneself.” (Woman, attendant)

In contrast to learning emotional rules or “scripts” formulated by the employing organization in order to feel the “right” things and show “correct” feelings to the client, the coaching aims at reflection on why the employee feels as he or she does in a certain encounter, what feelings are one’s own and those of others, and how to get around a specific problem. Even though the overall purpose is to perform a “better” job, supervision is of therapeutic kinds and leads to increased self-knowledge.

The coaching serves as an adhesive between self-reflection, direct actions and professional distance. Wharton (1993) maintains that, among those who perform emotional labour, the risks of negative influence are lowest among those employees who experience that they have a high degree of self-monitoring. “Given that attentiveness to others is a key component of

13 emotional labour, high self-monitoring abilities may reduce emotional exhaustion by enhancing the effectiveness of and lowering the effort required from workers engaged in this activity” (Wharton 1993, p. 221). The risks of emotional exhaustion in emotional labour are expected to be greater among employees with a low degree of self-monitoring.

The personnel must get instruments for handling it as well as possible. (Woman, attendant)

The instrument is the personal tool that is developed through reworking concrete experiences during coaching and group conversations with colleagues for the purpose of attaining a professional distance.

Professional distance Professional distance refers to making a distinction between private life and working life, and is depicted as a strategy for not becoming burned out:

I can let go of the job. But in the beginning when one is younger, it isn’t easy. Yet with age and with as much experience and knowledge as one has, one also becomes better. And therefore education is also important. (Woman, attendant)

As the above quotation reveals, education alongside experience and self-knowledge is also a means of attaining professional distance. The occupation requires ever more formal competence, so that several of the interviewees have undergone further education during working time as well. Increased demands for education and acquiring theoretical knowledge are perceived by the employees as status-raising, too. One woman describes how education has made it easier for her to let the job go after the working day.

But professional distance is to a greater degree about the relationship to the clients and one’s attitude toward them. For these occupational groups, who do their work in absolute proximity to the clients, it is essential to be clear about the nature of the relationship. A woman who works at a home for intellectually handicapped children, where the relations easily become more familiar and close, emphasizes that one must keep in mind that the relationship is professional.

14 They are our darlings at the same time as one need to have a professional distance to them ... One doesn’t let them in all too closely and one has, I think, such a job- wall between us anyway. (Woman, attendant)

A crucial aspect of professional distance is thus to clarify that the occupational practice does not depend on one’s own feelings. Instead, what is emphasized is an empathic ability – to be able to read the client’s needs while not feeling with him or her and becoming emotionally involved, and to strive for maintaining a professional relationship. One woman stresses this distinction and argues as follows:

There is a difference between understanding and emotions. One understands this person’s life, and one has ...empathy and ... But if one agrees with a person and cries for the person, it isn’t the same. One have to understand the situation, then one can do something about it. But if there are only feelings, one becomes helpless. One can’t solve anything. (Woman, Rehabilitation personnel)

Professional distance operates in several ways. It means a distance between the client and oneself, and is a way of creating a clear distinction between feelings and empathic understanding (cf. Holm, 2001; 2009). By acquiring a professional distance, the employee can carry out her/his work as a refined tool and run less risk of exhaustion symptoms. In other words, professional distance implies doing a good and effective job within a humanistic framework, for both the client and the employee (Bolton, 2005).

Concluding discussion In the research project we study how persons who work in occupations to which low status is ascribed deal with lack of recognition in many different ways. The results show that individuals accept dominance relations where their activities are regarded as low-status, while they also maintain an active approach to deprecatory judgments and strive to reinterpret stereotypes of the occupation (Sennett and Cobb, 1972/1993, Flisbäck, 2008; Ulfsdotter Eriksson and Flisbäck, forthcoming; cf. Hall, 1997, pp. 270-274). But how the lack of recognition is handled depends on which occupational area one works in.

A way of coping with low reputation may be to adopt an instrumental attitude. The primary argument is that the work is done mainly to earn money for living and that “real life” is after working hours. Thus the self is distinguished from the occupational activity and it is made clear that the person oneself is not as bad as the occupation’s low status (Sennett and Cobb,

15 1972/1993, Flisbäck, 2008; Ulfsdotter Eriksson and Flisbäck, forthcoming). Yet for those who work in relation-based occupations and do emotional work, an instrumental attitude is less possible (cf. Bolton 2005). For the care workers, there are special problems with being rendered invisible and lacking recognition, as well as specific strategies for counteracting the occupation’s low status.

Among the care workers we have interviewed, the stimulation and joy that arise in the encounter with users and clients are described as promoting energy for coping with stereotyped perceptions about their occupational activity. They experience the work as fulfilling and as an activity that really gives them something valuable. This – the work’s inner value (cf. Sennett 2003) – can be described in terms of a status shield which protects them from disparaging perceptions by ignorant surroundings.

The value of the work can thus counteract the environment’s ascription of low status. A similar status shield is acquired when they maintain that their own experiences and self- reflection constitute essential working equipment thus to use earlier experiences as knowledge in occupational practice is a strategy also for professional groups. The ability to express knowledge and skills verbally is related to an awareness that the knowledge serves in a wider context as well (Abbot, 1988; Svensson, 1990).

The verbalization of chores can further be regarded as a way of redefining less desirable tasks into a sought-after activity (cf. Stenross and Kleinman, 1989). Among professional groups, it is common to emphasize one’s specific occupational ethic in order to claim that a group is indispensable in society. According to Abbot (1983), such strategies are analogous to asserting the occupational group’s status. Certainly, the care workers we have interviewed cannot be described as a profession, but their emphasis on the emotional labour as a genuine client interest – although with professional distance – can be seen in the light of a development and adaptation of an occupational ethic. This also clarifies a desire that the work effort should be considered indispensable and that the occupational practice really “makes a difference”.

The coaching that is offered to the care workers is interpreted by us as an opportunity to transform tacit, experience-based knowledge into more abstract, theoretically driven knowledge. According to the interviewees, coaching enables self-reflection and analytical

16 attitudes that can protect them from the burn-out that care work may give rise to. The care workers describe how, in the collaboration with professional psychologists, they gain access to relevant concepts so that they can become better at analyzing their working methods and make use of the self as a tool. Through concepts and analytical distance, the emotional labour is intellectualized and abstracted. These processes distance the nearness and directness that are connected with the occupational practice. This increased theorization of experiences can, in our view, be regarded as a strategy for renegotiating the occupation’s low status, and provide a status shield against low recognition. What can then be asked is whether the care workers reproduce the conditions for the group’s low recognition through this strategy, since it lies within the framework of a dualistic perspective on knowledge where work is seen as either concrete or abstract – or whether they succeed in finding a way of their own where feeling, experience and nearness are not opposed to analysis and reflection, but are woven together in the emotional labours’s professionalism.

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