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Personnel who work in emergency medical services (EMS) face work environments which are high stress. These can lead to burnout, secondary traumatic stress (STS), and a reduction of compassion satisfaction (CS). However, very little is known about what individual and work factors influence these negative coping mechanisms in EMS personnel. It is also unknown how perceived organizational and coworker support, debriefing methods, or individual characteristics are associated with the aforementioned coping mechanisms in EMS personnel. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A cross-sectional administration of surveys to Florida EMS personnel was done. A total of 351 individuals who regularly performed EMS tasks completed the survey. Three regression analyses were carried out, utilizing the three ProQOL 5 subscales as the dependent variables. The Perceived Coworker Support survey, Survey of Perceived Organizational Support, the Brief Resilience Survey and questions regarding debriefing practices were included.

Both organizational support and psychological resilience were found to be related to higher CS as well as lower burnout and STS. Coworker support was associated with higher CS. Informal debriefing was associated with higher CS and lower burnout. Several individual factors were also statistically significant, specifically education with CS, being a volunteer and race with burnout, and working part time or volunteering with STS.

There are limitations due to the nature of cross-sectional survey design and due to the sample size. The varying circumstances which EMS personnel work also hinders generalizability.

This study displays statistical relationships between factors which EMS agencies could use to increase employee job satisfaction and potentially reduce turnover.

The purpose of this paper is to determine a baseline level of the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL 5) in emergency dispatchers in the state of Florida, as well as to examine the how it is associated with psychological resilience, perceived coworker support, different types of debriefing, and perceived organizational support.

This was done through a cross-sectional administration of surveys to emergency telecommunicators and dispatchers in the state of Florida.

In total, 186 surveys were completed by active emergency dispatch personnel across the state of Florida. The study found that psychological resilience, education, and perceived organizational support were statistically related to professional quality of life in Florida Dispatchers.

There are limitations due to the nature of cross-sectional survey design and due to the sample size. There are also possible issues with the accuracy of self-reported survey answers. The lack of participation from all agencies also hinders generalizability.

This study serves as a reference point for a very under studied emergency service population. There are also implications that psychological resilience development in dispatch personnel would assist in multiple aspects of their professional quality of life.

This is the first study to use the ProQOL 5 on dispatch personnel in Florida. It also displays statistical relationships between factors which dispatch agencies could use to increase employee job satisfaction and potentially reduce turnover.

Breast cancer support businesses, retail stores selling mastectomy-related products, are playing an expanding role within healthcare in the USA. As commercial spaces separate from the medical settings where most cancer treatment occurs, these businesses have been largely overlooked in studies of medical care providers and their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to seek to bring to light the meanings and dimensions of the care work provided by breast cancer support staff to newly diagnosed patients.

This project employed an ethnographic approach centered on the workers at one breast cancer support business. The first author carried out participant observation over a 20-month period and supplemented the observations with staff member interviews.

The analysis of field notes and interviews revealed two themes or purposes as central to the employees’ understanding of their work: defining the organizational setting as a nonmedical space and balancing image enhancement with comforting care. The findings show how values of client-centered care can be enacted in a for-profit healthcare setting.

This study is limited to one for-profit support business in the southeastern USA.

Mastectomy supply businesses appear to offer a kind of support that patients may not be finding elsewhere or at the particular time they need it. Thus the study holds relevance for practitioners and health policy makers who are seeking to develop more comprehensive care for surgical patients within the established healthcare system.

This study gives a detailed picture of breast cancer support work, including the value premises and meanings it holds for support workers.

Display rules are formal and informal norms that regulate the expression of workplace emotion. Organizations impose display rules to meet at least three objectives: please customers, maintain internal harmony, and promote employee well-being. Despite these valid intentions, display rules can engender emotional labor, a potentially deleterious phenomenon. We review three mechanisms by which emotional labor can create worker alienation, burnout, stress, and low performance. Though not as widely discussed, emotional labor sometimes has propitious consequences. We discuss the potential benefits of emotional labor as well.

The main intension of this paper is to challenge the dominance of emotional labour in professional nursing.

The article begins by evaluating the central conceptual and definitional aspects of emotional labour, emotion work and emotional work. The purpose of this discussion is to argue against the false public and private dichotomy that has plagued emotional labour and emotion work. Second, it is proposed that the central and helpful defining aspects of emotional labour and emotion work are Marx's concepts of exchange‐value and use‐value. These defining attributes are used in conjunction with other re‐conceptualisations, which unite these terms in order to create more encompassing constructs that are useful for focusing on the waged and unwaged aspects of professional nurses' emotional work response behaviours. Finally, the use of emotional labour in professional nursing is contested on the grounds that the construct has limited theoretical and empirical utility for researching the complex nature of professional nurses' emotional work response behaviours.

It is recommended that a more robust encompassing concept needs to be developed, which accurately reflects the nature and complexity of professional nurses' waged and unwaged emotional work response behaviours, as they are important overlooked facets of behaviour that can be theoretically related to professional nurses' contextual performance.

The paper provides a better understanding of professional nurses' emotional work response behaviours, which benefit nursing research and practice by drawing on other areas of theory and research.

MODERN novels are not as profuse as Victorian ones in the description of libraries in the home. In the last century a library, or at least a study well lined with books, was a necessary proof of the social standing of the hero, but not always of his education. This is not so noticeable in present‐day fiction, perhaps because with the advent of universal education almost every family has its collection of books and consequently the possession of a library does not impress the ordinary reader. To‐day the library is all too frequently considered important only as the scene of some mystery or gruesome murder. There are, however, a few authors, such as Edith Wharton, who reveal their love of reading in their delightful descriptions of books.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

We show how organizational forms shape job structures, specifically the variety and types of jobs employees hold, extending previous research on job structures in four ways. First, the social codes associated with wineries’ generalist and specialist forms constrain the number of jobs and functional areas delineated by job titles. Second, form-based constraints are weakened by institutional rules that impose categorical distinctions on organizations. Third, these constraints are stronger when there is more consensus around forms. Fourth, these constraints are contingent on the legitimacy and resources of organizations of varying ages and sizes.