Lead researcher: Dorothy Howard (PhD student, Communication)
This project investigates the social history of burnout and how organizations have built expertise to address burnout as a dimension of wellness and work culture. Qualitative case studies in the health sciences and software are presented to offer comparative insight on burnout as it moves through multiple domains and discourses. Historical and archival research on psychology and work design provide background to cast recent burnout research against the background of scientific management. This project engages existing work in organizational science on the situated practices in which organizations conduct operational research to create transformations in workplace culture and productivity, and how this affects working life.
This project will help us understand the complexities of creating initiatives to address organizational change. Participatory workshops on burnout and wellness will both generate ethnographic knowledge for the research design and facilitate opportunities for reflection in group activities to represent how burnout manifests in institutional contexts. The broader impacts of this work will be to elucidate practices of construct-formation in the sciences and the complexities of organizational change, while producing a more complete picture of an enigmatic diagnosis in the history of occupational health.
Supported by the NSF-STS Science, Technology & Society, Doctoral Dissertation Research Initiative Grant (DDRIG). April 1, 2020-Ongoing.