Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
First Advisor
Vesperi, Maria D.
Keywords
Emotional Labor, Organizational Culture, Anthropology, Managed Care, Mental Health, Emotion Management
Area of Concentration
Anthropology
Abstract
The purpose of the managed behavioral health care industry is to implement processes and standards for ensuring cost savings in the provision of psychiatric and substance abuse treatment to individuals enrolled in insurance plans. These for-profit companies employ licensed psychotherapists, social workers, and psychiatric nurses in call-center workplaces to carry out specific administrative roles. This study focuses on an organizational unit of mental health clinicians whose work involves an area of growing emphasis in commercial managed care, the coordination of patient care through telephonic case management. Using ethnographic interviews, I explore normative workplace rules and beliefs governing how case managers regulate and display emotions while performing their jobs. My findings indicate these clinicians are positioned to experience dissonance between personal feelings about patients' cases and what the company encourages and expects them to feel as employees. I examine the workplace culture and cultural practices that are found at these areas of dissonance between individual emotions and the requirements of the job role in the managed care corporation.
Recommended Citation
Mihalick, Justin, "Organizational Culture, Emotional Labor, and the Work Role of Mental Health Case Managers in a Managed Care Company" (2012). Theses & ETDs. 4644.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/4644
Rights
This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.