Att bära privat sorg i sin professionella roll: En kvalitativ studie om sorgens tudelade betydelse på arbetsplatsen och dess integrering i socialsekreterares professionalitet

Sammanfattning

This study investigates how social workers experience personal grief in relation to their professional role, and how their way of showing grief at the workplace is affected by colleagues and the organizational context. The aim is to explore how personal experiences of grief enrich the social worker’s professional role. The aim was achieved through a qualitative study, where seven semi-structured interviews were held with individual social workers. The theoretical framework used was Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labor and feeling rules, and Candace Clark’s sympathy biography and sympathy margin. Findings show that fresh grief can have a negative effect on social workers’ functionality at work, yet there is an ideal to continue working instead of applying for sick leave. Although working through grief is seen as both positive and negative, displaying grief at work is heavily dictated by so-called feeling rules. Grief is often withheld through surface acting to maintain professional legitimacy and protect colleagues from carrying the grief of others. Social workers carefully manage the sympathy margin, in which emotional support is exchanged between colleagues over time. This is a way of maintaining professional legitimacy while also allowing some aspects of grief to show at work. Findings show that when the grief becomes lighter, it can become a tool for social workers, enhancing their empathic ability and contributing to a greater understanding of the clients they meet.