Informal Community at the Workplace As a Defense Strategy in the Situation of Emotional Dissonance or Emotional Alienation: Sociological Study of Emotional Labor of Cardio-Surgical Nurses in Today's Russia

The paper based on the results of the pilot study into the peculiarities of emotional labor of hospital nurses at the cardiac surgery departments in Moscow and Rostov-on-don in the framework of the sociology of emotions of Arlie Hochschild. The analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with female professional nurses aged between 25 and 40 showed that emotional work was the essential part of their job, they were conscious of the need of expressing special emotions for patients and their relatives. It was discovered that due to rigid professional hierarchy and hard working conditions the nurses perform autonomous emotional labor (term used by Martin Tolich). Such labor is not regulated by the hospital management, but it is consistent with the norms of general emotional culture requiring nurses to express care, sympathy, empathy, etc. The nurses of the cardiac surgery are not specially trained for emotional labor, so they have to develop these skills on the job. It’s possible to say that the nurses present philanthropic emotion management (according to classification of S. C. Bolton). They are persuaded of underestimation of their labor by doctors in particular and by patients and society in general (via the social crisis in Russia). Hence the nurses are faced with the syndrome of emotional burnout and emotional self-alienation. They try to control negative emotions (annoyance, anger, despair) and to “humanize” the relationships with patients, but it is very difficult for them. In these circumstances the nurses form a close-knit community, whose members support each other. Such informal community incorporates the following features: openness, humor, talking about colleagues and patients, solidarity. This community helps neutralize the emotional tensions, dissonances and supports the emotional balance. So the nurses rather try to adjust to requirements and problems of their profession and maybe therefore they don’t experience bitter emotional self-alienation.