EMERGENCY CARE: EMOTIONAL CONTROL
An exploration of what constitutes emotional labour
for a UK paramedic

Abstract

This thesis draws on a small-scale, mixed-methods study of paramedics working for the North East Ambulance Service NHS Trust in order to extricate whether the performance of emotional labour is significant for the paramedic role. A depth in meaning is created through the development of a generic quadripartite integrated framework of the process of emotional labour contextualised for use by this inquiry through exposure to the prehospital emergency care discourse. This framework explains how performances triggered by antecedents carry consequences that can be mediated through interventions whose significance has previously been overlooked. It transposes into a deductive ‘a priori’ codebook / template within which data stemming from both qualitative and quantitative data streams is both organised and explained. As the voices of the paramedics, released from interview transcripts, mingle with observed scenarios they create a richly layered account highlighted by the judicious use of descriptive statistics offered by two self-reports. In addition to addressing the principal research question that inquires ‘what constitutes emotional labour for the UK paramedic’ this thesis also enlarges the sociological imagination on organisational emotionality by exposing how the framework fuses the interactional demand on a role with the individual process of emotional labour previously theorised separately.