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In professional-client relationships (such as those between healthcare providers and patients), an important underexplored topic concerns the emotional, symbolic strategies that professionals use to communicate their role expectations for clients. Interviews with healthcare providers and ethnographic observations of their interactions with terminally ill patients in a free health clinic in India show that providers validate a feeling rule to usher patients into the sick role. Providers validate the feeling rule of "it is appropriate to hope for a cure" to communicate their expectations that patients should want to get better and continue to seek treatment from physicians. Our study expands the social-symbolic perspective by identifying role expectations and feeling rules as targets of action and by linking relational work to emotion work through a holistic incorporation of emotional labor theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging literature examines "bridging work" that occurs when people cross occupational or professional boundaries. This study expands the theory of bridging work with two arguments. First, organizational structures can increase the likelihood that bridging work happens. Second, bridging work can promote organizational performance when it links workers that have disparate knowledge related to the organization's primary task. We test our hypotheses with data from interviews with 193 infection preventionists working in a random sample of US hospitals. We find that a hospital's size, infection control practices, and prior performance in infection control are associated with infection preventionists' working with medical doctors. We also find that relationships with medical doctors are correlated with reduced catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Thus, organizational context shapes bridging work and bridging work can have tangible consequences for organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative upstart groups dominate today's American religious climate. More people are becoming members of these groups, and fewer people are claiming membership to the mainline religions. A small scale enthography coupled with numerical data offers a snapshot of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), a religious group that seems to defy the current trends in religious membership. Analyzing the Unitarian Universalists using Rodney Stark's (1996) principles, the Unitarian Universalists should be in decline. Against the odds, the UUA has grown in the past ten years. Even though rightward leaning religious groups dominate today's religious environment, the case of the UUA argues that groups on the far end of the opposite spectrum can grow and avoid the decline of the traditional mainline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary healthcare is often characterized by overlapping frameworks or ""logics"" that share goals of organizational efficiency and quality but differ in their explanations of how to achieve them. We argue that performance improves when workers approach tasks in a way that combines these logics. Using data from a nationally representative survey of infection preventionists working at 193 unique acute care hospitals in the US, we show that nurses are involved in the biomedical and administrative elements of infection control, while doctors are not involved in both elements. Nurse support for infection control lowers infection rates, while doctor support has no effect. We estimate that nurse support for infection control reduces hospital costs by 40%, an annual savings of $120 million. We attribute this reduction in cost to nurses' blending of biomedical and organizational knowledge. An implication from this research is that healthcare costs and quality are tied to collaborations that hybridize logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]