Work and Occupations

Based on qualitative comparison of three nursing home facilities, the idea of organized emotional care is proposed as a complement to the concept of emotional labor for understanding care work. It is argued that emotional labor and organized emotional care are distinguished primarily by the presence or absence of organizational feeling rules and affective requirements. Care organizations can be plotted on a continuum with emotional labor at the coercive end and organized emotional care at the other. The proposed distinction restores a positive vision of organizational management of emotion to the sociology of work.

This article contends that the use of vacation time reveals one's relative weighting of work and family obligations and examines gender differences in taking vacation time. Using data from the National Study of the ChangingWorkforce, this study finds that in the presence of familial and work-related controls, women are less likely than men to have unused vacation time. In gender-specific analyses, men's work schedules, supervisory duties, and concerns about job security significantly reduce the duration of their vacations. Even though familial factors have no impact on women's vacation use, women's concerns about the success of their family lives increase with the number of unused vacation days. These findings suggest the endurance of traditional expressions of work-family priorities. The research and policy implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Benefits that enable employees to manage better their work and personal lives are an important form of compensation offered by some but by no means all organizations. Using data from the 1996 National Organizations Study, the authors test three theoretical perspectives (internal economic, external economic, and institutional pressures) on the existence of four family-friendly benefits in U.S. establishments. These theories are not opposing, and the authors find support for each: Different benefits are provided in response to different pressures. Furthermore, although most organizations had one familyfriendly benefit in 1996, these benefits have not been universally adopted.

Handbook of Work Stressoffers a series of essays concerned with the sources of work stress, how experiences of work stress vary across specific populations, the consequences of work stress, and interventions to mediate its negative effects. The chapters on specific work stressors cover a wide range of topics, including role-related, interpersonal, and justice-related stressors. Fewer chapters are devoted to cohesive examinations of the consequences of work stress and possible mechanisms for ameliorating its effects on individuals and organizations. This volume offers a useful survey of key developments in the field over the past forty years while also including essays on new directions in work stress research.