American Professionalism: Contents and Consequences of an Organizational Role Schema

Research in impression management, sociology, and cultural psychology suggests that socio-historical and cultural conditions have shaped people’s “professional” role schema in the contemporary United States. Building on these literatures, we examined evidence that contemporary professional role schemas reflect historical trends of minimizing personal references at work. In Study 1, working managers reconstructed the office of a target presumed to have (or not have) a professional reputation. Results show when participants’ professional role schemas are invoked, participants assembled the office with significantly fewer objects symbolic of personal life but with similar numbers of work-related and neutral objects. Moreover, this effect was moderated by participant’s tenure in the U.S., suggesting this standard of professionalism may be culturally specific. A second study showed that a job candidate’s success was significantly lowered by the mere suggestion that they would make minor references to personal topics in a hypothetical client meeting. Implications for the implicit cultural standards that guide identity work in organizations are discussed.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39162/4/908.pd

Two Views of Agency in Patient Advocates' Problem-Handling Work: Storytelling and Rule Use.

Patient advocates are hospital employees who handle the non-medical problems and complaints that patients and their families experience while receiving care in hospitals. Using qualitative data from interviews and shadowing at teaching and Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals, this dissertation develops two accounts of agency in patient advocates' problem-handling work. First, my analyses suggest that patient advocates are organizational storytellers who construct accounts that enlist the participation of others to resolve patient and family members’ problems. I identify several relational practices that patient advocates use to accomplish their problem-handling work. Second, the analyses also suggest that patient advocates draw on organizational rules to construct legitimate paths of action for patients, families and staff in hospitals. Four patterns of rule use emerged, but in different frequencies across teaching and VA hospitals. The different institutional logics in the two hospital types help explain the variation in rule use practices, in that they supply guidelines for the kinds of rule use patient advocates may creatively employ within an organizational setting. This portrait of work is fundamentally relational, in the sense that storytelling and rule use occur primarily through interaction with others. Through these relational practices, patient advocates are able to effect small changes within their respective hospitals. In addressing the work of patient advocates in this way, the dissertation contributes to research on work, problem-handling roles, and agency.Ph.D.Business AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61722/1/heaphye_1.pd

Social closeness increases salivary progesterone in humans

We examined whether interpersonal closeness increases salivary progesterone. One hundred and sixty female college students (80 dyads) were randomly assigned to participate in either a closeness task with a partner versus a neutral task with a partner. Those exposed to the closeness induction had higher levels of progesterone relative to those exposed to the neutral task. Across conditions, progesterone increase one week later predicted the willingness to sacrifice for the partner. These results are discussed in terms of the links between social contact, stress, and health

Organizational body work: Efforts to shape human bodies in organizations

In this article, we review management and organizational research that describes and explains “organizational body work”— purposeful, organizationally embedded efforts to shape human bodies. We conceptualize human bodies in terms of three dimensions—materiality, meaning, and functionality—and argue that organizational body work is constituted by programs of purposeful effort involving activities situated in and shaped by organizational life. Based on a review of 210 articles and books that feature descriptions of organizational body work, we unpack the concept in three main ways. First, we offer an inductively developed process model of organizational body work that comprises five key themes: the triggers, forms, consequences, contexts, and the variations of bodies targeted. Second, a key observation that emerged from our review was that organizational body work is animated by a set of organizational tensions, and so we explore three such tensions situated in the cultural, health, and political dynamics of organizational life. Third, we suggest eight directions for future research intended to illustrate and inspire, rather than set boundaries around the study of organizational body work