Search

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]

In the context of reproductive and sexual health, African American women have higher incidence of disease and poorer outcomes on key indicators when compared with White women. In this study, we used discourse analysis to identify and examine the workings of two clusters of interpretive resources (“interpretative repertoires”) associated with reproductive/sexual health care seeking among low-income African American women who participated in semistructured interviews as part of a health promotion initiative. Interpretative repertoires are ways of accounting for engaging in or refraining from engaging in actions, which are shared by people in a community. We labeled the two interpretative repertoires “Don’t Want to Know,” and “Take Charge of Your Health.” Within the “Don’t Want to Know” repertoire, that testing would lead to threatening findings was assumed, a chain of devastating consequences was imagined, and a preference for uncertainty over certain knowledge was expressed. Conversely, the “Take Charge of Your Health” repertoire valued certainty over uncertainty, though in both interpretive frameworks, knowledge-based and emotion-based decision-making were intertwined. We conclude that health promotion initiatives—if they are to succeed in encouraging women to obtain valuable preventive health care services—must respond, in their choices of language and outreach strategies, to the expressed dilemma of wishing for reassurance but fearing bad news, to the intertwining of emotional reasoning and technorationality in health decision making, and to the particular relational experiences of African American women. Failure to do so will contribute to the continuation of reproductive and sexual health disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on a multiyear intervention to address a key factor in African American women’s underutilization of reproductive health-care services in a small city: a communicative disjuncture between residents and community-based organizations (CBOs). Through the lens of communication infrastructure theory, we explicate processes through which the intervention reduced the communication disconnect between individual and organizational community actors. Analyses of interviews with community residents and CBOs show how the research team and an emergent group of residents working as peer health advocates functioned as interstitial actors who helped bridge the gap between micro- and meso-level actors. We discuss pragmatic implications of this research for health communication interventions and ways in which the study extends communication infrastructure theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about the benefits of integrating research on the work-life relationship with that of organizational rhetoric and communication. Some researchers are finding that some communication concepts connect these two apparently dissimilar areas of communication. Three theoretical areas for connecting workplace and private-life frames of reference are examined: structuration, systems, and relational dialectics. Integrative directions are identified in each area for future research.

Dramatic demographic, technological, and social changes are reshaping how individuals experience family and work as we begin the 21st century. As the composition of the paid workforce continues to change, men and are rearranging what used to be a rigid distribution of wage, work, and family responsibilities in traditional families. Coupled with these changing demographics, technological innovations have changed the way work is accomplished. Computer technologies now enable new forms of virtual work, thus blurring the boundaries between workspaces and homespaces. Communication can serve as a catalyst for empowerment when workers take opportunities to act by asking for family leave, pressing for flexible work schedules, and questioning traditional stereotypes surrounding who performs wage work and family labor. Until recently, work and family received limited attention from communication researchers in relation to researchers situated in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior.

The article offers the author's perspective regarding his effort to organized a panel discussion for the 2010 conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG). The author mentions that the panel aims to determine the relationship between the feminist researchers' research, research participants and their selves. He talks about struggle on how to position oneselves in relation to the research participants. He also explores the impact of the said position on every aspects of the research process.