Feeling Stressed and Burned Out A Feminist
This article is written in the spirit of resistance, as a challenge and alternative to what are accepted as neutral, unbiased conceptualizations of stress and burnout within traditional and popular discourse. Findings reported in a previous study suggest that the ways we conceptualize and experience stress and burnout are not inherently neutral, but are shaped by culture and a particular set of dominant themes prevalent in organizational and professional discourse. This article exposes the processes by which some forms of organizational experience and knowledge related to stress and burnout have become dominant, whereas "other" forms have become marginal and suppressed. Through a postmodern feminist reading of stress and burnout as expressed within the medical and organizational discourses, the author reveals how gender acts as an axis of power and meaning that helps sustain dominant and seemingly neutral conceptualizations within the discourses. Building from the feminist reading, she develops a radical reconstruction of the ways organizational participants and theorists could interpret and experience stress related emotions, and discusses the cultural conditions that could produce and sustain such a revision. The reading and revision reveal ways in which experiences of stress and burnout have been shaped and constrained by the dominant discourse and suggest ways social scientists might rewrite those experiences toward more humane ends. Insofar as stress and burnout are among the most common and well researched topics (and emotions) within the field of organizational behavior, this paper has far reaching theoretical, epistemological, and practical implications. More generally, the feminist reading and revision open new spaces for other ways of theorizing and argues against the limitations of knowledge and experience imposed by traditional organizational theory and medical discourse. (Feminist Organization Theory; Feminist Reconstruction; Stress and Gender; Emotions and Gender; Medicine and Feminist Theory; Feminist Organization Theory; Feminist Epistemology) Introduction In the fast paced, resource constrained, "high tech" environment of contemporary life, feelings of stress and burnout have achieved the prominence of social epidemic. The incidence of stress and burnout, as well as the claim of "stress," is unequivocally on the rise (Barley and Knight 1991) That trend and the perceived consequences of the "epidemic" have not escaped the attention of managers, therapists, industrial psychologists, and self help book publishers. With the attention has come a portfolio of strategies intended to help individuals avoid, control, and cope with stress and burnout. 1047 7039/98/0901/0103/$05.00 Copyright C 1998, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/Vol. 9, No. 1, January February 1998 103 DEBRA E. MEYERSON Feeling Stressed and Burned Out Although rarely explicit, the language of organizational and popular discourse formulates stress and burnout as "problems" to control, manage, or avoid. With a few exceptions (e.g. Abbott 1990, Colligen et al. 1982) work on stress and burnout within the organizational behavior and industrial psychology literatures (e.g. Cartwright and Cooper 1996, Maslach 1982) as well as popular self help books focus on methods of management and coping. They emphasize (1) emotional and (2) bodily control, (3) the individual as the locus of control (if not the source of the problem) and (4) the abnormal not normal nature of stress and/or burnout. Those four themes are implicit in how stress and burnout are traditionally conceptualized. They are taken for granted as neutral and rarely questioned. In a previous article (Meyerson 1994) I challenged the neutrality of those themes by exposing the ways in which the dominant formulation of stress and burnout are products (and producers) of a broader set of cultural and institutional conditions. I contrasted the language of stress used by social workers practicing in a traditional medical culture with that used by social workers practicing in a culture shaped by psychosocial ideology. Whereas the language of stress among the medical social workers mirrored the institutionalized conceptualizations of stress and burnout within organizational and popular discourse, the social workers in the psychosocial culture talked qualitatively differently about such experiences. Those findings suggested the set of questions addressed here: 1. Why does the dominant conceptualization of stress and burnout within organizational and popular discourse mirror that expressed within the medical culture? 2. What cultural and institutional processes account for parallels across disciplines and the systematic privileging of some conceptualizations of stress and burnout and marginalization of "others" 3. How is gender implicated in the privileging of certain forms of knowledge and meaning over "other" forms? How does gender figure into the way stress knowledge and experience have been socially constituted and sustained? 4. Can a gender based critique suggest alternative ways to conceptualize and experience stress and burnout that would engage alternative sensitivities and allow for other forms of knowledge and experience? I begin with a brief summary of the relevant findings from my ethnographic study of social workers in two distinct cultural contexts. Next, I consider questions about parallel patterns of knowledge and meaning across medical, organizational, and popular discourse and discuss briefly why postmodern analysis, and in particular feminist postmodernism, provides the theoretical and epistemological foundation for addressing those questions. I 104 then deconstruct the four themes central within medical and organizational discourses and show, for each theme, (1) how it shapes dominant conceptualizations of stress and burnout, (2) how the theme figures more generally in the disciplinary discourses, and (3) how it has been sustained and privileged by its gendered associations. Finally, I propose a revised way to conceptualize stress and burnout that is based on a reconstruction of the meaning and association of the prevailing themes. Dominant and Marginalized Conceptualizations Interpretations of Stress and Burnout in Medical and Social Work Cultures A previous study revealed patterns of dominance and marginalization in interpretations of stress and burnout (Meyerson 1994) That work contrasted social workers' interpretations in acute care medically dominated cultures with social workers' interpretations in a chroniccare psychosocially oriented culture. Social workers in the predominantly medical cultures tended to talk about stress and burnout in the language of coping and control. They spoke of burnout as emotional and physical lapses of control. They treated burnout as an individual failure and stress and burnout as diseases, undesirable aberrations from a universal definition of "normal." In contrast, social workers in the psychosocially oriented organizational culture tended to talk about stress and burnout as "no big deal," as an inevitable and "normal part of the ebb and flow of work life." They described burnout as an occupational hazard. As a professional, a person was expected to burn out on occasion. Emotional control was seen as impossible and sometimes undesirable because social workers were supposed to use their emotions as a source of connection and insight. The capacity to feel for clients and develop empathy was viewed as a professional skill, which meant that social workers regularly lost "control" of their emotions and were therefore normally prone to burn out. The contrast between social workers in the two distinct cultures has several implications. First, social workers in the medicalized culture talked about stress and burnout in ways that reflected the values and beliefs of traditional medicine: the emphasis on finding objective "cures," the professional mandate of "control," the focus on individuals as the locus of disease and cure, and the universal definition of "normality" and, by contrast, abnormality (Friedson 1970, Starr 1982) Second, the "other" way of talking about stress and burnout reflected the ideology of social work: a marginalized and feminized profession. ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/VOl. 9, No. 1, January February 1998 DEBRA E. MEYERSON Feeling Stressed and Burned Out Psychosocial ideology, with its foundation of selfdetermination, places control with "clients" and thereby devalues (in theory) professional control, emphasizes the social bases of conditions and therapies, and accepts ambiguity and multiple definitions of "normality" (Meyerson 1991) Third, identifying the "other" way of talking about stress and burnout challenges the apparent neutrality of the dominant medical conceptualizations and, by implication, the seeming neutrality of the dominant and parallel conceptualizations of stress and burnout within organizational and popular discourse. Gendered Conceptualizations Within Medicine and Organizational Discourse Observed patterns of dominance and marginalization in the way the social workers in the different organizational cultures interpreted stress suggest gendered patterns of relations and meanings. First, medicine and social work, the professional cultures that shaped interpretations of stress and burnout have traditionally been made up mainly of men and women respectively. Second, the readily apparent subordination of social work to medicine is a "feminized" position. Third, the traditional professional ideologies of medicine and social work have gendered associations. Medical values and beliefs, such as the value placed on control, have been socially constructed as "masculine," whereas social work values and beliefs, such as the value placed on empathy and relationships, have been socially constituted as "feminine." Medicine has long been associated as the prototypical patr