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Community health workers (CHWs) occupy a liminal position in two senses: they are situated between the communities they come from and serve, and the health and social service professionals with whom they connect patients; and also between two forms of knowledge. In interacting with health and social service institutions, they draw on the 'technical knowledge' that dominates these settings. However, they must also draw on 'communicative knowledge', which is the situated and embodied knowledge needed to gain the trust of their community peers and to carry their voice, but which is often relegated to a secondary position. In this US-based study, we analyze interviews with CHWs, their supervisors, and advocates of their work, to better understand how CHWs mobilize discursive resources to combine these two forms of knowledge and, in doing so, constitute their liminal position as an essential asset. Our findings support valuing CHWs' incorporation within healthcare teams, so that health and social service professionals can directly interact with CHWs' situated and embodied knowledge of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on an under-investigated link between work–life interrelationships and health: how low-wage work impacts employees' health by influencing their management of health-related concerns. Using structuration theory, interviews with 21 low-wage service work (LWSS) women workers were analyzed to identify structures and interactional dynamics in their reported interactions with their supervisors about health-related matters that intersected with work. Three 'corporate privilege' structures or 'recipes for action' emerged, along with three 'life friendly' structures. The structures intersected in three dynamics of supervisor–worker interactions: (a) collaborative reproduction of 'corporate privilege' structures, (b) collaborative resistance to 'corporate privilege,' and (c) contested reproduction and resistance. In some situations, supervisors and workers alike reproduced corporate privilege structures. In other circumstances, supervisors and workers resisted corporate privilege structures, and in still others supervisors and workers contested structures differently, pointing to potential opportunities for more systematic disruption through organizational interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial body of literature considers the experience of precarious work in market economies. Only recently, however, have scholars of work begun to consider the impact of precarity in the workplace on work-life interrelationships. This study contributes to that research and expands its focus beyond the form of precarity represented by job insecurity to other forms of precarity that inhere in the management of work-life interrelationships for working families in industrialized nations. Taking a communication as constitutive of work-life interrelationships perspective, we identify four forms of precarity in middle class working mothers' accounts of work-life, and then examine how these forms are communicatively managed through classed and gendered discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Using Weick's organizational sensemaking model, in particular his notion of "partial inclusion," we discuss the implications that individuals' practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship among middle class working mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on work-life interrelationships for community health workers (CHWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. CHWs serve as liaisons between marginalized communities and health and human service organizations to facilitate access to services. Required physical distancing transformed their work from embodied, face-to-face interaction to almost wholly mediated by communication technologies. Interviews were conducted with 52 participants to identify CHWs' adaptive strategies for communication, consequences of their adaptations for their experience of work and work-life interrelationships, and their communicative management of negative unintended consequences. Communicative practices that were emergent from participant accounts are examined through the lenses of four mutually informing research frameworks: the impact of technologically mediated remote work on work-life interrelationships, technological capital and differentiated digital inequalities, the text work/body work continuum, and gendered emotional work. Implications for the future of community-based care workers and for other workers with respect to communication, technology, and managing work-life boundaries are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]