TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yan, Zhe
T1  - “I tried to control my emotions”: nursing home care workers’ experiences of emotional labor in China
JF  - Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology
N2  - Despite dramatic expansions in the Chinese nursing home sector in meeting the increasing care needs of a rapidly aging population, direct care work in China remains largely devalued and socially unrecognized. Consequently, scant attention has been given to the caregiving experiences of direct care workers (DCWs) in Chinese nursing homes. In particular, given the relational nature of care work, there is little knowledge as to how Chinese DCWs manage emotions and inner feelings through their emotional labor. This article examines the emotional labor of Chinese DCWs through ethnographic data collected with 20 DCWs in one nursing home located in an urban setting in central China. Data were analyzed using conventional content analysis and constant comparison. Participants’ accounts of sustaining a caring self, preserving professional identity, and hoping for reciprocity revealed implicit meanings about the often-conflicting nature of emotional labor and the nonreciprocal elements of care work under constrained working conditions. Importantly, the moral-cultural notion of bao (报 norm of reciprocity) was found to be central among DCWs in navigating strained resources and suggested their agency in meaning-construction. However, their constructed moral buffers may be insufficient if emotional labor continues to be made invisible by care organizations.
KW  - Gerontologie
KW  - Care-Arbeit
KW  - Emotionsregulation
KW  - China
KW  - Altenpflege
KW  - China
KW  - Long-term care
KW  - Direct care workers
KW  - Emotional labor
KW  - Filial piety/xiao
KW  - Professionalism
KW  - Reciprocity
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-324295
VL  - 37
IS  - 1
ER  -