The focus of this study was to explore the socialization process of aerial acrobats to pain and how these workers (re)produce traditional Circus d/Discourses through occupational identity enactment. The two research questions posed in this study were answered through semi-structured interviews with 27 professional acrobats and the arts-based elicitation method of Photovoice. A phronetic iterative analysis revealed a subcategory of body work—pain work. Pain workers are those employees who are required to sustain, endure, and manage embodied pain to enact their occupational role. This study introduced a four-phase cyclical socialization process model through which pain work is enacted: (a) experience, (b) tolerate, (c) embrace, and (d) proselytize. Using a dramaturgical analysis framework, the findings of this study revealed aerial acrobats engage three front stage and three backstage identity enactment strategies that (re)produce institutional d/Discourses: (a) masking pain, (b) performing-despite-risk, (c) artistic sacrifice, (d) body-work double bind, (e) complicit anonymity, and (f) self-deprecation. The findings of this study carry theoretical and methodological implications for organizational communication literature in the areas of socialization, identification, and body work, as well as embodiment in qualitative research. Importantly, this study demonstrates how discourse simultaneously changes collective embodied experiences and social realities by portraying the vivid, tangible consequences on members. Limitations of the study and future directions of research are discussed.

This dissertation examines compassion in healthcare organizations through a lens of structuration theory. The purpose of this study is to identify structures that healthcare workers describe as enabling and/or constraining compassion, and the ways that healthcare workers (re)produce and transform these structures. Through qualitative, semi-structured interviews with healthcare workers, this study reveals that multiple structures in healthcare constrain compassion at different stages of the compassion process (i.e., recognizing, relating, and (re)acting). Findings also illuminate how healthcare workers engage in individual and collective compassion to support coworkers, which can (re)produce or challenge the status quo of compassion in organizations. This study extends compassion scholarship by: (a) delineating the differences between individual compassion, group compassion, and organizational compassion, (b) highlighting how structurational divergence in healthcare stunts compassion, (c) examining the limits and consequences of emphasizing compassion in healthcare, and (d) offering insight on the varied success of compassion programs.

Since its implementation in 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) has greatly informed preservation practice in the United States. As a primary text for the professionalization of the field of preservation, it not only acts as a law, but establishes an ideological framework that informs practices which impact public memory in the US by determining what places remain, how they are transformed (or not), and whose stories they tell. The objective of this study is to explore the communicative dimensions of the NHPA to better understand how its rhetoric informs practice, and thus, informs public memory in the US. This study employs a meta-method of crystallization which engages a range of analysis methods. First, I conducted a close rhetorical analysis of the NHPA’s text which provided insight into ideologies within the law, opportunities for practice, and limitations on practice through the law’s definitive conceptualization of public memory. Next, I completed a qualitative case study of a preservation organization. I participated in extended field observation, conducted interviews with organizational staff, and engaged in walking methods in the city. The analysis offered insight into local discourses (everyday talk) which built into Discourses (ideologies) and demonstrated how the NHPA informs d/Discourses of preservation, even when it is not required. Although local practice was informed by the NHPA, the analysis also revealed methods for challenging and resisting the NHPA. Finally, I engaged in arts-based methods to examine how National Register listings (products of the NHPA) provide aesthetic and narrative precedents for determining ‘significance’ and worth in preservation practice. Through a poetic exhibition entitled Mythed Places, I artistically analyzed the NRHP, arguing that by giving historic sites the quality of myths, the NHPA attempts to arrest multiple unfolding narratives of places in service of a national myth. This project demonstrates that the NHPA communicatively constructs US preservation practice through its ambiguity, implied morality, and formation of a mythic national community. Although the current structure requires preservationists, even those not legally bound to the NHPA, to work within its framework, this study showcases ways to disrupt the discursive boundaries and practice preservation more critically.