Narrativizing Chilean nurses' accounts of workplace bullying: Communicative processes of mystification, constrained and contested agency
Abstract
This study investigated the lived experiences and descriptions of workplace bullying of thirteen Chilean nurses, by exploring these nurses’ discourses as they reflected on, accounted for, and made sense of their bullying experiences. This study focuses on how nurses, as targets of bullying, create rich stories of bullying episodes and how their sense-making about such treatment is related to broader social, organizational, and professional discursive contexts. To address these issues the following research questions were developed: How do nurses make sense of workplace bullying? What social and organizational discourses are appropriated or constructed by nurses in their accounts of workplace bullying? And, finally, what ideas do nurses have for preventing workplace bullying? What practices would make them feel safer or less vulnerable to bullying? This research study relied on problematic integration (PI; see Babrow, 1992, 2000), feminist organizational communication (Buzzanell, 1994, 2000), and organizational discourse theories (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Hardy, 2004) as frameworks for addressing different aspects of nurses’ interview data: sensemaking, contradictions, ambiguities, core processes or themes in organizing, power, and agency. Findings of this study revealed several themes that interwove to create compelling and poignant narratives of nurses’ bullying experiences. Themes laid out the characters, plot, and circumstances as well as the climax of bullying episodes and their proactive and reactive responses. These themes were: nurses’ conceptualization of workplace bullying; most typical bullying actions; the emotional, psychological and physical impact of bullying, and the nurses’ coping strategies. However, the discourses constructed and/or appropriated by the nurses to account for workplace bullying, revealed several thematic processes that related directly to their national, professional, cultured, and gendered contexts. The thematic processes that emerged included: I-discourses, He/She-discourses; discourses about nurses’ occupational identity; discourses about nurses’ occupational image; discourses about nurses’ organizational positioning; and discourses about workplace conditions. Of importance was the interplay of constrained agency and contested agency in their complex and nuanced responses of adaptation, resistance, complicity, confrontation, and moving on (from particular workplace situations). Finally, the nurses reported several specific strategies perceived by them as useful in dealing with bullying in health care settings. These strategies invoked the need for discursive and material changes and consequences: fostering dialogue and communication; strengthening the Chilean Nursing Association; and reformulating certain aspects of nursing education.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Buzzanell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Communication|Nursing|Occupational psychology|Gender studies
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