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Doctors’ emotional labour during the Covid-19 pandemic and the role of vocational identity in feeling rules

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posted on 2025-02-03, 12:04 authored by Marcus R. Digman

Emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983/2003) is an important aspect of healthcare, but there is little qualitative research on doctors’ performance of emotional labour (Riley & Weiss, 2016). This thesis uses qualitative methods to explore NHS doctors’ experiences of emotional labour during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK (March-June 2020). Contemporaneous newspaper articles written by UK doctors were thematically analysed using a critical realist grounded theory approach (Oliver, 2012; Gioia et al., 2013).

Doctors’ sense of identity emerged as a strong theme in the analysis. A narrative approach to collective identities (Brown, 2006) was applied to the data, and doctors’ pandemic-era writings were treated as identity-relevant narratives that contributed to the shared, discursive identity of ‘NHS doctors’. These identity-relevant narratives described subject positions (Davies & Harré, 1990) and contained feeling rules that motivated emotional labour.

Doctors experienced ‘speed-up’ (Hochschild, 1983/2003) during the pandemic, during which they had to perform more emotional labour with fewer resources. Examples are described and analysed in this thesis. Emotional labour around patient deaths emerged as a prominent part of doctors’ work that tied into a strong sense of vocational identity and duty of care.

This thesis proposes a model of emotional labour in which identity-relevant narratives describe subject positions and contain feeling rules that are important to a vocational professional identity. Doctors abided by feeling rules described by their identity-relevant narratives, drawn from professional ideals about the ‘duty of care’. They also performed emotional labour in order to access subject positions described by their identity-relevant narratives.

Doctors’ emotional labour was extensive, challenging, and required balancing often-contradictory feeling rules, which has implications for doctors’ mental wellbeing and risk of burnout. The findings also have implications for understanding emotional labour in healthcare and for the teaching of professional identity during medical education.

History

Supervisor(s)

Will Green; Katharine Venter

Date of award

2024-12-17

Author affiliation

School of Business

Awarding institution

University of Leicester

Qualification level

  • Doctoral

Qualification name

  • PhD

Language

en

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