Rewriting stress: Toward a cultural psychology of collective stress at work

Introduction

‘I’m so glad working with Bryan, when he like sits and looks very relaxed when he works on an assignment, where I think the rest of the organization … and when you look at your mailbox – they were all really in a spin so in the end I had to say to him: “Bryan you sit and look so relaxed. Should I also be as relaxed and think the others are in a spin or how shall I interpret this?”. Because actually I let myself be carried away by the atmosphere which I had experienced in the mailbox, where I began to think – wauw we are so busy and then Bryan sits there like so leaned back and relaxed’.

Intuitively, people tend to think in individualistic terms about the stress that allegedly permeates modern life, not least work life, where we often hear about a “stress epidemic” (Wainwright & Calnan, 2002). Stress is something that is inside us as isolated individuals, caused by different neuro-endocrinological pertubations. Although stress can be triggered by specific stressors in the environment, or by inadequate coping strategies, stress as a phenomenon is located beneath the skin and even inside the skull. From this common point of view, stress is understood as both a mental phenomenon and as an embodied phenomenon. But a perspective on stress as something embedded in or even extended into the physical and social environment has not been prevalent neither in the research on stress nor in lay discussions.

The example above is from an interview sequence from the first author’s study at a large biotech company in Denmark where she conducted fieldwork in a period of five months in two different departments which comprised researchers, lab technicians and technicians. Twelve individual interviews and eight group interviews were conducted and the interviews and observations form the basis for this article. The interview sequence illustrates the social embeddedness of an appraisal process. The woman in the interview exemplifies how two opposing ways of judging a work situation are derived from her interaction with her colleagues and make her confused concerning how she should interpret the situation. This interview sequence, and many others like it, made us interested in how appraisal processes related to stress can be shaped in and through social interaction. We have come to think that appraising one’s potentially stressful situations and considering how to cope, is not just a process occurring inside the individual, but often takes place in dialogue with others (who can be physically present or imagined others). But also the world of material objects is important: The physical surroundings with its artefacts can be conceived as part of a coping process inherent in a stress response, which we will address later in the article. To fully understand the complex phenomenon of stress, we will argue that we need to take the social and physical embeddedness into account. The empirical analyses developed from the research project will be published elsewhere, so, in the context of this paper, the examples included merely serve as indicators of how we believe that stress should be approached as a dialogical, distributed and situated phenomenon.

Individualism and objectivism as approaches in contemporary stress research

Increasingly, contemporary stress research is polarized around two seemingly irreconcilable schools of thought. There is on one hand the individualistic approach represented by cognitive psychology, which focuses on the individual’s ability to cope with stressful events (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). On the other hand, there is the environmental approach such as work-environmental studies, which focuses on identifying the specific risk factors in the environment that are meant to explain the development of stress (Karasek, 1979; Karasek & Theorell, 1990; Siegrist, 1996). While the cognitive understanding of stress concentrates on the individuals' interpretation of the work environment as a mediating factor between the individual and the context, the work-environment studies operate with a more direct causality between work-environment characteristics and the development of stress (Siegrist, 2000; Wainwright & Calnan, 2002). The different theoretical and epistemological frameworks represented in the two schools of thought enhance the possibility of a reductionism either in the direction of individualism or that of objectivism. The work-environmental approach reduces the individual to a passive medium of extrinsic forces and, in our view (and borrowing from Harré, 2002), implicitly ‘deletes the active, interpretative person from the ontology of psychology’ (p. 131). The cognitive approach on the other hand stays enclosed within a subjective, almost Cartesian realm, and does not encompass the social and cultural praxis in which the individual is embedded, as part of the understanding of how stress develops.

Attempts have been made to reconcile these poles through different models such as the balance-model, where work stress is understood as a result of an imbalance between work demands and the resources of the employee (Siegrist et al., 2004), and later through more coping-oriented work-environment models (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). But these models still operate with an alleged gap between the individual and the context and thereby still reduce the world to rational individual subjects on the one hand and verifiable objects on the other. And, as Falmagne (2009) has stated, once positions are construed on a metatheoretical level, they are also easily construed as ‘incompatible, bounded, and mutually exclusionary’ (p. 796).

This polarization reflects the deep and perennial metaphysical chasm between the subjective and the objective, mind and matter, of Western philosophy. Several attempts to reconcile the positions have been made within philosophy of mind, but it has been quite a conceptual puzzle how the two interact. As part of a Cartesian heritage in western thinking, a long philosophical tradition has favoured the isolated mind and ignored the importance of embodiment and situation (Gallagher, 2009). Philosophers such as Dewey, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have articulated approaches to cognition, which recognize its situated nature, and researchers within cognitive psychology have more recently begun to emphasize the situated and distributed character of cognition (Clark, 2009; Hutchins, 1995). But the situated, distributed and cultural understanding of cognition has not yet been employed in stress research, which is needed if we want to capture the complexity in how stress develops in our lives in general and at work specifically.

In this article, we begin to develop a distributed and cultural understanding of stress. We propose that stress can favourably be understood as extending into the social and physical environments. The individual is thus not “a container of stress”, but rather one part of a dynamic system, which includes social processes and the material world. This perspective is important in stress research for two main reasons: First because it is theoretically satisfactory (as we hope to demonstrate), and second because it goes against the ways that current treatments of stress are dominated by different versions of individual-focused cognitive therapy. A problem often emerges when employees come to interpret work environmental problems as caused by themselves as individuals, e.g. by failed coping strategies or personality features, instead of facing work environmental problems as a common problem at the work place.

The cognitive understanding of stress and its problems

Within the cognitive tradition, Lazarus (1922–2002) created a widely used theory of stress, which illustrates the role of psychological factors in mediating the person–environment transaction. Stress is viewed as a relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised as exceeding the persons' resources for coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The concept of appraisal designates a two-stage transactional process in which the magnitude of a threat is evaluated in comparison with an evaluation of the individual’s ability to cope with it. The first step in the process is primary appraisal of a potential stressor, which can have three outcomes: it may be appraised as irrelevant, beneficial, or stressful to the individual. Whether a potential stressor triggers the stress response depends upon the individual’s secondary appraisal of her ability to cope with the potential stressor. A positive appraisal of the capacity to cope with a potential stressor reduces the experience of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). There are thus two processes, which serve as central mediators within the person–environment transaction – cognitive appraisal and coping.

Lazarus’ cognitive understanding of stress helps throw light on the processes involved in the agency of the individual where the individual is not seen as a passive patient of problematic work conditions. Rather, the concept of appraisal highlights the role of individual differences concerning the interpretation of environments that are otherwise “objectively” equal for different individuals. The same can be said about the concept of coping, which emphasizes the active role played by the individual in trying to change the situation or the appraisal of it.

Despite its sophisticated and dynamical aspects, Lazarus’ theory fails, however, regarding the cultural and social dimensions of the stress response and is thereby unable to account for how to integrate the individual and environmental dimensions. It acknowledges to a certain extent the importance of the environment in understanding the development of stress through its emphasis on a transaction between the individual and the environment, but, in line with the cognitive tradition, it also expounds an understanding of cognition as the individual’s property, as something that is “in the head”, and thereby concludes that appraisal and coping are individual processes as such. The problem of the polarized positions therefore persists, if we continue to consider appraisal and coping as something that is in the end only shaped by the individual (Wainwright & Calnan, 2002). In a draft written a week before his death, however, Lazarus stressed the fact that he, when he elaborated his appraisal and coping theory, did not acknowledge the impact of the specific social context and the interpersonal interactions (Lazarus, 2006). Lazarus tried in the draft to develop a tentative model that included these elements but we find that it is more meaningful to develop a theoretical perspective, which, in its philosophical and epistemological foundation, has an understanding of the individual and her mental processes as embedded in a physical and social environment at the outset. We need research that goes beyond the individual and conceptualizes appraisal and coping in a new manner and reconciles the alleged dichotomy between the individual and the context. Not in a manner where we insert a not further described “interaction” between the two, but in a manner where both positions are inherent in the philosophical and theoretical framework.

The extended mind in stress

A new perspective on stress as embedded in the environment calls for a new metaphysics of mind. This philosophical position is emerging today and is known as externalism and holds that the mind needs to be understood in light of what exists outside the subject and not just by intrinsic features such as physiological or cognitive processes. This position avoids the need to build conceptual bridges between mind and matter and reconciles the oppositions in the stress research that were described earlier.

Clark and Chalmers (1998) introduced externalism and the concept of the extended mind in opposition to the dominating internalist conceptions, and thereby tried to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens “in the head”. Their notion of the extended mind is a version of “active externalism”, which states that significant parts of what constitutes mental functioning exist outside the skulls of individuals (there is also a version of externalism that refers to semantics, associated with Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, 1973, which posits that “meanings are not in the head”, because meanings are conceived as tied to referents in the world). Clark and Chalmers (1998) introduce the parity principle, which states that: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process (p. 11). To illustrate this principle they use the now famous example of the rotation of a shape. It can be done in three ways: (1) by forming a mental image of the shape and mentally rotate is to see if it will fit. (2) By rotating the image on a computer screen by way of the computer’s keyboard. (3) By using a neural implant, which is equivalent to the mechanisms/hardware in the computer, allowing people to rotate the images and even at a faster speed. The logic behind this example is that all three operations are psychological, i.e. cognitive, operations, and the difference between them lies solely in the location of the operation, so even if 2) and 3) are external versions of the cognitive process, they still count fully as cognitive operations for Clark and Chalmers.

Since Clark and Chalmers (1998), the view of the mind as not just embodied, but also embedded in a world and extended into this world has generated much interest and fascinating research programs (Robbins & Aydede, 2009). However, very few researchers have looked at mental health issues such as stress in this light. Our question then becomes: Is it possible to understand stress from an extended mind perspective? Can appraisal and coping, as psychological (indeed, cognitive) processes be understood as extending into the physical environment? This seems possible, for just as human beings may perform the rotation of a shape using different (internal and external) media, they can in similar ways mentally imagine the magnitude of assignments at work and appraise it as being threatening towards ones wellbeing. Or they can consider the magnitude of assignments at work by way of an electronic calendar on the computer screen and appraise it as being threatening towards ones wellbeing. And they can assess the magnitude of assignments at work by way of the amount of physically placed assignments on the table and appraise it as being threatening towards ones wellbeing. One can even imagine an appraisal of the magnitude of assignments at work being extended into the physical environment through the architecture, for example. Imagine a work place with multi-person offices and with walls of glass. People can see how busy their colleagues are, the assignments on their tables and appraise their workplace as busy and threatening towards one’s wellbeing.

Kono (2013) has recently pointed out that in spite of its promises, the extended mind thesis developed in the tradition of Clark and Chalmers nonetheless reflects an understanding of the surroundings as static, and the technologies inherent in the surroundings are only conceived as resources or constraints on human action. He points to the need for a theoretical framework that is more dynamic and which does not just treat the surroundings as a mere extension of the cognitive processes. Also Gallagher (2013) criticizes Clark and Chalmers for having an overly functionalistic understanding of cognitive processes because of their limited definition of cognition as simply encompassing belief, desire, and other propositional attitudes. From his embodied-embedded perspective, Gallagher argues that cognition is more than that, i.e. also constituted by enactive cognitive processes and activities such as problem solving, interpreting, judging, etc. Gallagher elaborates on the theme of cognitive extension by extending the mind to include processes and social practices that occur within cultural institutions, which he calls “mental institutions”. Mental institutions are defined as institutions that help us to accomplish certain cognitive processes or even constitute those processes and thereby function as an example of how cognition can be socially extended. As examples of mental institutions he refers to legal systems, educational systems and cultural institutions and claims that ‘these socially established institutions sometimes constitute, sometimes facilitate and sometimes impede but in each case enable and shape our cognitive interactions with other people’ (Gallagher, 2013, p. 7). He defines a mental institution more precisely as an institution which:

“1) includes cognitive practices that are produced in specific times and places and 2) is activated in ways that extend our cognitive processes when we engage with them (that is, when we interact with or are coupled to these systems in the right way” (p. 6).

With this broad definition of mental institutions, we might include not only formalized institutions with explicit externalized rules and systems among them, but also specific subcultures or social practices inherent in organizations and institutions. Such social practices do not have to be embedded in systems of externalized rules, schemas, etc. in a physical sense to function as socially extending, but also cultural and social signs in the environment mediated through language, discourses and distributed through the social interaction between individuals can be socially extending (Brinkmann, 2011).

We agree with the critics that the extended mind thesis needs further elaboration to include a more dynamical understanding of the interaction between the individual and the environment in the sense that the environment co-constructs the individual and the individual co-constructs the environment. The socially extended mind thesis has a more dynamical concept of the environment than cognitivist approaches, but seems to lack a concept of social practice that is detached from a formalized system and which entails a description of social interaction with opposition or conflict among a subject and its surroundings (Kono, 2013). What we need is a theoretical framework that encompasses both the physical and social embeddedness of an individual as well as a dynamical understanding of the interaction between the individual and the environment and a broader understanding of social practice.

We believe that a properly conceived cultural psychology may accomplish exactly that and exemplifies how mental life can be extended physically as well as socially through the mediated, distributed and dialogical nature of the human mind. Valsiner is an exponent of an integrated version of cultural psychology as he tries to integrate a personal element with culture and thus understands culture as partly shared and partly personal. Since individuals contribute a personal element to culture, they “co-construct” culture and culture is understood as a part of persons’ psychological systems and plays a functional role within that system (Valsiner, 2007). Hence the individual and culture dynamically co-construct each other. Culture is seen, not as a variable or a cause of human conduct, but rather as a set of resources (semiotic as well as material) that human beings employ as mediators when living their lives together. The individual adds a personal element to culture by transforming the cultural messages in personally novel forms which then gets externalized to the surroundings.

From this point of view, the meaning-making process and hence distinct appraisals and ways of coping are distributed (Hutchins, 1995; Scribner, 1984) between persons through the social use of semiotic signs and material tools. Dialogism, which is one direction within cultural psychology, focuses specifically on the interrelatedness of thinking and communication and exemplifies how dialogue is a case of social use of semiotic signs and material tools. This direction operates with a broadened concept of dialogue as not just between two people as we know it, but refers to ‘any kind of human sense making, semiotic practice, action, interaction, thinking or communication’ (Linell, 2009, p. 5). In the next sections, we look first at the role of artefacts and the physical embeddedness of stress, before moving on to analysing its social embeddedness. We will throughout the analysis invoke the concept of distributed appraisal and coping as a way of emphasizing the situated, dialogical, distributed and, indeed, collective nature of stress.

Through the analysis of the physical and social embeddedness of stress, we take our point of departure in the earlier described stage theory of stress formulated by Lazarus. We argue that Lazarus’ theory does not grasp the dynamicity of stress, but nonetheless can be used as an analytical tool to expound the social and physical embeddedness of the different stages of stress. Thus, in short, our goal is to “socialize” and “externalise” the Lazarusian theory.

Stress as physically embedded

During the first author’s field study, she noticed the importance of the physical environment in shaping the appraisal and coping process and how this often seemed to be mediated through technology, physical materials, and physical surroundings such as the architecture within the organization. The following observation sequence illustrates the interaction with technology as mediating specific appraisals of the magnitude of work assignments:

‘Paul looks at his electronic calendar on the computer screen and says shortly after:”I was just feeling really good as I looked at next week, but then I saw that it was 2012 I was looking at (and not 2011, which was the year the observations were conducted). When I look at next week I just get hit hard. I get all sweaty”’.

This example shows the switch in appraisal of the magnitude of the assignments based on his interaction with the electronic calendar on his computer. Building on Clark and Chalmers’ parity principle introduced above, it is rather obvious that the computer calendar functions as extended memory that organizes Paul’s tasks sequentially in time, and it is interesting to notice how he describes how this technology has concrete implications for his physical state. The appraisal process is not just mediated through an individual’s use of a material tool, but can also be distributed across members of a social group through the interaction with the tools. The organization in which the fieldwork was conducted had implemented lean ¹ as a way of optimizing the production in the organization. One of the elements in the implementation of lean was that they allocated all the orders of the week to different days, using a blackboard, to avoid a piling up of orders. A green note was placed if an order was one week before deadline. One of the employees evaluated the implementation saying: ‘Earlier I got stressed when I saw orders pile up on a single day. Now they are allocated on several days and I get calm and I feel like I get an overview, when I look at the blackboard’. Many of the employees highlighted the visual aspect of the implementation as central; that they visually could see the work of the week congregated on the blackboard gave them calmness. Here their appraisal of the magnitude of assignments seems to be mediated through the material tool or physical artefact – the blackboard – and distributed across the group of employees, given the social use of the artefact. The employee stated further: ‘We actually talk less about busyness now. You can see it is shared and placed there (pointing at the blackboard).’

The example illustrates how physical artefacts in the environment through their distinctive nature can mediate and distribute distinctive appraisals of the work environment. Not only can the appraisals of the work environment be mediated through the physical artefacts, but the coping process can also be mediated through a physical artefact. In an interview one of the participants said:

“ … I sit here and where I maybe ought to go over on the other side of the hall and joke or chitchat a bit. But I don’t feel I have time to do any of that. And it affects me emotionally, that I don’t have time. That’s why I have that Havana club rum placed there. It is my own little token for once in a while to remember that I also must have time to do fun stuff”.

Here the bottle of Havana Club rum functions as a sign. The bottle mediates a specific coping strategy, which in this case is to use humour as a way of distancing oneself from how busy the work is.

The critique of the extended mind thesis mentioned above, as reflecting an understanding of the surroundings as static and the technologies inherent in the surroundings as only resources or constraints of human action, does not apply to the theoretical framework applied here. As the cultural psychological perspective focuses on the dynamic co-constructing nature of the person-environment relation, it implies that through the transactions, the environment gets transformed, and so do the semiotic and material tools inherent in the surroundings.

Stress as socially embedded

In this section we will address the social embeddedness of stress through a focus on semiotic tools, which mediate the appraisal and coping process. Semiotic tools involve other people’s experiences and interpretations of the world and allow communication between members of social groups through the exchange of signs. According to dialogism, when a human being constructs meaning in a relation with the world, it is always through a field of opposites. It is the opposition between the meaning and its opposites that is the basis for further change and explains how people are transformed through the social interaction. As Valsiner (2007) states, it is not possible to think of e.g. non-red (a negative concept) without having the notion of red (a positive concept). The person is placed between what is known (e.g. non-red), which is the subjective meanings based on the person’s life experiences up to now, and what is not yet known personally, which is a semi-open field of possible new meanings (e.g. red). The semi-open field of possible new meanings is socially suggested by others through their use of semiotic devices.

In relation to stress, the appraisal of a situation at work being “I cannot manage this workload” is an example of a negative concept (“non-red”), based on the person’s life experiences up to now and this appraisal is opposed to a semi-open field of possible new meanings, which is suggested by others such as: ‘I can manage this workload’. An example from the field study exemplifies this more thoroughly: ‘Sarah says loudly in the group of colleagues: “I get all stressed when I can’t get the assignments finished on time”. Susan replies: “It is just work. It is enzymes we are working with – not people and a question of life or death”’. Susan exemplifies the semi-open field of possible new meanings and uses a semiotic organizer implying don’t take work too seriously. The way the dialogical self is conceived as social is that the dialogue with others (heterodialogue) becomes a part of the person’s internal dialogue (autodialogue) in the sense that others occupy positions in the multivoiced self, the so-called multiple I-positions. Each I-position creates a “voice” which relates to the other “voices” of other I-positions (Valsiner, 2007). Within this narratively structured self, dominance relations are established. In the case of Sarah, through an interpersonal dialogue, a particular direction of how to feel is suggested: That she should not feel stressed because work should not be taken too seriously. As a result, Susan’s suggested value becomes a part of Sarah’s internal dialogue as well as the other voices in the group. But what seems to be the case is that the voice of Susan becomes dominant and seems to form a social representation understood as a meaning complex that guide particular thought, feeling, and acting processes (Valsiner, 2003).

‘The following days in the group I noticed that they often reminded each other that their work wasn’t a matter of life and death and in a following group interview they stated that they were good at calming each other down by telling each other that it was “just work”’ (extract from reflections on field notes).

From a cultural-psychological perspective, what happens in this process is that through communication and social action, the social representation gets distributed among the members of the group. This described process reflects the tension between the personal culture and the social world within which the person is embedded and describes how an appraisal process also is a social process as well as an intra-psychological process. Furthermore, the coping process also seems to be distributed among the members of the group. In a group interview, they stated how important it was for the newly appointed to learn to address the management, if they could not keep up with the pace of work:

‘Interviewer: Is it something you pass on to the newly appointed? Hugh: Yes, we are good at passing it on. Simon: Then they just have to learn to comply with it. Hugh: It is important, because if you do like Marian explained: “I can just do that, I can just squeeze it in tomorrow morning” etc., then it is going to be a mess, because it will not be removed from the system, and then the researchers think the next time: “Yes, it works fine, why can’t you make it? You could the last time”’.

This, we find, is an example of how coping can be seen as socially distributed. On the basis of our argument so far, we believe that cognition and thereby the appraisal and coping process is dialogical in nature and is semiotically mediated through the use of language in social interaction. In this sense we can also talk about the self being distributed or extended to others and to the social and cultural groups and mental institutions (Gallagher, 2013) to which one belongs. As Linell (2009) underlines, distributed cognition is typically understood as distributed along the extended loop of body–brain systems, artefacts, semiotic resources and the material world, but to this list we should add “the other and her actions and utterances” (p. 146).

Rewriting appraisal and coping: Socializing Lazarus

In light of the theoretical and philosophical framework articulated here, we will now revisit the existing Lazarusian theory of appraisal and coping and rewrite it in light of our reflections on the distributed and mediated nature of these concepts. In the understanding of the individual vs. environment transaction, Lazarus sees the single individual as someone who acts, thinks, speaks and explores the world, and, as Linell (2009) emphasizes in his critique of monologist theories, the ego is dominant and others in the social environment are around only as an “environment” for the ego. Lazarus' definition of stress thereby only entails an individual vs. environment encounter without emphasizing the social aspect of stress. A cultural psychological perspective, in contrast, emphasizes that persons are social beings interdependent with others. The other gets a central place in this theory accentuating that the other is a central part of the individuals’ psychological constitution through the manifestation of different I-positions in the multivoiced self. One move in our attempt to “socialize Lazarus” consists of developing the ideas of appraisal and coping in a social direction. What Lazarus called primary appraisal (is something irrelevant, beneficial, or stressful?) already has an unacknowledged social dimension in the fact that such appraisal is unavoidably relative to social norms. What it means that something is, say, beneficial or stressful, is, of course, not only relative to the individual’s capabilities, but also to a kind of normativity that is sociocultural. Similarly in relation to secondary appraisal (if it is stressful – can I then cope?), for here there are social norms about what counts as adequate coping. Coping – like other psychological processes (Brinkmann, 2011) – is a normative process with the individual implicitly or explicitly comparing herself to others. One must know what it means to cope well, relative to social norms, in order to be able to assess whether one can cope. If so, it means that the social realm, so to speak, is built into the appraisal and coping process at its very foundation. Considering whether one can cope or not implies entering into dialogical relations with real or imagined others with whom one can compare and deliberate about what coping well means (compare the question: ‘Can you play football?’ If asked by Lionel Messi, one is likely to answer ‘No, not really’, but if asked by one’s four year-old child, a correct answer might be ‘Yes, I can’). Capabilities, including coping, are relative to social positionings, but this is ignored by the individualist framework developed by Lazarus.

Conclusions

In this article, we have tentatively invoked the concept of distributed appraisal and coping as a way of emphasizing the situated, dialogical, distributed and, indeed, collective nature of stress. We argued that traditional approaches to stress and coping are linked to an individualistic epistemological and theoretical framework, and we have found it necessary to accentuate the different philosophical and metatheoretical foundations by introducing a new concept. We would like to emphasize that our talk of collective and distributed stress and coping are meant as tentative concepts, as our aim is to examine what kind of knowledge about coping we can gain by introducing this perspective.

The concept of distributed coping, we believe, can bring us new knowledge about the landscape of appraisal and coping. By using this landscape analogy we emphasize that concrete contexts invite employees to appraise the situations in a certain way and afford using certain coping strategies rather than others. This is not just a matter of isolated individuals, but related to the ecology, the landscape of material artefacts and social relations. Just as the human cultivation of the landscape as such invites us to use certain paths and limit the use of others, so does our structuring of our working environment offer us certain coping strategies and make others less obvious. The structuring of our working environment both entails how we organize and shape our physical surroundings as well as how our human activities are organized such as the work organization, our communication and social interaction, and the discourses and cultural characteristics within the working environment. While the traditional concept of coping made us ask the question: ‘How do you cope at work?’ the concept of distributed coping will turn the question around to that of: ‘Which coping strategies does the working environment offer you?’