Associate Professor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Heritage Hall 460C
(205) 934-0565

Research and Teaching Interests: Health care organizations and workers, Aging and end of life, Care for people with dementia

Office Hours: By appointment

Education:

• BA, Indiana University, Sociology
• MA, University of Arizona, Sociology
• PhD, University of Arizona, Sociology

The medical institution is in constant flux in response to external pressures and the needs of both patients and workers. My sociological research seeks to understand how changes to the medical institution affect workers' experiences and interpretations of the work.

At the macro level, I study how new legal options for people nearing the end of life are translated into health care organizational practices and policies. The translation process is both structural (through requirements of the law) and cultural (through meaning systems about dying, care, and professional responsibilities).

At the meso level, my research illustrates that attempts to create new health care approaches are either supported or undermined by organizations' willingness to engage with workers. Even as change is constant, truly "transformational" shifts in health care are unlikely because of the high degree of embeddedness of practices.

At the micro level, I am most interested in how health care workers seek out meaningful opportunities in their work. Understanding how workers define and arrange meaningful experiences provides a much-needed complement to growing research on "burnout" in health care. In a forthcoming book, I argue that meaningfulness is not just inside individual workers' heads, but rather a property of the institutional setting. Locating meaningfulness within the institution opens up new opportunities for changing organizations to improve medical work.

My sociological interests reflect two defining aspects of my life. First, I grew up in a rural area of Oregon in a multi-generational household. Growing up with farm animals, fresh food, distant neighbors, and a big family taught me a great deal about communities, families, informal care, and health care. I became especially interested in end-of-life care from my experiences with aging family members and our desire to keep care at home.

Second, I have had many jobs through the years: factory work, child and elder care, restaurant management, cell phone sales, and now teaching and research. Having these widely varying work experiences highlights commonalities between all types of work. Specifically, in each job it was clear that workers sought to create a sense of meaningfulness about the work. In my research and teaching, I examine how meaningfulness of health care work affects workers and is shaped by the organizational context.

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