Work, family life and recovery: An exploratory study of “the third shift”

BACKGROUND: Using 24-hour narratives as a starting-point, the present study examines conditions for recovery from work. The third shift concept forms the explorative starting point for highlighting the interplay between work, family responsibilities, leisure time and recovery. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study is to explore how the third shift affects possibilities for recovery. METHOD: The material was gathered by group interviews and diaries. Thirty employees participated in the study. Ten participants where women between 30 and 45 years of age with children living at home. RESULTS: Being solely responsible for the third shift reduced the chances of recovery from during work-free time. The material showed that women aged 30–45 years had to a greater extent than others the main responsibility in a complex third shift. CONCLUSION: As a precondition for external recovery, this study show how theoretically beneficial the breakdown of the second shift and development of the third shift is for understanding different preconditions and the way they affect the possibility of recovery.

The Third Shift

Chapter 5 presents dual expectations women pastors face in relation to their pastoral responsibilities at work as well as how they go about being a wife and mother, commonly referred to as the “second shift.” Women pastors are often expected to take on the lion’s share of household responsibilities. Therefore, congregants assume that they are pulled more between home and work than men, thus resulting in congregants doubting their ability to do it all. Finally, Chapter 5 demonstrates the traditional role of pastor’s wife and how some congregants implicitly assume that the work of pastors will be complemented by the unpaid work of their spouses. Pastors’ wives typically face more congregational expectations than pastors’ husbands, often leaving women pastors in heteronormative relationships to pick up some of the traditional pastor’s wife responsibilities in addition to their own responsibilities both at home and work; I refer to this phenomenon as the “third shift.”

Improving motivation for self-directed training in Danish EMS personnel

Background: Emergency Medical Services personnel's motivation to carry out self-directed training might be impaired by several factors such as work environment, pressures and training facilities. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether easy access to local training facilities would improve individual motivation for self-directed training. Methods: A before-and-after study of 118 Danish personnel was conducted. Participants were asked to complete two identical questionnaires, exploring their motivation and training efforts, before and after initiatives to promote training were introduced. Results: Response rates were 69 and 77, respectively. Motivation for self-directed training increased, on a scale from 1–10, from 5.6 to 6.7. The rating of opportunities to perform self-directed training increased from 4.1 to 5.9 and the rating of the training facilities from 3.7 to 6.3. The frequency of training sessions completed increased (every shift n=6 to 12, every second-to-third shift n=29 to 37). Conclusion: The increase in ratings regarding motivation and effort for carrying out self-directed training suggests that easily accessible training facilities improves individual motivation for self-directed training in emergency services personnel.

Intimate Entanglements: Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in science and technology

This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shift is an exploration of the heterogeneous materiality of the intimate and, in particular, of its more-than-human constituencies. The third shift both reclaims and speculates about other politics of relations, including practical challenges (not only conceptual) to the way we do research. The article shows that the beings entangled, the materialities involved, the affects conveyed and the extension of the intimate all come to matter when science and technology is critically analysed, and that they challenge the traditional limits and geographies of the intimate. The paper also argues that this has important political implications for science and technology studies. By countering the invisibilisation of ‘intimate work’ through its usual association with the emotional and the domestic, the article contests the ready-made framing of the intimate as bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private. In so doing, the authors make visible the politics of relations that scientific and technological settings silently enact.